Consider this book a canvas. My job will be to depict the strange chaotic world that was born with the new millenium and, I feel certain, will remain with us for a little while longer. I’m not a visionary prophesying doom, however, or a scientific wizard forecasting the shape of things to come. I don’t know the future, and I’m pretty sure they don’t either. If I describe the present accurately, I will have achieved my goal.
Very little of what I have to say will be original: maybe only the composition.
If, after all these admissions, you were to ask me why you should read on, I would respond: because the world I’ll describe is probably very different from the one you think you’re living in. The problem is that there are so many superficially dazzling aspects of the information tsunami. When I sit in my study in Vienna, Virginia, and Skype with someone in Beirut, Lebanon—that’s dazzling. It feels remarkable even as I’m doing it. So, naturally enough, attention has focused on the capabilities of digital platforms like Skype, Facebook, and Google, on the proliferation of communication and collaboration around the globe, or on the unprecedented growth in the volume of information. I understand the fascination—my own journey started with these concerns.
But it turns out that fascination with surface glitter has obscured our view to what is transpiring in the depths. There, human beings interact with platforms and information, and are changed by the interaction, and the accumulated changes have shaken and battered established institutions from companies and universities to governments and religions. The view from the depths is of a colossal many-sided conflict, the outcome of which, for good or evil, remains uncertain. In fact, the outcome will largely depend on us. And because we still think in categories forged during the industrial age—liberal and conservative, for example, or professional and amateur—our minds are blind to many of the clashes and casualties of this underground struggle.
MY THESIS
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