We are living amidst a grand experiment. Everywhere you look around you people are working/involved with each other, some even spend their whole lives entrenched within a single organization. We have become engaged in such a way that as a result we often strengthen our mutual bond with each other through work in exchange for money. These are jobs, they are part of the grand experiment. Many individuals not only have jobs, they have jobs because of their ability to, shall we say, interact with the grand experiment. To put simply, geeks got skills others don’t, they have their skills in spite of their jobs, and have their jobs because of their skills. So looking at the grand experiment like a map we see most people are probably doing things very similar to each other for work, and thus likely are adhering to very similar systems of adherence to the grand experiment. They have ordinary jobs which do not require extraordinary talents, their jobs are in spite of their skills. These are normal people.

Then you have special people, explorers of the map of our grand experiment, renegotiating agreements to their terms, or at least appearing to plot out new ways to work/involve people with each other. Some go so far as to say ‘no I don’t wan’t want anything to do with manual labor, but yes I’ll work with my mind if you pay me well enough’. These are programmers who spend sleepless nights exploring, just need enough money to get back to experimenting, brainstorming. Exploration is a massive endeavor, all of us likely participating, on some level, if not on such a grand level as the hacker might, transforming the way we communicate with a stroke of the keyboard.

Explorer types of people are striking a new balance, or you might say, a new deal, with other people. Explorers might be described as people who think of a new exchange that people will accept and then set about making such a thing that other people might like to use in their thinking. It’s like hackers are meta-hacking. On one level, they are inventing new ways to connect stuff and ideas. On another level they are saying ‘no I don’t want to live a normal life at all, really I want to do my own thing’.

I am trying to point out the choice we make joining society — we keep making it over and over our whole lives… so it must be a good choice to make? Is it really even a choice? What does it even mean to claim this question meaningful? What have we done with our words already in this sentence that precludes other possibilities? We must have a pretty good explanation, because what’s the odds that something so ordinary not being something we can answer readily? You can of course keep peeling back layers of meaning until…what have you got left? ‘joining’ or ‘not joining’ society could mean all sorts of things, but whichever way you phrase it I bet we can come up with some rationale for our choices to buy cars, shop at Wal-Mart, live in houses, etc. etc. Of course we’ve got an answer, obviously. Something like Society rules, or, your wife wouldn’t like you droping out, or, life is tedious, friends make it better, and friends live in society. And of course, I can imagine a psychologist saying something like, yes, life is tedious at times, but that doesn’t mean one should seriously consider quitting. The quack could calmly and collectively let us know what it is we thinkg we are talking about, what the hell that actually means, and we can go home to sleep unconcerned. Perhaps I could just as easily find the answer in the back of a Vogue magazine, or perhaps Muscle Car magazine? Everyone I know, pretty much, has an agreement with society at least a little bit. hat’s really at stake here?

Consider those of us, explorers brave and powerful, that have braved the far extremes of systems of science, reason, philosophy, math, etc, gained profound insight into systems and metrics. By the power of our thinking we have constructed machines for our minds to use. Valuable thinking machines. Companies, no shocker hire us, put us together, and tell us to ‘explore’ on their terms. And since joining enclaves of peers does not sound altogether like a bad idea, many of us go resignedly to our collective fates, some still asking, but am I willing to let my values get filtered through the corporate bandwidth?

And those younger, less attached, free to wander through whatever MySQL dictionary we find fascinating, perhaps maybe on our way to our more grand ambitious idea, or just a new kind of fart app (but that’s actually as intelligible to use as Siri, if you’re the mental equivalent of a four year old). They too, are part of this grand expirement part of the design.