Tag: community

How the Internet is Like Language

The power went out, and with it the WiFi, for four hours the other day while a pole was being replaced and again for an hour today while the A/C was being fixed.  It was almost overwhelming how lonely and isolating it felt.

Before you think me too dramatic let me say that we’re currently in a rental house in Ecuador, in a neighborhood that still consists primarily of empty lots or newly constructed but not yet occupied houses and we’re 45 minutes from the nearest city and without a car at the moment.  None of these things feel isolating when the internet is working.  (As an aside, the WiFi here is better than the best I can get back in South Carolina.)

It’s not that I spend all day on the web.  The bulk of my work requires internet and I do use it heavily, but there are many hours every day where I’m reading, exercising, playing with my kids, eating, preparing food, sleeping, or just relaxing when I do not use the internet.  One would think a few hours without WiFi would simply let me switch to one of these activities with no mental stress.  But it didn’t work that way.

The minute it went down I felt trapped in a desolate place, separated from the world.  Not because I wanted to do something specifically requiring the internet at that moment, but because I didn’t have the option.

WiFi provides a kind of invisible psychological ether that connects me to all of humanity.  Just knowing it’s there, at the tip of my fingers through my smartphone, gives me a profound spiritual sense of connection to all mankind and to great ideas and facts and images and more.  It is the subtle substrate that makes me always a part of a network or community, even when I’m quietly reading or sleeping.

In Ecuador we’ve had experiences where we were nearly incapable of communication with the other humans around us due to my deficiency in Spanish and some Ecuadorians rapid speech.  In our current neighborhood there are many French Canadian expats who speak not a word of anything but French.  At times a feeling of fear and disconnection can sweep over you when you realize you cannot share ideas with any of the people around you.  What if you need something?  What if you just want to chat and aren’t up to the exhausting task of sign-language and hackneyed Spenchglish?  You’re stuck on a (metaphorical) island, surrounded by people but without any connective tissue.

The parallels between these experiences are striking.  Geographic proximity and physical presence do not connect us with our world.  Information and a means of exchanging it do.  That is the task language performs.  The internet performs it even better.  It can instantly translate between languages, among its other wonders.  The web is like a performance enhancing drug for language.  It exponentially increases the idea sharing power of words.

This silly idea that the internet and social media have somehow severed human connections or weakened community is an absurdity espoused by those blind to the world around them.  It’s no less ridiculous than claiming, “People used to really connect before language was invented.  Now all they do is constantly stream ideas back and forth with sound waves.”

It’s not even the speaking or web browsing.  It’s knowing you can.  What a powerful connective web for the human race.

A Citizen by Choice

This excellent post by Jeff Tucker over at Laissez Faire Books got me thinking about citizenship.  Per Jeff’s suggestion, I visited Tweetping.net and sat mesmerized as I watched communities grow across the globe, irrespective of arbitrary government borders.

Odd isn’t it; we’re born into citizenship of counties, states, and countries, which are little more than organized crime gangs with layers of bureaucracy, and we are supposed to feel allegiance to these.  Yet everywhere you turn, people are constantly joining myriad associations to get the benefits, both practical and sentimental, that state citizenship is supposed to confer.  States are an anachronism, and more so every day.  Exist costs and lack of alternatives have long been the primary reasons states maintain as many citizens as they do.  Technology is smashing both barriers.

Now you can exit the state and become the citizen of a place that meets your needs and provides a voluntary community far superior.  Most people today have overlapping citizenship in dozens of digital commercial and social jurisdictions.  You can join a better community from right where you are.  Technology has not (yet) provided a way to completely opt out of states, at least without significant risk of being pursued by armed agents, but it offers alternatives to services supposedly only states can provide, including intangible things like a sense of community.  This is exciting.

When states lose the power of patriotism we can see them more clearly for what they are: violent, inefficient and corrupt monopolizers who force us to use services of inferior quality and make us pay even if we don’t.  When state operatives have a harder time winning affection by appealing to the “us vs. them” mindset in citizens because citizens are a part of so many “us’s” and with stronger bonds than they have with the state, the edifice begins to crumble.

Far from being atomistic, critics of the state desire a world of strong and genuine social bonds.  They know the truest of such bonds are forged by cooperation not force; by choice not dictate; by mutual interest not lines on a map.  The more ties formed voluntarily, the weaker the chains of the state.

Some bureau somewhere considers me a citizen of Mount Pleasant, and South Carolina, and the United States.  They take some of my money because of it.  Whatever they need to tell themselves to feel better.  I consider myself a citizen of Amazon Prime, Facebook, Visa, The Institute for Humane Studies, my church, Netflix, Google, Twitter, LFBC, The Hartford Insurance, home school associations, etc. etc. and on and on.  I joined each of these entities to meet specific needs.  Some offer valuable services.  Some offer education.  Some offer security and protection.  Some offer comradery.  Some offer many things at once, while some offer only one.  I have different levels of love and loyalty for each, but all of them render something that terrifies states because they can never offer it: choice.