Mark Pesce at the Personal Democracy Forum

I’ve been spending part of my day chewing over this quote by Mark Pesce in an essay entitled Hyperpolitics published in edge.org (one of my favorites).

Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.

His argument is that the “hardware” of new technology makes us hyperconnected.  This accelerated capacity to share with one another allows us to more quickly reproduce behaviors, what he calls hypermimesis…an accelerated capacity for “the crowd” to learn from one another.  This capacity will lead to a hyperempowered crowd that will produce unprecedented soceital changes that liberal democratic systems will be incapable of handling.

I’m usually very skeptical of proclamations about the great unrecognizable future.  I remember a student introducing me to Ray Kurtzweil’s idea of the singularity and thinking “this guy’s Kurtzweil guy is a nut”!  But I’m slowly giving more purchase to the idea that our “hardware” is allowing us to make rapid, unreflective, undemocratic changes to our social, political and economic systems.

Pesce makes a simple yet provocative argument: changes in a society’s ability to share causes massive shifts in social organization.  Does this ability to share/copy/mimic explain the financial crisis we now find ourselves in.  The desire of other financial institutions to get into the mortgage market, the easy availability of credity and coupled with the accelerated ability to slice and dice mortgages led us to where we are today (as I write the Dow Jones average is at 6726).

I remain a skeptic of deterministic/functionalist views of human evolution.  I still think we have the resilience and capacity to stake out new forms of social organization.  But we have little idea as to what those new forms will look like.