Something Larger Than Ourselves
Robert Wright, at the NYT Opinionator blog, asks whether the huge growth in technology–specifically the internet–means that we’re in the process of building one big brain. We’re not just building a brain, we’re part of it—cells in a superorganism. We’re connected.
To begin with, note that the new technologies, though derided by some of these skeptics for eroding the simple social bonds of yesteryear, are creating new social bonds. We’re not just being lured away from kin and next-door neighbors by machines; we’re being lured away by other people — people on Facebook, people in our inbox, people who write columns about giant superorganisms.
If you need an excuse to check Facebook one more time today, you can try this one: You’re linking to other brains.
And, as the author [and entrepreneur] Steven Johnson recently noted, these social connections, though so distracting that it’s hard to focus on any task for long, nonetheless bring new efficiencies. In a given hour of failing to focus, you may: 1) check your e-mail and receive key input from a colleague as well as a lunch confirmation from a friend; 2) check Facebook and be led by a friend to an article that bears on your political passions, while also checking out the Web site of a group that harnesses that passion, giving you a channel for activism; 3) and, yes, waste some time reading or watching something frivolous.
If it’s any consolation, we’re not the first humans to go cellular. The telephone (and for that matter the postal system before it) let people increase the number of other brains they linked up with. People spent less time with their few inherited affiliations — kin and neighbors — and more time with affiliations that reflected vocational or avocational choices.
What to make of being a cell in a superorganism? Wright looks at the bright side:
I have to admit that I’m not totally loving the life of a cell. I’m as nostalgic as the next middle-aged guy for the time when focus was easier to come by, and I do sometimes feel, after a hard day of getting lots of tiny little things more-or-less done, that the superorganism I’m serving is tyrannical — as if I’m living that line in Orwell’s “1984”: “Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”
But at least the superorganism that seems to be emerging, though in some ways demanding, isn’t the totalitarian monster that Orwell feared; it’s more diffuse, more decentralized, more reconcilable — in principle, at least — with liberty.
All this leaves us with some big questions to answer:
What sort of human existence is implied by the ongoing construction of a social brain; and, within the constraints of that brain, how much room is there to choose our fate?
Which brings us to the much-anticipated new book by Kevin Kelly:
This autumn will see the publication of a book that promises to help us out here: “What Technology Wants,” by Kevin Kelly, a long-time tech-watcher who helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor back in its young, edgy days. … He writes of technology “stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves” and asks, “How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves?”
Being “sensitive to something larger than ourselves” — Wait a minute. I think this is where the search for God comes in.
