Thursday 5 December 2002

Pic of the day: A shadow of a shadow ... one soul in two bodies, but not the way Aristotle imagined. (Screenshot from the online RPG Dark Age of Camelot.)

Society evaporating

I visited the comic book store in Kristiansand. The proprietor is also a philosopher, as I believe is common for such people. Seeing so much weirdness (and that's before we include the customers) will do that to you, not to mention that you have to be fairly open minded to open such a shop in the first place.

Anyway, we had been talking. I was just leaving, and he fired his parting shot: "Obligations is the glue that binds society together." And there, in a flash of timesight, I suddenly saw society melting, boiling, evaporating. And in my mind boomed the echoes of Sister Miriam Godwinson's prophecy: "No longer a solid or a liquid ... we will be as a vapor." (In all honesty, Godwinson is a fictional character from the game Alpha Centauri. I'd love to know who has written the speeches for some of those characters... they sometimes say things better than I could. Believe it or not.)

***

Back in the Middle Ages, society was largely brick solid. Where you were born, there you stayed and there you died. During feudalism, the noble landowner could demand you handed back from wherever you ran off to, so you once again could work his fields. Even the free farmer or craftsman was born to his farm or craft, and had few choices but to stay there. (There was often the option of becoming a soldier, typically for younger brothers.)

The industrial society is a liquid, in which people flow from place to place as demand rises and falls. You build a new factory, and the workforce flows in. You build residential zones and people flow into them. You make a country rich and people flow into it from poorer neighboring countries. It flows faster and faster, until in our lifetime it churns and boils. And then ... then society starts to evaporate. It is coming. It is coming now.

In the late 1990es, the world-leading magazine The Economist started to use the expression "the death of distance" to describe how telecommunications had become so cheap as to be ubiquitous. We all know that distance isn't really dead. But it is certainly reduced. After the Fall of the Towers on September 11th, one of my fellow Norwegians said that "we are all American now". I'm thankful to say it's not quite that easy. But perhaps we will all soon be human, and geography won't count for much anymore. Already a group of programmers in India can take jobs for a Norwegian or American corporation.

We are losing our physical location. That is to say, we are still in a physical location at any one time, but it is not a defining part of us anymore. Even ethnicity is often a lifestyle choice now. But there is one thing more. What the comic shop guy talked about: The ties that bind. They are unraveling.

***

In the old days, the family was a big thing, more like a clan. Your uncles and aunts and cousins lived either in your home or just next door. You uncle had more authority over you then than your father has now. The family was a fundament on which you were built. But then with the industrial age we got the nuclear family. You can't move grandma and grandpa their younger brothers and 168 cousins once and twice removed when you need to move to get a job. So you got the nuclear family, the bare essentials of a family: Mum and dad and the kids. And then, as we reached the boiling point, we got the nuclear family fission. Marriages broke, children went with one of the parents or were thrown like balls from one to another. You'd think it would end there. I don't think so.

It may that as a vapor, we will simply be individuals, and even the kids will get used to it. But I foresee the time when we move from vapor to plasma ... and the single human mind is broken open, its content strewn out across cyberspace. Where our many different minds will take on lives of their own, perhaps careers of their own. When our electronic avatars can take any form we choose, why should there not be many of them, each doing some smaller task at which it excels? One of them may be in Norway, one in California, and one in Middle Earth. For geography will largely be virtual too. Spread out across an electronic universe, the ties that bound will be broken and forgotten, like the life-ownership of the feudal age is largely forgotten today.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps there is a limit to fragmentation, and it is the body. But I am not so sure. Playing online role playing games since the days of the TinyMUD, I know that there is a goodly number of people at least who are capable of supporting high-function separate personalities with no ill effects to their sanity. Augmented with near-future software support, and with the steadily increasing intelligence and education, I am sure the numbers will grow. I just don't know how far.