Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
–E. M. Forster
Back in the 90’s, the nerds exultant over the Internet, in zines like 2600 and Mondo 2000, saw a utopia ahead. They saw a future of equality through anonymity, of direct democracy, and empathy via a wire into the home of everyone on Earth.
In retrospect, from 2017, it’s easy to say that they were wrong. They were certainly naïve. The Internet, a tool originally built to purpose to decentralize communication, in an inspired fever-dream of the cold war, has succeeded in that goal — shattering hierarchies of dissemination, disrupting traditional structures in our society.
Disruption, is an understatement. Like if the captain came on the intercom after that guy was dragged off the plane and said, “CRRRK!– sorry for the disruption, folks. Well… we’re about to get underway here…” But it was because someone recorded the assault on a smart phone and then had the means to distribute it to the whole world via this network, that changes could be made to make flying less miserable…. OK. Bad example. But maybe not so for police shootings recorded. Or for a small Silicon Valley ride-hailing company to crash the equity in the New York City Taxi medallion. Or the ability of a small group of people in one country to stoke already divisive debate in another during the run up to its national election.
Or the way that the Internet’s enabled people to group themselves, rather than merely by geography, by nearly everything else — shared interest, history, identity — and in so doing strengthen their beliefs and identities. For good and for ill we’re creating new communities and new realities online — neo-nazis and citizen scientists, enlightened discussions on government and worm holes of conspiracy. The technology gives us more of what we want, keeping us on the platforms to show us ads, learning our apparent likes and feeding it to us. We’re hard wired for it, like with salt, sugar and fat, mice compulsively hitting the lever. Junkfood for the mind.
But not all of it, not the desire. People still meet online, people date, and find love, or they don’t. They organize meetings, birthday parties, and revolutions online. They glimpse other lands and book flights to them. We only want to connect. Because we need to see ourselves in other people and them in us. As when we travel, and catch a spark of recognition in someone so otherwise foreign, we crack open the door to empathy.
I believe that the Internet utopians had it right, at least in spirit. We have a machine that we can use to gain empathy for others, for anyone on Earth. And as we’re constructing new communities and identities, we seem to be losing old ones, and that’s scary. But if we can just peer into one-another’s bubbles, as we so want to, maybe even shout in a Hullo!, we might just lessen that fear, and live in fragments no longer.
