World 2.0 coming Soon: Please Wait For Reboot.

Every now and then, I run across something that is both creative and thought provoking. Such is the case with Dave Pollard's The End of Civilization as a 'Software Crash', in that it flips the concept of The Sims into something which serves as an analog for global society - instead of the other way around.

At first this might seem a little goofy, but with a few brain cells working on it part time, everyone should know that we (mankind) design things based on our experience. The complexity of what we design is based on our perception of the world around us. There is a danger of becoming reliant on a model based on a model that we have created, but it's interesting to explore especially when we, as a global society, realize that our perceptions not only have changed, but have to change further for the continued survival of what one group may call a species and what another might call 'God's Children'. Either way, the change occurs.

The four related concepts in Dave Pollard's mind are (from his post):

• What has allowed human civilization to evolve so quickly in recent millennia has been the gradual switch-over from reliance on instinctive knowledge embedded in our DNA and transmitted genetically ("hardware") to reliance on 'rational' knowledge transmitted through language and communication culturally ("software"). Cultures can adapt to changing circumstances much more rapidly than genes, so evolution has encouraged this switch-over, to the point that we are, in a very real sense, more what our culture has made us than what our genes have made us.
• Our civilization has a very thin veneer. What keeps the six and a half billion of us 'behaving' in a way that allows our now-global civilization to struggle on optimistically is extremely fragile, and when it breaks down even slightly, when our culture fails to tell us what to do and our instincts are no longer listened to, we quickly show we are capable of staggering atrocities, that we are capable of anything.
• There is some compelling evidence that some of the most 'advanced' human civilizations of the past, like those of the Incas and the Anasazi,ended when en masse the
  people of those civilizations quite suddenly gave up on their
  'civilized' way of life, concluding that it no longer worked for them, and just walked away, returning to an 'uncivilized' gatherer-hunter society.
• Thanks to reader Martin-Éric Racine, I became aware of this remarkable post by Kai Krause in response to the Edge "what's your dangerous idea?" question, in which Krause suggests that our civilization may already be falling apart.

These all make sense on an intuitive level. The first point makes sense in that mankind has incorporated more and more culture into the sphere of mankind. The 'hardware' is still there, and the amount of 'software' is increasing. Bias based on slightly different hardware (racial prejudice, etc.) has become more and more repulsive in mainstream society. Bias based on software such as language and culture is more prevalent in the modern world. Broadly speaking, our disagreements are exponentially less about 'hardware' than they were 100 years ago.

The second point, that our civilization has a thin veneer, is not something I consider as new. Humans are, at a meta level, capable of atrocities. Yet, referring back to point one, where the largest atrocities in dealing with differences in 'Hardware' during previous millenia - the Holocaust, as an example, as well as slavery based on race - this millenium is not about the 'hardware' as much as the disagreements in 'software'. Radical religious nuts on both sides of the fence are lobbing explosives at each other not because they are physically different, but because they are culturally ('software') different. Political borders - another 'software' construct by mankind - are another area of disagreement which has replaced the 'hardware' issues. So to expand on this point, the level of atrocity is not different, the reason or rationalization of the atrocity varies. As progress occurs, integration becomes necessary and this is a change. Radical change, as when the wall came down in Berlin, could be seen as revolution. And as John F. Kennedy once said:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

The third point is interesting. I didn't realize that the Inca and Anasazi civilizations disappeared because people left the cities... but it makes sense. As more differences in 'software' happened, a few people probably left - and eventually, the cities themselves could not sustain themselves within the 'social software' they were using. What makes this interesting is that back then, there was a place to run to. Nowadays, in a globally integrated society, no matter where you go, there you are. I know quite a few people who wouldn't mind leaving the city they live in to become like the Urban Refugee. Yet to interact within a global society or to protect the rights of a society, technology is needed to interact an that technology itself can be seen as a border in the ability to get it (digital divide), the policy to use it, and so on. Thus to be separate one has to defend being separate, and to defend being separate one has to participate to maintain that separation in a manner which suits the separated society.

Thus there is no true separated society during this period of globalization, but if one pays attention you will see that there are people who want to be separate. When the Constitution of the United States, the 'leader of the Free World', is subject to interpretation by a court because a democratic election failed to produce a clear winner, the veneer begins to fall off. When to install democracy ('software') within geopolitical ('software') borders there are cultural ('software') disputes which take the form of disputes of religion ('software'), it's apparent that there are incompatibility issues. Oddly, when you look at these models, neither is 'open source' in realization.

The fourth point is not new. The Sky Is Falling can be explained in any multitude of ways; the sky is always falling but it never seems to wipe out civilization. It's sky limbo. How low can you go? Yet in a way, it's always true because the 'software' that we call society is always getting changing. In extreme cases it gets rebooted, like some sort of Microsoft product. Nowadays, we need more 'software patches' than 'software', and with the end of the Cold War over, many people who grew up during the Cold War are still running things in an era of globalization. The next generation will be different, or we can hope so.

This all intuitively - at least for me - takes us to the next point which Pollard makes lower down in his entry:

Is our civilization, this 'proprietary' software, the only program we still have available for our 6.5 billion humans, about to crash -- a global cultural analogue to the Blue Screen of Death? And, by walking away from civilization soon en masse, might our most informed and most disenfranchised be recognizing this impending crash and looking, hopefully in time, for another, 'open source' program, another way to live?

He wrote a lot of interesting stuff, but the crux of it is this: Do we continue trying to patch all these different versions of 'software' - as violently as we have been doing so - or do we 'reboot' by powering down the system and bringing it back up - or do we decide to change the software altogether such that humanity interoperates better in the global network?

Right now I'm thinking the last option would be the best. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you are supposed to do is stop digging.

This is an idea worth fleshing out more. In fact, it might be the way to assure the survival of mankind in an era where we seem intent to do completely the opposite.

Image at top can be viewed here.