KAI KRAUSE, a philosopher, artist, and software developer, is the author of 3D Science: New Scanning Electron Microscope Imagery.
Dangerous ideas? It is dangerous ideas you want? From this group of people? That in itself ought to be nominated as one of the more dangerous ideas.
Danger is ubiquitous. If recent years have shown us anything, it should be that very simple small events can cause havoc in our society. A few hooded youths play cat-and-mouse with the police: Bang!, thousands of burned cars put all of Paris into a state of paralysis and mandatory curfew and the entire system into a state of shock and horror.
My first thought was: What if any really smart set of people set their minds to it…. How utterly and scarily trivial it would be to disrupt the very fabric of life, to bring society to a dead stop!
The relative innocence and stability of the last fifty years may spiral into a nearly inevitable exposure to real chaos. What if it isn’t haphazard testosterone-driven riots, where the rioters cannibalize their own neighborhood, much as in Los Angeles in the 1980s, but someone with real insight behind that criminal energy? What if slashdotters start musing aloud, “Gee, the LA water supply is rather simplistic, isn’t it?” An Open Source crime web, a Wiki for real WTO opposition? Hacking LA may be a lot easier than hacking Internet Explorer.
That’s basic banter over a beer in a bar. I don’t even want to speculate about what a serious set of brainiacs could conjure, and I refuse to give it any more print space here. However, the danger of such sad memes is what requires our attention.
In fact, I will broaden the specter still more: It’s not violent crime and global terrorism I worry about as much as the underpinning of our entire civilization coming apart. No acts of malevolence, no horrible plans by evil dark forces, neither the singular “Bond Nemesis” kind nor masses of religious fanatics. None of that is needed. It is the glue that is coming apart to topple this tower. And no, I am not referring to “spiraling trillions of debt.”
No, what I am referring to is a slow process I have observed over the last thirty years, ever since (in my teens) I began to wonder, “How would this world work if everyone were like me?” and realized that it wouldn’t! It was amazing to me that there were just enough people to make just enough shoes so that everyone could avoid walking barefoot, that there were people volunteering to spend their time day-in-day-out being dentists and lawyers and salesmen. For almost any “job” job I look at, I have the sincerest admiration for the tenacity of the people who do them…. How do they do it? It would drive me nuts after hours, let alone years…. Who makes those shoes? Who drills those teeth?
That was my wondrous introspection in my adolescent phase, while I was searching for a place in the jigsaw puzzle.
But in recent years, the haunting question has come back to me: “How the hell does this world function at all? And does it, really?” I feel an alienation zapping through the channels; I can’t find myself connecting with those groups of humanoids trouncing around MTV. Especially the glimpses of “real life” on daytime courtroom dramas—or just looking at faces in the street—on every scale, the more closely I observe, the more the creeping realization haunts me: Individuals, families, groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, countries all just barely hang in there between debt and dysfunction. The whole planet looks like Anytown, with mini-malls cutting up the landscape, and just down the road it’s all white trash with rusty car wrecks in the backyards. A huge Groucho club I don’t want to be a member of.
But it does go further: What is particularly disturbing to see is this desperate search for what I call Super-Individualism, which has rampantly increased in the last decade or so.
Everyone suddenly needs to be so special, be utterly unique. So unique that they race off like lemmings to get ever more “individual” tattoos—branded cattle, with branded chains in every mall, converging on a bland sameness worldwide. Every rap singer with ever more gold chains in ever longer stretch limos is singing the tune: “Don’t be a loser! Don’t be normal!”
But now the tables are turning: The anthill is relying on the behavior of the ants to function properly. And that requires social behavior, role playing, taking defined tasks and following them through.
What if each ant suddenly wants to be the queen? What if soldiering and nest building and cleaning chores are just not cool enough anymore?
If AntTV shows them, every day, nothing but un-Ant behavior…?
In my youth we whined about what to do and how to do it, but in the end all my friends became “normal” humans—orthopedic surgeons and professors, social workers, designers…. There were always a few who lived on the edges of normality, ending up as television celebrities, but on the whole they were perfectly reasonable ants: 1.8 children, 2.7 cars, 3.3 TVs….
Now I am no longer confident that that line can continue. If every honeymoon is now booked in Bali on a Visa card and every kid in Borneo wants to play ball in NYC, can the network of society be pliable enough to accommodate total upheaval? And what if 2 billion Chinese and Indians raise a generation of kids staring six-plus hours a day into all-American values they can never attain…taunted by Hollywood movies about heroic acts and pathetic dysfunctionality coupled with ever-increasing violence and disdain for ethics or morals…?
Seeing scenes of desperate youths in South American slums watching Kill Bill makes me think, “This is just oxygen thrown into the fire!” The ants will not play along much longer. The anthill will not survive if even a small fraction of the system is falling apart.
Couple that inane drive for Super Individualism (and the Quest for Coolness by an ever-increasing group destined to fail miserably) with the scarily simple realization of how effective even a small set of desperate people can become, then add the obvious penchant for religious fanaticism, and you have an ugly picture of the long-term future.
So many curves that grow upward toward limits, so many statistics that show increases and no way to turn around.
Many contributors to this forum may speculate about infinite life spans, changing the speed of light, finding ways to decode consciousness, wormholes to other dimensions, and grand unified theories. I applaud that! It does take all kinds. Those are viable and necessary questions for humankind as a whole.
However, I believe we need to clean house, re-evaluate, redefine the priorities. While we look at the horizon here in these pages, it is the ground beneath us that may be crumbling. The anthill could go to ant Hell!
Next year, let’s ask for good ideas, not dangerous ones. Really practical, serious, good ideas, like: “What is the most immediate positive global impact of any kind that can be achieved within one year?” “How do we envision Internet3 and Web3 as a real platform for a global brainstorming with six-plus billion potential participants?”
This was not meant to sound like doom-and-gloom naysaying. I see myself as a sincere optimist but one who believes in realistic pessimism as a useful tool to initiate change.