We hear warnings all the time that we use remote connectivity to wall ourselves off from our immediate environment, so that we are actually less connected to people with whom we share space.
DWill,
I have a method of simulating conversation on forums and it involves reading and stopping to comment before reading the whole response in view. I stopped reading there to offer something I thought about this morning on this topic.
This topic is Howard’s book in general and in particular an idea concerning connectivity and disconnection – your very interesting observation – in on the table currently.
I think that intimacy, or caring, or protecting, preserving, defending, nurturing, or otherwise loving other people other than one’s own self is statistically measurable.
If that measure of general or overall empathy, sympathy, or love between one human and the other humans is measured accurately 100, 1000, and 10,000 years ago and that accurate measure is now measured today, also done accurately, then what would the results of that accurate data indicate?
Is the presumption such that the data is accurately measured and furthermore that the data shows a drop in overall caring from a high point in the past to a low point now?
I have not signed onto that presumption; I do not have the data, and the data I have indicates no overall loss of caring, not the opposite, and certainly not accurate to a point where a conclusion can be made, what can be made, it seems to me, is a hypothesis geared in either direction.
Direction A: Human beings as a whole care less about each other now then they did in the past.
Direction B: Human beings as a whole care more about each other now then they did in the past.
Direction C: No net change in overall caring by human beings from the past to today (move onto some other measurable perspective).
I contend that someone could conjure up selective data to prove either hypothesis so long as the observer is careful enough to avoid the inclusion of data that does not support the hypothesis.
Someone championing capitalism may offer data that supports the hypothesis that capitalism has raised the standard of living of human beings in a measurable way because the past proves, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that people tortured and mass murdered (crime) each other on a more regular basis.
Howard does that to some measurable degree and I call it apologizing for capitalism.
Eric Fromm, on the other hand, tends to offer the Direction C, as Eric Fromm refutes the Direction A hypothesis with data measuring the activities of current and past “uncivilized” civilizations where the general trend in those civilizations is measurably less costly in terms of work load for the people within those “uncivilized” civilizations.
If, as Eric Fromm appears to contend, we have “advanced” from days of old, now we are more civilized, then how is that advancement measured? Is it measurable as a cost/benefit ratio such as hours of labor per day divided by happy and healthy living? If so: then some examples of civilization in the past, and present, offer a lower cost and a higher benefit than a comparison with, say, my life up to today. I’ve worked as a laborer sometimes 12 hours a day 6 days a week, even 7, for months and returning to 10 hours a day, and having almost no time or energy (power) to do anything but work for years, while my body deteriorates and becomes less able to work, and finding no benefits, no viable insurance, no golden parachute, nothing to show for all that hard work for all those years, and my standard of living is measurably higher than average today.
If the idea is to see the truth, rather than an idea where the viewer wishes to see something desired, then I think this idea that we, as a species, have become less empathetic is not yet conclusive. Not conclusive to a point where a conclusion can be made, and then from that conclusion a new direction can be traveled; certainly not to a point where any data that refutes the conclusion is preferably ignored.
I’ll read on with your reply, seeking more interest in this contentious thing in view (connection versus disconnection).
My objection to this vision is simply that it's over the top and presents interconnectivity as a panacea. We know panaceas have never existed.
My take on that is such that Howard didn’t intend to convey what you are reading into the book. Perhaps it is me who has mistaken what is intended to be conveyed by the book. When I read Global Brain I happened to be working on very similar thoughts concerning how connectivity works globally. Howard’s book offered much data in support of my own observations. I am not absolutely convinced in my conclusions of political economy; but I have yet to see any data that refutes my present conclusions.
Your viewpoint offers contentious data, and that is why your viewpoint is front and center in my life right now. I wake up to this contention on the table.
I think the contention on the table right now can be summed up as:
Connection versus Disconnection
It seems to me, after thinking about this from many angles, that there must be data, conclusive data, which measures disconnection. There is data, in abundance, where there is a measurable increase in connection.
I’ll read on.
Don't misunderstand me, I think interconnectivity needs to continue. For example, it is vital to our being able to understand more exactly what the climate of our planet is doing. It's just that as a solution to our human problems, I don't believe in it; it is only a tool, as powerful in certain ways as it may be.
