Technology causes massive changes in society, we are in the middle of a transition period between the old world and something different and new. The significance of this cannot be overstated. Everyone alive right now is part of the transition generations; we still envision the world as it was and in many ways the world is still that way, the way it used to be, the “old” way. But we are increasingly forced to confront the breakdowns of the old and the emerging new.
This is a result of technology’s ability to facilitate connection. Not very long ago we had only a fraction of 1% of the connections that exist today. Image the world as a gigantic web of connections of every type. Now go back 10 years, to just the beginning of social media taking off and apps-smart phones becoming ubiquitous. What was the comparative level of connections back then? Probably only 10% what it is today, maybe far less.
Then go back 20 years from now. What was the comparative level of connections then? Certainly 0.1% or less compared to what it is today.
In a state of relatively low connections (relative to what we experience today) societies organize locally in terms of ethnocentrism and cultural homogeneity. Nation-states, for example. Ethnic groups sticking together, genetic lineages preserving themselves over time. Racism and culturism are quite common and to be expected, are not even that bad in the overall context. Each generation more or less tends to reproduce the previous generations, with some small upgrades or deleterious changes here or there (mostly upgrades since natural selection is still at work, albeit weakened since the peak of the industrial revolution).
Once we get to the level of connections that exist today, all of that is over. Genetic lineages collapse and along with this physical health and mental health also collapse. Most people become patients of some sort, defective in their physical workings and their conscious workings. Gene errors proliferate, meanwhile inter-racial breeding increases to the extent that anyone even breeds anymore. The massiveness of the connections is simply going to open up so many possibilities that the old world and its way of doing things cannot be maintained anymore other than in rare and isolated locales. What was the normal and standard now becomes the exception.
What is fascinating about this is that it is actually a good thing. Why? We are alive to witness the taking of evolution to a whole new level. Never before have humans been able to breed for pure characteristics without regard to race or ethnicity - now they can. Genetic research shows that mixed race couples are more psychologically similar to one another compared to same race couples. This makes sense in evolutionary terms; the preservation of identity and genetic fitness has moved to a new avenue, no longer about the mere physical phenotypes and now increasingly more concerned with mentality, with things like personality, intelligence, emotion, interests and skills, etc.
Anyone still clinging to the old ways of doing things, the ethnocentric monocultural same race breeding sort of pattern, is working so hard to keep things all shiny polished and working not realizing they are on the Titanic and sinking fast. This is the majesty of technology, how it FORCES change on the world. People can deny this change or run from it, they can choose to live their lives as relative luddites clinging to the past ideals and values and mores, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But that is just their own life, it has zero bearing upon the world at large and where it is headed.
Level of technology leads to the amount and types of connections that exist (“making the world smaller”), bringing people together who would never have otherwise had contact in these ways; this reaches a threshold at which point evolution takes on an entirely new direction. And this couldnt come soon enough, considering the accumulation of deleterious gene mutations in the population as a consequence of Industrialization and the breakdown of darwinian purifying selection. We NEED evolution to take this leap into the new. And as far as I know there is nothing to compare it to, we have no examples to look at. Every other example of evolution is under the old world model of relatively limited exogenous connectiveness i.e. the VAST majority of all connections are in-group and intra-group. Sameness proliferates. Along with this comes more or less isolates regions and locales in various stages of conflict with one another, and the whole ethnocentrism homogeneous monocultural thing develops quite naturally. Nothing wrong with any of that, however it increasingly fails to apply to the modern world we now live in.
The world is becoming “one thing” thanks to …technology and how it connects us. Just look at this, I can write this sentence and click “Submit” and people all over the world will see it. This is simply unthinkable from the perspective of someone living just a couple of generations ago. And the scope and degree of connections are only going to keep massively increasing from here on forward. There is a ‘hidden science’ to this, which would analyze and explain effects from this increasing connectivity, predicting and understanding how society and humans will change as a result, but no one so far seems to have any idea that such a science exists. All we have are weird quasi-religious technofuturists and transhumanists who want to merge with the machine and AI to “live forever”. Well certainly some of that is going to come true quite soon, but that describes only a drop in the bucket. Such a narrow view.
Where are the truly far-thinkers? Who can take a look at technology as it is today, and where it has come from, and where it is going, and extrapolate the philosophical grand implications of this?
