post-feudal hypersocial nationalism and then urbanism and then globalism --> free fall
The changes in human culture and technology over the past few centuries have been unique to both human history and world history. Previously humans used tools and lived in small groups with shared language for tens of thousands of years -- but so have other species. We then developed agriculture and domesticated lands, plants, and animals about 15,000 years ago, which led to somewhat larger social, economic, and political networks -- although most relationships remained local and personal. But more recently we moved beyond local & personal social relationships and created federations of humans who will never meet each other, who nevertheless use a common language, a common currency, a common set of laws, a common set of beliefs -- and who are willing to kill and be killed for a common cause.
The rise of nation states, the rise of transnational religions (the Catholic Church has over one billion members), the rise of cities, the rise of global trade networks -- these required the invention of impersonal group membership and impersonal trust on a geographic and then global scale. Instead of interacting with neighboring farmers and villagers who we grew up among and knew personally all of our lives, we began identifying with groups of people we'd never meet, or even if we did meet a fraction of them, we only met them briefly and did not know them personally.
This has been the rise of mass culture, greatly aided by the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, the photograph, and then radio, film, and television. The rise of the newspaper, the novel, the radio show, the TV show. Recorded music. Things we take for granted now. Those of us who are a bit older and grew up before the splintering of cable TV and then the Internet, took mass culture as such a given condition, that the splintering of mass culture into personalized information bubbles feels like an ongoing social disaster. WTF, we cannot even agree on the facts anymore?
But it was never "natural" for humans to shift their focus from the local to the national or the global. It is not "natural" that in India one political party received 230 million votes in the 2019 election, the largest number of votes ever received by one party in a democracy. How did we get 230 million people to formally agree on anything all at the same time?
Where The Social Conquest of Earth leaves off (the genetic prerequisites for social behavior in macroscopic animal species), other authors have continued, looking at the cultural prerequisites for hypersocial behaviors, such as organized religion, nationalism, capitalism. An important prerequisite for the rise of empires -- defined as nation states composed of multiple ethnic groups who speak multiple languages -- is cooperation on a completely arbitrary scale, loyalty to people you'll never meet or even communicate with, trust in religious, political, and economic arrangements over which you'll never have any personal control or even meaningful personal input. Whereas the "social contract" of the feudal age was intensely personal -- you pledged loyalty to a local lord who in turn pledged to defend you and your land -- the social contract of our hypersocial age is entirely impersonal. You get paid with some of those 22 trillion existing USD, whether you like it or not.
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Yesterday I was surprised to find an early example of moral revulsion against the novel. I mean, reading books. OMG, Agnes is crying because of a story she's reading about a fictional person. So are the cleaning women downstairs. Our country has been conquered by this novel, everybody is talking about its characters as THOUGH THEY'RE REAL PEOPLE! What will happen to the individual stories of real people as we are conquered by novels? What will happen to our foundational myths?
Hah, I grew up taking novels for granted. My parents and teachers thought it was great how many books I read as a kid. But it did blunt my social life to some extent -- time spent reading novels was time not spent playing with other kids or exercising outside.
Novels are merely one example of mass culture. We're absolutely drowning in mass culture nowadays, although each of us has our own personalized experience of mass culture now. Mass culture has been individualized in the 21st Century. But it is still mass in the sense that we are not personally in charge of it, and we are interacting with it impersonally. I've called it "infosmog" in the past -- now our mass culture has differentiated to such an extent that no one person can perceive or understand it. Mass culture is no longer shared. At least, not in the countries that have freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
One author describes what we're living in now, via this differentiated mass culture, as an Alternate Reality Game. I still think infosmog works.
But there were similarities when the printing press was invented, when newspapers were invented, when novels were invented, when radio was invented. At first, these technologies were able to differentiate previous forms of mass culture. The printing press led directly to the Protestant Reformation, shattering the authority of the Catholic Church in Europe. Newspapers fueled the transformation from monarchy to democracy. But then radio and television led to the rise of the Cult of Personality -- allowing leaders to broadcast their voices and then faces into every home, as though they were sitting by the fire with you, talking with you. Leadership suddenly required a new skill, or, really, an ancient skill: personal charisma. Mass culture adapted. The ruling class figured it out.
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In my attempted retreat from news media I ended up spending more time with other media instead. And now, media about media. Metamedia about the history of, and effects of, media.
All of these media, from the printing press onward, are too new for us to have evolved to deal with them. The rate of cultural change exceeds our biological ability to cope. In 1970, one author called this phenomenon "Future Shock", when culture changes faster than we can personally adapt to it. He wrote of how we're entering a post-industrial age, in which manufacturing employment becomes a minority occupation, like agriculture became a minority occupation. Instead, now most of us work in the knowledge and service industries. Finance, health care, IT, accounting, law, marketing, education, lobbying, security, transportation, hospitality, fundraising, tourism, entertainment, government, research, social influencers LOL.
We cannot even imagine stepping off this massive cultural hyperwave. What are the alternatives? If you are neither working, nor attending to some sort of media, what the fuck are you doing? Can you spend time without engaging with some sort of printed, recorded, manufactured, or transmitted media? What's left? Even the games most of us play are forms of mass media.
