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In Praise Of The Shattered Society

...The illusion which we called 'society' is coming to an end. I'd say the inevitability factor here is so high that we might as well admit it has ended already, and get on with the new twenty cents...er...paradigm. What is coming now, what is effectively here already, is the next phase in human societal evolution -- beyond family, beyond tribe, beyond nation -- we are forming societies based on common interest, communities based not on where we live but on who we are. These societies have their own customs, their own rules, their own ambassadors to other such societies. These are not societies formed to fight the sabretooth tiger or pave the streets. These are societies formed to fulfill the actual needs of the individuals who compose them. In these societies, the needs of the individual and the good of society are one, because the society exists solely as a consensual entity. You aren't born into these societies, you join them.

Why does this scare the sort of people who write for Atlantic and have letters printed in the New York Times? Because it means the end of their power. It means the end of artificial consensus, it means the end of leaders who set the pace and followers who follow. It means the end of the sanctioning of art, literature, or opinion as 'mainstream' or 'fringe'. It means that everyone is creator and critic, where every individual decides whose opinions matter to him and whose do not. The movie critic is replaced by the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup, and ten thousand threads in a hundred thousand forums replace the editorial pages. When it is as easy to reach one page on the Web as it is to reach another, when every opinion is an equal click away, then there is no creation of 'proper' and 'improper' opinions. It will no longer be the case that the 'mainstream' opinions get slick coverage in TIME and the 'fringe' gets mimeographed handouts. There will be no way to zone ideas where they will not be seen by the rank-and-file, no way to proclaim the 'correct' range of opinions.

No more consensus. And with it, no more of the sick joke we call Democracy. How much longer can the government continue to claim legitimacy when it represents an ever dwindling percentage of the population? How can the government even function, when decisions cannot be reduced to a binary 'yes/no', but instead must account for a thousand variations of opinion? Even the 'mass' media is no longer so massive....from three networks to a hundred cable channels, to a million Webcasts. What would once have been isolated incidents or local outrages become national, even international, outcries. The Church of Scientology is fighting a hydra distributing its 'secret' documents, and it is draining itself in lawsuits faster than it can drain its foes. Cybersitters' fascism, which would once have been unrevealed for fear of losing an advertiser, is now front-page news -- because the net never lets a story die. There is no sweeping a scandal, real or imagined, under the rug, because there will always be someone with a gripe and a modem to keep it alive.

...Nations and tribes need leaders. Individuals in full control of their own environment do not. This is what scares the powers-that-won't-be-for-much-longer. This is why they decry the 'breakdown' of society -- when what is happening is the creation of the only society that has any moral right to exist, the consensual society of mind. They are Neanderthals, listening to their Cro-Magnon children talk, and realizing that the world has passed them by. They'll fight back as Neanderthals do -- with clubs and fire and hoarse, inarticulate imitation of the language of their evolved progeny. And then they'll die, destroyed by those they fathered. ...