Disconnect
In the twenty-first century, danger is defined by connectivity.
With greater connectivity, walls fall down, lines are erased, distinctions blur, and identities become obscured. Every increase in the number of connections between people decreases the mind’s ability to digest what’s spewed over those connections. Local catastrophe becomes global contagion. Little keeps disaster contained: the old bulwarks are rubble, every road leads everywhere else, and trouble suffers from a richness of choices. So many places to go, so many things to destroy, so many defenseless targets to exploit, and everything’s within driving distance. When connectivity is global, any disaster anywhere becomes every catastrophe everywhere.
Nothing suffers more when all are connected to all than responsibility. Universal connectivity is universal amnesty. The dark places of the globe coalesce into one curtain of obscurity. The direct line between cause and effect, action and consequence, and perpetrator and victim is lost. Everywhere ambiguity is triumphant. Uncertainty produces doubt. Doubt raises fear. Fear rouses stupidity to action and folly inevitably follows. Innocent and guilty alike are intermingled together so both suffer retribution altogether.
Connectivity creates a world whose leaders become best friends forever. Best friends forever form one exclusive club. Elites develop shared understanding. That shared understanding imprisons what passes for elite thought. Those who inherit or win power lose the ability to see dangers lurking beyond the glare of the universally fashionable. Independence leads to isolation while conformity leads to welcome. The man surrounded by the greatest number of human shields is hailed as the strongest of leaders while the man standing alone is denounced as the lowest of creatures. Followership is diligently studied by the most promising while leadership is left to lucky accident. Mankind finds itself subject to the rule of mush. And the future only promise to elevate that rule to a tyranny of mush with connectivity running through it.
There is no firewall against stupid: the safeties have come off stupidity. Never has the harvest of folly been greater. Never has personal folly had more opportunity to become shared folly. Delusion can leap from mind to mind with unprecedented efficiency, leaving mass foolishness in its wake. Never has someone’s chance to go over the cliff with a million of their closest friends been greater. Never has the crowd pushing someone towards the edge from behind been greater. With universal connectivity, the onrush of cascading folly meets too little friction and all too many willing transmitters. The whisper of the wise is buried in a torrent of fools.
Connectivity is the enemy of robustness. Yet only in robustness can what little safety there is be discovered. Universal connectivity must be recognized for what it is: it is not a virtue to pursue or a development to encourage. It is an evil to shun and a danger to suppress. A world of universal connectivity is a world beyond human scale and a world beyond human control.
Connections must be culled. The universal must be cut down to the human. The line connecting action and impact, actor and acted upon, and offender and offended must be found along a few sun-lit paths instead of lost in a tangle of obscure back roads. In a world where everything threatens to wad itself into a one single all-connected jumble, one law must trump any other:
Every man must have a state.
