That's a terrible title.
Oh well, I'm sticking with it. It's been a few days, on account of I've been pretty busy with family and law stuff. But I want to speculate a bit about what's going on in the world right now. There seems to be a lot of anger generally. People are raging online about politics and sports and movies and really just everything. It is a constant stream of aggro, 24/7/365.
I worry where this is taking us. But I think, like with most things, it'll turn out okay.
I mean, think about that sentence for a second. "I worry where this is taking us." I worry, but only because I made one of the classic blunders. Nothing about land wars. No, I said "us," meaning humanity. But what I meant was me.
Because people that worry about the future are really worrying about their place in the future. And trust me, the future doesn't need you. Or me. But that is what makes me think that things will be okay.
See, humans do this really cool thing. It started hundreds of thousands of years ago. It's called "making stuff." We started to make all sorts of... well, stuff, and that stuff helped us survive, live longer, and figure out how to make more stuff. The thing is, each new thing that was invented caused a period of adjustment. That was maybe one thing too many in that sentence. Again, oh well.
Anyway, the adjustment period for most major developments in human history could be measured in a pretty short time period. Months or years, for the most part. And that, my dear friends, is the crux of the dilemma facing our species right now. The crux being that we have, really for the first time ever, something totally new.
And we just weren't quite ready for it.
Now, like I said earlier, that's okay. We've made some pretty scary shit over the centuries. But I want you all to really consider this. Major changes in human history were... agriculture? But agriculture is still food acquisition. It was simply a new way to get food. The industrial revolution? A new way to do work. No doubt confusing, maybe even terrifying to people at the time. But just a new riff on a classic theme.
Even nuclear weapons, while terrifyingly powerful, are just really big, dangerous weapons. It took a few years for folks to get used to them, but if you really look at it, we got used to the idea that we could turn the whole planet into a guttering cinder pretty damned quickly.
So that brings us to the Internet. "But Steve," you might say, "the Internet is just a new way to communicate!"
Except it isn't. Because it is about much more than communication. Certainly not just communication. It's about communication, and interconnection, and it mediates our interactions not only in virtual spaces, but in the meat world too. Now that is a heavy realization. But an accurate claim, I think. Which is why I make it.
The Internet isn't just about communication, because it is always on. It is everywhere. And millions of people today take actions in their real lives that are predicated on some anticipated online result. Let me put it another way. The Internet's true difficulty is not a matter of communication so much as one of access. You might say that I'm picking nits here, and I would disagree with you on many levels
But that isn't the hill I'm going to die on, either. I'm sure you have plenty of valid arguments for it just being really big, fast, better communication. I'll concede the point, because at the end of the day this is a blog post, I have a novel to work on, and it's not relevant to the conclusion that I'm making.
The point is that our brains are wired from a very young age to direct us to interact with one another in very specific ways. Right now, the online sphere is a chaotic mess of shrieking adults-cum-adolescents, but that is because they are physically incapable of adapting to the Internet's level of interconnectivity.
Even if it is just a matter of communication, the degree of difference from something as revolutionary as the telephone is quite literally mind-boggling.
But like I said, in the long run, it actually will turn out okay. There is a generation of people growing up right now that have never known anything but that extreme level of societal interconnection. So while it might seem like Twitter is tearing the world apart right now, in the long run it is just pulling the fabric of our species a little bit tighter together. Just remember that you're always in the process of watching the new world being born.