Next Civilization: Virtual without Virtue

(This is nothing more than my personal guesswork, part analysis, part intuition, provided for your entertainment.)

People worry about the government doing something akin to taking down the Internet. It won’t happen — at least, not intentionally. Governments themselves rely entirely too much on it, as does corporate advertising with a massive investment in entertainment delivery. Nor is it likely we’ll see anything like the Great Firewall of China. Our hardware situation is entirely different from China’s. Besides, it’s much more effective to infiltrate the hacker community. Whatever Anonymous was, it’s now entirely fake. But some of what they pretended to be will have a lasting effect. It’s what we pretend is the heart and soul of the Internet, which can’t be regulated too much, or it will quit working for everyone, government included.

It’s quite possible the Internet as a physical artifact will disappear. The endless kilometers of wires, fiber, the routers and computers will eventually need replacing. The current protocols will simply not make it much longer. But the sheer necessity perceived will increase, and mankind will become ever more networked electronically. Something will replace what wears out.

Not just your toaster, refrigerator and bicycle, but people will be networked in ways we can’t picture. Devices will get smaller and more powerful, yet simpler and easier, and more mysterious to everyone but the few geeks. Geekery will dominate as fashion and style, but the actual understanding of how things work will become too complex for most people who now run the Internet. Something fundamental will shift. Devices will shrink, become universal, wearable, eventually embedded, but with a physical form we cannot yet imagine. Yet the dreaded self-aware computer network will never happen, though it may appear to exist.

There will be more paradox, as the virtual world becomes the dominant reality of everything mankind does. What alarms us today will be taken for granted tomorrow. While the struggle to preserve the freedom of choice rises, and the determination to protect your right to choose how you present yourself to the Network, it will become by far the most dehumanizing and impersonal civilization ever seen.

What we call “texting” will become the New World Language, only more abbreviated. Human interaction will likewise be abbreviated, more shallow, even as it becomes more honest in some ways (AKA, less civilized). In some places in the world, there are already societies where people honestly admit they have hundreds of acquaintances, and almost no friends. They have no one they can really trust, no one they really know, nor any who really knows them. Nobody sees enough of their daily life, the multiple contexts, paying attention to the cues about personality. Spouses are simply partners, and children are spun off before they even become people — if they actually do that. This will get worse. It will be the new isolation in a crowded urban world.

The next Facebook will be mandatory, literally, though government will become something hardly be recognizable to us today — it will be fragmented and global at the same time. The right to be deceptive will increase, but only for certain aspects of your existence. Your identity will be digital, and more complex than any mere number or hash. It will be multifaceted depending on what each demands to know, and they will know. You’ll have multiple identities for the various different authorities in your world, and only a simulacrum of management over it. The human soul will be compartmentalized, digitized, and people will hardly possess the mental capacity to know themselves, even while they know more about themselves.

Things will never be absolute, because neither hardware, software, nor the people who use them can ever be that perfect. There will always be those who can take advantage of the system even while it seems they are fully participating. There will always be those who somehow manage to opt out, not participate much at all.

Some people will cease to exist physically and many will never know it. Some will have never existed at all in the first place. Still, there won’t be artificial intelligence which rivals humans as they are now. Rather, human intelligence will devolve closer to the artificial. It will only seem we have accomplished AI.

Welcome to the future.