In the social sciences, we are forced to strip out threads of reality because no human can possibly grasp the totality of what happened in the past or what’s happening right now.
We do not even have an economic model for the Network Civilization. All we know is that it will be different. There have been plenty of words spilled about the information economy, but because it would be forced to drag with it the old traditional production economy, it could never take off. Just think about the hateful attempts to squelch anything that threatens the ancient paper-book and hard-copy media sales. The whole business of copyright will not benefit from any reforms. Only the complete destruction of the current system will do.
Whole sectors of the current economy will disappear, in the sense that we can hardly imagine where it’s going. How do you build a society on giving so much control to the individual, when time and place become virtually meaningless in terms of delivering “the product?”
We also have no model for the social structure that will come with the Network Civilization. It’s possible we can have some input as it develops, but something like that is far beyond human control. The whole question requires thinking about the fundamentals of what “civilization” means and all the ways humans interact. What will it mean when the majority of your friends and acquaintances are people you’ll never meet in person? How will this change social psychology? What is the mental model of a close friendship, with all the emotional warmth, and no solid visual concept of the person on the other end? We are already doing this.
And what’s the model for differentiating between a real person and some AI projection? Would it shock you to suggest it won’t really matter? In terms of how you live your life, people you encounter online can create a false self, but it will be entirely real to you. What’s the difference to you between someone who seems so real and someone who is real? It becomes a question only if we aren’t ready to deal with life consciously in the first place.
On top of all this, we still have to deal with our localized meat space reality. How to you integrate all of that, when the very real controlling factor of your future is online? How do you deal with that when there really isn’t a model for what “online” will come to mean in terms of technology and user interface? Oh, but it will most certainly change.
With all that, try to understand that I have been thinking about these very things as I struggle to build a religion that fits into this future. I’ve been working on a religion that would offer a better expression of the ineffable call of the Spirit Realm in a very different world. Of necessity that spirituality must include other people or it means nothing, and we can’t keep using the old matrices of human interaction. We have to discern the core of what it means to walk with Christ when our feet are under a computer desk. Western Civilization did a horrible job, perverting religion in ways the Apostles could not have imagined, but in ways they sensed in the Spirit.
We have to do better.
