The Disconnected Society

Our technologies are disconnecting us from a shared, stable reality. That puts us at risk.

Recently, Puffin Books announced that they had posthumously redacted the classic books of Roald Dahl to align with current networked speech standards. The news was unsettling due to the following factors:

1. The networked swarm had opened another front in its war to align everything and everyone with their synthetic values.

2. The swarm, despite online outrage, would get away with it (they did, the company’s only concession was that they would keep the classic book in print).

3. Classic books, one of the few remaining bastions of permanence in our world, were now being redacted.

Of the three, the last reason was the most unsettling. Here’s why. For millennia, we’ve built technologies to help us better communicate with each other. Until recently, nearly all these technologies have allowed us to create a shared, objective reality. A reality that adds permanence, resilience, and cohesion to our society.