Except there's been developments. There is rumbling under the foundations. Tectonic plates are shifting. We're that close. She could blow any minute now.
Paradigms shift. You can't see it happening. But when such a sudden return-to-basics occurs you can bet there's been another one. And this one has nothing to do with recent political upheavals. It may be an antitoxin. It has to do with face-to-face connections on the videoconference softwares that happened to be almost ready when Mr. Virus came to town.
There we were, all isolated and segmented and jerked this way and that by pavlovian triggers to buy more plastic for the expanding Pacific Gyre, and Splat! Our normal ways of being became lethal to each other. Nobody's immune. Them's the Rules. Now, play.
***
Consider what brains do when people are face-to-face. Well, we don't really know that, do we? But neither does all that A.I. that's been learning to encapsulate our minds so it can extract our autonomy for whatever Mark or Jeff or Eric want to use it for. A.I. might gain infinite intelligence, but has no access at all to wisdom (read Mary C. Bateson on this.)
Brains do a vast amount of processing through faces, all of it laser-focused on connecting to other brains. And for the first time since letter-writing, it's a real-time, broadband, two-way street. Remember that the telephone had squeezed us into a wire with only voices, and TV disrupted our normally interactive communications into passive one-way input, but added sight, which was worse. Conference calls and email allowed group interactions, but still quite limited as to the scope our momentary awareness. But videoconferencing puts us face-to-face, voice-to-voice, and even pipes in the ambient cacophony of grunts and farts and fidgets and microexpressions of disdain or approbation. Like we're all in here together. And not only that, it's going on at scale. Billions of us are gazing into each other's eyes (and nostrils, and teeth).
Brains are loving it. They are synchronizing worldviews, is what they're doing. It's becoming easier to see yourself in somebody else, rather than assume right off the bat they are ill-intentioned a**holes out to take away your assault weapons, or shoot you with theirs. They can't reach you for anything like that, you're safe in your own home. One little smile or the tilt of a head, the lift of a shoulder, and everything is different, just like that. Physical changes are going on in our brains every nanosecond. We have no idea how complicated this is, and besides we're busy trying to impress people and avoid looking stupid. Our brains can carry on syncing the world uninterrupted by us.
This brain-connecting stuff happens in a kind of misty Heideggerian realm where bots and trolls fear to tread. Are you kidding? They have no sensors or gauges that can even discern this space. It's the space where Meaning itself arises, the primordial ooze of language and perception and action. It's ephemeral and un-digitizable. And people, who have been isolated into psychotic clots of agony and complaint for years now, are being reconnected to humanity. By a germ, wouldja believe!
Common, participatory experience. Being "out here" in a conversation, where our internal state is of no consequence whatsoever.
Shared reality. The thing that the Invisible Hand of Surveillance Capitalism has all but destroyed in pursuit of marketing and political power and profit above everything.
Considering that a couple billion or more people are f-2-f right now, and every moment around the world and around the clock, how long will it take before a whole lot of us just get bored out of our skulls with all the seething froth of utter nonsense that clogs our cables and satellites and airwaves, and just wander off to create something interesting? Like, see if the neighbors are okay, do they have enough to eat?
***
Marketing algorithms haven't got a grip yet, in this new paradigm. Surveillance Capitalism itself is struggling to keep up, and let's not kid ourselves, a trillion dollars is now fueling efforts to contain this thing. Humanity, all sharing one common reality, one set of facts? Anathema! The economy will collapse! Something Must Be Done!
Anything of substance still stands on its own merits, as ever. It may not outsell high-fructose corn-syrup on the web, but when sixty-seven brands have come and gone, honey remains honey, and only comes out of a hive of bees. And a billion people know the difference when they're all linking brains online. It's not the words, it's the whole face, sight and sound, the broadband brain-meld of living human relatedness. And one of these days we'll hook up our sense of smell. And maybe, touch.
Imagine that.
So, get on as many videoconferences as you can, folks, while our machines haven't yet worked out how to corrupt it. There's a window of opportunity. We've been thrown a floatation device. It may get waterlogged eventually. Don't worry about topics, it doesn't matter. The point is to be gazing into human faces, the more, the differenter, the better.
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