I'm Not In Any Sense

Back In The 1980s, When The Internet Was Only Available To A Small Number Of Pioneers, I Was Often Confronted By People Who Feared That The Strange Technologies I Was Working On, Like Virtual Reality, Might Unleash The Demons Of Human Nature. For Instance, Would People Become Addicted To Virtual Reality As If It Were A Drug? Would They Become Trapped In It, Unable To Escape Back To The Physical World Where The Rest Of Us Live? Some Of The Questions Were Silly, And Others Were Prescient.

At The Turn Of The [21st] Century It Was Really Sergey Brin At Google Who Just Had The Thought Of, Well, If We Give Away All The Information Services, But We Make Money From Advertising, We Can Make Information Free And Still Have Capitalism. But The Problem With That Is It Reneges On The Social Contract Where People Still Participate In The Formal Economy. And It's A Kind Of Capitalism That's Totally Self-defeating Because It's So Narrow. It's A Winner-take-all Capitalism That's Not Sustaining.

The Problem I Have With Socialist Utopias Is There's Some Kind Of Committees Trying To Soften Outcomes For People. I Think That Imposes Models Of Outcomes For Other People's Lives. So In A Spiritual Sense There's Some Bit Of Libertarian In Me. But The Critical Thing For Me Is Moderation. And If You Let That Go Far You Do End Up With A Winner-take-all Society That Ultimately Crushes Everybody Even Worse.

I Fear That We Are Beginning To Design Ourselves To Suit Digital Models Of Us, And I Worry About A Leaching Of Empathy And Humanity In That Process.

Funding A Civilization Through Advertising Is Like Trying To Get Nutrition By Connecting A Tube From One’s Anus To One’s Mouth.