Here is my opportunity to offer a viewpoint that may ring true to you as a possible measure of what you are seeing when you look at connectivity from a viewpoint of connectivity being harmful or from a viewpoint where connectivity isn’t good, where connectivity isn’t, as you say, “a solution to our human problems”.
Human beings must trust each other, without this type of connection, without this quality of connection, there can be no trade, there can be no collective increase in the power needed to maintain life and reproduce life.
A. All for one and one for all
B. Everyone for themselves
If everyone trusts that everyone is out for themselves and everyone is always on guard always knowing for certain that without the expense of defense there can be no trade, then that is TRUST.
Now, if you can follow me, enter into the picture something that ends trust and ends trade and without trade (connectivity) each person must produce everything they need to survive and reproduce or perish.
A. Trust (connectivity)
B. Crime (disconnection)
If what you are seeing when you see disconnection isn’t disconnection, instead, or rather, this thing in view is crime, then you are seeing a form of connection that intends to disconnect.
I think, and I’ve thought about this a lot, that you are seeing, at the root, two things in view (and I thank Howard for Howard’s work as being a vital part of my thinking process):
A. Entropy
B. Ectropy
I can illustrate what I mean, if what I am seeing isn’t transferring to you well.
Currently there is a way of trading globally with a program called E-bay. If Trader A trusts that the person he will trade his money for a used guitar amp with will, in fact, send no used guitar amp, that the supposed seller is a criminal, that the only thing being traded here is his money for nothing in return, then such a connection will not happen, not voluntarily, not by the person who trusts that the other trader is a criminal.
Why would the Trader A person conjure up such a conclusion?
The program offers data whereby the potential trader can measure this trust factor. Trader B has currently collected something called negative feedback. The negative feedback could be unjustly attached to Trader B.
Why would Trader B unjustly be connected to negative feedback?
Someone somewhere decides to injure Trader B, and the method employed is to falsify the data, to disconnect Trader B from potential traders, to end connectivity.
What happens if one entropic disconnecting criminal type joins up with, connects with, sympathizes with, or empathies with a second entropic, criminal type, and they both decide to add to the negative feedback of Trader B?
Now Trader A has more than one source of data that confirms a trust in the entropic, criminal, destructive, disconnecting intention and embodiment of Trader B, and this is a false trust, a false conclusion, and how did this power become some powerful?
Criminal A connects with criminal B to access the power of connectivity and cartelize or monopolize their entropic behavior, to cause further disconnection, to produce more false data, to confuse, to disguise, to injure, and to destroy, to spread apart, to sever, to exclude, etc.
Criminal A produces a mutually beneficial plan and shares that mutually beneficial plan with criminal B, and they both volunteer, and agree, and share and profit from this connection, this mutual association, this division of labor, and this specialization, this combined, collective, and this example of ectropy.
What do they do with this increase in power earned by their voluntary and mutual association, where they share an idea, and share the work load, and find better ways to make this association work efficiently?
They decide upon an idea called crime, they use their combined power to destroy, to separate, to disconnect, to dissect, to dismember, to pull apart, to un-join, etc.
The power in view is connectivity, when someone is looking for human power, a power that produces something, even crime.
I think you are looking at entropy and seeing the human form of it, I think you are looking at crime and you have yet to label it accurately, to know it, to see it, to measure it, and to then learn to avoid it, and most certainly to know not to become it.
I hope the illustration can aid in the transfer of what I see to you. E-bay offers a very good look at how human beings connect globally and how human beings manage to avoid crime in that process. If you can find an angle of view in this illustration whereby the culprit of any wrongness, and harm, and blowback is the fault of connectivity, or something I have not seen, then please consider responding with that accurately measurable observation. I think that the paper trail (or the digital trail) will lead to one criminal, then another, then another, in each and every case where bad things have happened.
I have one more angle of view and this one is much easier to see compared to the very complicated E-bay illustration above – it seems to me.
If oxygen suddenly turns into ammonia, each oxygen atom connected to each oxygen atom, then that sudden change will kill all oxygen dependent life on earth, or the one’s who will survive manage to disconnect some of the oxygen from the source of the “infection”.
Does nature, ectropy, produce the “infection”, or does the paper trail lead to some human being in some lab where the idea behind the work is to eliminate the competition?
I borrow this viewpoint from Kurt Vonnegut with his Ice 9 creation.
I’ll read on.