What's left? Conversation (unless we're conversing about mass media), contemplation (unless we're thinking about mass media), time outdoors, physical touch, exercise, stretching, cooking, eating, drinking, smoking, fucking. Sleeping.
Is there value to existing outside of the mass?
The rise of nation states, the rise of transnational religions (the Catholic Church has over one billion members), the rise of cities, the rise of global trade networks -- these required the invention of impersonal group membership and impersonal trust on a geographic and then global scale. Instead of interacting with neighboring farmers and villagers who we grew up among and knew personally all of our lives, we began identifying with groups of people we'd never meet, or even if we did meet a fraction of them, we only met them briefly and did not know them personally.
This has been the rise of mass culture, greatly aided by the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, the photograph, and then radio, film, and television. The rise of the newspaper, the novel, the radio show, the TV show. Recorded music. Things we take for granted now. Those of us who are a bit older and grew up before the splintering of cable TV and then the Internet, took mass culture as such a given condition, that the splintering of mass culture into personalized information bubbles feels like an ongoing social disaster. WTF, we cannot even agree on the facts anymore?
But it was never "natural" for humans to shift their focus from the local to the national or the global. It is not "natural" that in India one political party received 230 million votes in the 2019 election, the largest number of votes ever received by one party in a democracy. How did we get 230 million people to formally agree on anything all at the same time?
Where The Social Conquest of Earth leaves off (the genetic prerequisites for social behavior in macroscopic animal species), other authors have continued, looking at the cultural prerequisites for hypersocial behaviors, such as organized religion, nationalism, capitalism. An important prerequisite for the rise of empires -- defined as nation states composed of multiple ethnic groups who speak multiple languages -- is cooperation on a completely arbitrary scale, loyalty to people you'll never meet or even communicate with, trust in religious, political, and economic arrangements over which you'll never have any personal control or even meaningful personal input. Whereas the "social contract" of the feudal age was intensely personal -- you pledged loyalty to a local lord who in turn pledged to defend you and your land -- the social contract of our hypersocial age is entirely impersonal. You get paid with some of those 22 trillion existing USD, whether you like it or not.
-----
Yesterday I was surprised to find an early example of moral revulsion against the novel. I mean, reading books. OMG, Agnes is crying because of a story she's reading about a fictional person. So are the cleaning women downstairs. Our country has been conquered by this novel, everybody is talking about its characters as THOUGH THEY'RE REAL PEOPLE! What will happen to the individual stories of real people as we are conquered by novels? What will happen to our foundational myths?
Hah, I grew up taking novels for granted. My parents and teachers thought it was great how many books I read as a kid. But it did blunt my social life to some extent -- time spent reading novels was time not spent playing with other kids or exercising outside.
Novels are merely one example of mass culture. We're absolutely drowning in mass culture nowadays, although each of us has our own personalized experience of mass culture now. Mass culture has been individualized in the 21st Century. But it is still mass in the sense that we are not personally in charge of it, and we are interacting with it impersonally. I've called it "infosmog" in the past -- now our mass culture has differentiated to such an extent that no one person can perceive or understand it. Mass culture is no longer shared. At least, not in the countries that have freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
One author describes what we're living in now, via this differentiated mass culture, as an Alternate Reality Game. I still think infosmog works.
But there were similarities when the printing press was invented, when newspapers were invented, when novels were invented, when radio was invented. At first, these technologies were able to differentiate previous forms of mass culture. The printing press led directly to the Protestant Reformation, shattering the authority of the Catholic Church in Europe. Newspapers fueled the transformation from monarchy to democracy. But then radio and television led to the rise of the Cult of Personality -- allowing leaders to broadcast their voices and then faces into every home, as though they were sitting by the fire with you, talking with you. Leadership suddenly required a new skill, or, really, an ancient skill: personal charisma. Mass culture adapted. The ruling class figured it out.
-----
In my attempted retreat from news media I ended up spending more time with other media instead. And now, media about media. Metamedia about the history of, and effects of, media.
All of these media, from the printing press onward, are too new for us to have evolved to deal with them. The rate of cultural change exceeds our biological ability to cope. In 1970, one author called this phenomenon "Future Shock", when culture changes faster than we can personally adapt to it. He wrote of how we're entering a post-industrial age, in which manufacturing employment becomes a minority occupation, like agriculture became a minority occupation. Instead, now most of us work in the knowledge and service industries. Finance, health care, IT, accounting, law, marketing, education, lobbying, security, transportation, hospitality, fundraising, tourism, entertainment, government, research, social influencers LOL.
We cannot even imagine stepping off this massive cultural hyperwave. What are the alternatives? If you are neither working, nor attending to some sort of media, what the fuck are you doing? Can you spend time without engaging with some sort of printed, recorded, manufactured, or transmitted media? What's left? Even the games most of us play are forms of mass media.
What's left? Conversation (unless we're conversing about mass media), contemplation (unless we're thinking about mass media), time outdoors, physical touch, exercise, stretching, cooking, eating, drinking, smoking, fucking. Sleeping.
Is there value to existing outside of the mass?