entangled thinking

About 500 years ago a new communications technology came along and changed the face of Europe — print. The Protestant Reformation saw the rise of religious wars, which were later followed by the scientific revolution and The Enlightenment. An age of exploration followed, which brought not just gold and silver to the coffers of Europe, but new foods such as potatoes from the Americas, to fuel the Industrial Revolution. These new foods increased the population and in turn brought about the demise of the Indigenous people of the Americas.

Did print help to enable democracy, and is that why the founders of the USA put freedom of the press into their Constitution? If print enabled democracy, will the emerging digital (electric) medium destroy it? Yuval Noah Harari thinks this may be the case, “The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century — the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place — may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.”

However, a connected world is much more than digital networks and includes global transportation technologies that also enable the rapid spread of disease vectors as we have recently seen. During a pandemic too much control leads to filtered information, making it more difficult to quickly react to complex problems at the local level. Authoritarian regimes then are less able to address complex challenges — as we are witnessing with China’s Covid shutdowns at the moment.

Authoritarian regimes can lose the trust of the people when faced with complex decision-making. When trust is lost, knowledge fails to flow, hampering the regime’s ability to react even more. In the long run, will these regimes be forced to become more open because a complex world demands it?

The end of the Print age and the beginning of the Digital age marks the end of The Enlightenment and all the institutions and scientific disciplines it fostered. We are entering The Entanglement.

“As we are becoming more entangled with our technologies, we are also becoming more entangled with each other. The power (physical, political, and social) has shifted from comprehensible hierarchies to less-intelligible networks. We can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the hierarchy of physical space or deliberate design. Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy, and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows.” —The Long Now Foundation 2019-12-26

The idea of The Entanglement is that the world has become so complex and interconnected that the individual disciplines developed during The Enlightenment — like medicine — are no longer adequate to help society in our collective sensemaking, especially during global crises.

“Unlike the Enlightenment, where progress was analytic and came from taking things apart, progress in the Age of Entanglement is synthetic and comes from putting things together. Instead of classifying organisms, we construct them. Instead of discovering new worlds, we create them. And our process of creation is very different.” —Long Live the Entanglement

Networked individuals, outside established hierarchies of institutions and corporations, are the power behind digital media, I noted in my last post — we are on our own. How we move forward is up to us and we need to create new ways of thinking about how to organize and make sense of our world. My small piece in moving forward has been to develop the discipline of personal knowledge mastery so that we can Seek > Sense > Share together.

This post is a summary of ideas from several posts from 2019-2021, and continues my entangled thinking.