Different While Connected?
I think it was Jeff Hammerbacher at Facebook who said that the best minds of his generation were trying to get people to click on ads. Neal Stephenson, the science fiction writer, and others, have tried to suggest that we should step up and think big and not just be concerned with these very commercial and pedestrian and next quarter concerns, but really think out at the generational or civilizational scale. I applaud that 100 percent.
.. A really great question, is how one can protest against the system when it seems impossible even to communicate without it or, in some senses, be a modern person without it? You could say, well, the Amish are protesting in some sense because they’re out of it, but their protest is very feeble.
.. The real key is to remain different while you’re connected. The problem with being connected is it tends to homogenize everybody, so there’s this pressure to be the same if you’re connected. You go to any large city around the world, and there is a uniformity in what that downtown looks like. Connection tends to drive things to uniformity, but the value, the power of being connected is by remaining different. There’s this conundrum, this dilemma of remaining different while connected, because if you’re just different but not connected, there’s no power in that, and that’s actually easy to do, but can you remain different while connected?
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There’s an interesting thing about ancient China, because if you read through the history, almost every single major invention of the world was invented in China first, and sometimes it took hundred of years for each to either it to make it’s way to Western Europe or to be reinvented in Western Europe. That includes paper, printing, steel, gunpowder, the compass, rudder, suspension bridges, etc. It’s almost everything, and for a long time China led the world in civilization because it was able to make these things long before anyone else. But there was one invention that China did not invent, and it would turn out to be the most important invention, and that was the invention of the scientific method.