REBUILDING THE TOWER OF BABEL:

Why the Impossible Happens More Often (Kevin Kelly, The Technium)

I've had to persuade myself to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I've encountered a series of ideas that I was conditioned to think were impossibilities, but which turned out to be good practical ideas. For instance, I had my doubts about the online flea market called eBay when it first came out. Pay money to a stranger selling a car you have not seen? Everything I had been taught about human nature suggested this could not work. Yet today, strangers selling automobiles is the major profit center for the very successful eBay corporation.

I thought the idea of an encyclopedia that anyone could change at any time to be a non-starter, a hopeless romantic idea with no chance of working. It seemed to go against my general understanding of human nature and group interaction. I was so wrong. Today I use Wikipedia at least once a day.

Twenty years ago if I had been paid to convince an audience of reasonable, educated people that in 20 years time we'd have street and satellite maps for the entire world on our personal hand held phone devices -- for free -- and with street views for many cities -- I would not be able to do it. I could not have made an economic case for how this could come about "for free." It was starkly impossible back then.

These supposed impossibilities keep happening with increased frequency. Everyone "knew" that people don't work for free, and if they did, they could not make something useful without a boss. But today entire sections of our economy run on software instruments created by volunteers working without pay or bosses. Everyone knew humans were innately private beings, yet the impossibility of total open round-the-clock sharing still occurred. Everyone knew that humans are basically lazy, and they would rather watch than create, and they would never get off their sofas to create their own TV. It would be impossible that millions of amateurs would produce billions of hours of video, or that anyone would watch any of it. Like Wikipedia, or Linux, YouTube is theoretically impossible. But here this impossibility is real in practice.

This list goes on, old impossibilities appearing as new possibilities daily. But why now? What is happening to disrupt the ancient impossible/possible boundary?

In a word: emergence. As far as I can tell the impossible things that happen now are in every case manifestations of a new, bigger level of organization. They are the result of large-scale collaboration, or immense collections of information, or global structures, or gigantic real-time social interactions. Just as a tissue is a new, bigger level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures are a new bigger level for individual humans. And in both cases the new level breeds emergence. New behaviors emerge from the new level that were impossible at the lower level. Tissue can do things that cells can't. The collectivist organizations of wikipedia, Linux, the web can do things that industrialized humans could not.

Humans have long invented new social organizations, from law, courts, irrigation systems, schools, governments, libraries, and at the largest scale, civilization itself. These social instruments are what makes us human -- and what makes our behavior "impossible" from the vantage of animals. For instance when we invented writing, written records and laws enabled a type of egalitarianism not possible in our cousins the primates, and and not present in oral cultures. The cooperation and coordination breed by irrigation and agriculture produced yet more impossible behaviors of anticipation and preparation, and sensitivity to the future. Human society unleashed all kinds of previously impossible human behaviors into the biosphere.

The technium is accelerating the creation of new impossibilities by continuing to invent new social organizations.

Ever been in the Epcot ball and seen the Spaceship Earth display? Think of the cloistered monks sitting there transcribing one book apiece, perhaps, or perhaps not, reading it as they did so. And when they were done a single copy would result, to be seen by how few eyes?

Posted by oj at September 5, 2011 8:50 AM
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