This observation of Solzhenitzyn's is very true. It's a level or two above the one I was thinking of, though. Offhand, I can't see how interconnectivity would help us be more universal in our concern, but maybe I don't understand what others see in its potential.
I may be wrong here but my guess is that you are harboring a false viewpoint that has been unwelcome in your natural way of perceiving life. I can call this viewpoint the Machiavelli syndrome. People who profit from you having this viewpoint are people who have this viewpoint, people who own it. If you have this viewpoint and you don’t see it, it may be very difficult to divorce yourself from it. It may be impossible.
I don’t know.
I am going to get out my copy of The Prince and I am going to quote from the introduction in my copy. If what you read opens a door in your viewpoint that you don’t want to see, and you close that door, slam it shut, then you may be infected. This may all sound stupid to you too. I can’t help the way I see our world – either. It is what it is.
I try to keep all the doors open, even the one’s that scare me.
Machiavelli’s viewpoint was darkly pessimistic; the one element in St Augustine’s thought which he wholeheartedly endorsed was the idea of original sin. As he puts it starkly in the same chapter 18 of The Prince, men are bad. This means that to deal with them as if they were good, honourable or trustworthy is to court disaster. In the Discourses (I,3) the point is repeated: ‘all men are bad and are ever ready to display their malignity’. This must be the initial premise of those who plan to found a republic. The business of politics is to try and salvage something positive from this unpromising conglomerate, and the aim of the state is to check those anarchic drives which are a constant threat to the common good. This is where The Prince fits into the spectrum of his wider thought: while a republic may be his preferred form of social organization, the crucial business of founding or restoring a state can only be performed by one exceptional individual.
And that is the point, yes or no, that everyone “else” is bad.
If connecting good people is good and if connecting bad people isn’t connecting good people, then what is it about connectivity? Is it bad?
It is not bad, it is essential to the survival of the species here on Earth and most certainly essential for the survival of the species once the Earth can no longer support life (an inevitability).
What is the frame of reference?
A. Survival of the species = good
B. Survival of the species = not A.
Or
A. Survival of me – good
B. Not A
They are not necessarily mutually exclusive goods.
If someone sets out to injure someone else, to survive at the expense of the other person, how does that decision work reasonably if, by chance, the injured one, or the injured many, could have been essential to the survival of the species?
A common political message these days, I am asking for confessions for it’s owners, is “over-population”.
What is the final solution for that wonderful perspective? Where is the data that confirms the accuracy of that oh so conveniently vague and misleading perspective?
I’ll read on, I have to get moving too.
That's an interesting quotation, too. I don't have that particular worry on my own radar screen.
If the one news source you look at is FOX NEWS, then your quotation has a different meaning, to me, than, say, if you have 20 diverse competitive news sources from which to pick the most accurate news, in your view, from.
Say it won't be so, Howard!
My viewpoint includes a future cell-phone self-defense/insurance weapon where the users can be compared to non-users statistically much less likely to be harmed by criminals –even legal ones.
What will happen isn’t within my power to know. I think, I can predict with confidence, that gasoline (petroleum) powered cars will be upside down in 5 years time. I mean that a buyer of one of those cars today will be better off dumping it rather than paying off the loan – like people living in houses with upside-down mortgages. But that is my viewpoint based upon the data I have managed to get past the censors. I can elaborate – with specifics.
If we're wise, as well as clever, we'll constantly have an eye on the need to upgrade our flesh-and-blood communications and interactions, even as we ramp up interconnectivity.
To me your viewpoint continues to harbor a false negative upon connectivity. It isn’t connectivity that plans on and then executes the plan to injure innocent people. Connectivity, like a weapon, a pointed stick, doesn’t commit crimes.
The weakness becomes more apparent as we find it imperative to live as a global community.
Some criminals desire a global community so as to destroy all competitors who may vie for control over that one connection, a legal money monopoly comes to mind.
If the global legal money monopoly offers the highest quality money at the lowest cost possible, then why would such a thing be at all bad?
The facts support an observation that legal money monopolies offer the lowest quality money at the highest cost to the victims, while the producers of said commodity have the opposite perspective.
They must either destroy the competition or leverage the competition into submission – or the competition will force quality up and cost down.
Why would anyone ever trade something valuable for the poor costly thing when a rich inexpensive example is on the same web page?
It's been nice talking about this with you.
It has been nice borrowing your thoughts – thanks. No time to edit carefully.