I'm glad you present your thoughts in chunks the way you do, as this makes them easier to comprehend and lessens fatigue. I should do more of that myself. I don't know that I even see as much significance in some of what I say as you do, but thanks for so patiently considering each bit. I probably can't repay the favor, tending toward a more general response rather than one guided by quotation from you.
A few things I seem to pick up:
You think I may be miscontruing Bloom in Global Brain. Very possbily, as I've not read much of his book. I cherry-picked one quotation, about having a computer read the dliatation in our pupils and then go crawling the web to buy stuff for us. Okay, this might not be typical of Bloom, but I do very strongly not want to participate in that kind of consumersim, and I hope I will continue to have the choice not to.
You see, values inevitably will come into play, and that might be what I should have said. It is definitely not that interconnectivity is bad or good in itself, but as I think you said that humans have the freedom to put it to good or bad uses. But this is not just a stark matter of legal vs. illegal as you seem to say, but of what kind of interaction we most value or esteem most highly. It is not true that I see anything negative about interconnectivity, but I do see a negative in a world in which people move farther away from warm or actual relations with each other. That would be a behavioral shift that would also impact the degree to which people have the time of inclination to care about one another, in real time through flesh and blood. There will always be a blowback ( a word you use) from anything that has the ability to move us forward on a given The wise thing is then to minimize loss or blowback.
I hear about a "slow media" movement, where some people have decided to go back to letter writing and unplug. They're reacting to a sense of loss of intimacy or immediacy or experience as we always used think of it, I think.
With the quote from Machiavelli and your feeling that I 'm harboring a negative about interconnectivity, could it be conservatism you're sensing? Because in a philosophical--but not a political--sense, I am conservative. I do think that there are enduring facts about our nature that we ignore at our peril. One of these is that we evolved as creatures needing intimate or at least truly personal contact. Another would be that there is not a substitute for the family as the very core of society. I don't think people are more inherently evil than good, but I believe we will always reflect a mixture of good and bad.
Your proposal to answer the questions of whether or not we are less empahtetic today and also better off thanks to capitalism is ambitious, probably impossibly ambitious. Because of the multiple points of view needing to be considered, how would we decide what we mean by "we"? How would we take into account the ebb and flow of different civilizations?
I don't see what my false viewpoint is, Joe (although part of your point is that I may be blind to it). I don't see any attraction or find any resonance in the Machievelli you quote.I may be wrong here but my guess is that you are harboring a false viewpoint that has been unwelcome in your natural way of perceiving life. I can call this viewpoint the Machiavelli syndrome. People who profit from you having this viewpoint are people who have this viewpoint, people who own it. If you have this viewpoint and you don’t see it, it may be very difficult to divorce yourself from it. It may be impossible.
And I seem to see you insisting on a good/bad or yes/no verdict on interconnectivity, and I don't see this as possible.
That is sketchy compared to your own post, but it's as far as I'll take things at this point. Thank you for reading.
DWill
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