The tribes are all around us, we are starting to identify ourselves more virtually than we do physically. We believe we have more in common with the people we associate with online than we do with our own countrymen. Democracy proves it with declining voter turnout and moldy, dysfunctional bureaucracies. People feel less and less relevant to where they are.
Your social networks linked to interests become more and more concrete in your mind. The people you game with are your comrades. It's little wonder that these bands of virtual patriots rally behind the cry of truth overturning hypocrisy that Wikileaks is sounding. Bring down the government, bring down the corporations, bring down those things that try to limit our digital selves.
Perhaps it's time to embrace the new, as our ancestors did with sail powered ships, printing presses and industrialization. The ships brought plague and genocide in the New World, the printing presses overturned a millennia old religious institution in Europe and industrialization is still slowly poisoning a very finite bio-sphere, but each of these things ushered in new eras of discovery and innovation; the digital era will be no different.
Why we ever thought that our brave new world would exist in happy harmony with the old world ideas of nationhood and economics is rather ludicrous; like expecting horse drawn carriages to run calmly next to a super highway. The digital truth we're in the middle of inventing is going to demand some changes.
I wonder if people throughout history simply stumbled into obvious, overwhelming change without realizing it. In 500 years, students learning the early 21st Century will wonder at how people clung to ideas that were obviously outdated. Perhaps they'll wonder why those nation states were so amazed that a apparently powerless little organization could unclothe them so easily. Perhaps they'll wonder why no one stated the obvious.
But then again, maybe as Rome burned they really did fiddle, we are.
The best digital future books:
http://thedaemon.com/ fantastic new author
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/ fantastic veteran
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307357519&view=print creepy and obviously true - so go by a pickup!
http://100milediet.org/ the future of how we feed ourselves - doesn't seem important until you realize what is
We Are Legion: the beginnings of the end of geographical government? The beginnings of digital nationhood?
We Are Legion: the beginnings of the end of geographical government? The beginnings of digital nationhood?
