Capturing Capture
Over the course of history, additions to our stock of knowledge have been incremental. Steady little by little additions. However, at some point, after the dark ages, we had a knowledge explosion that gave birth to the renaissance which gave us the enlightenment. Not only was knowledge involved. There was technology. There was culture.
The enlightenment gave the Industrial Revolution. I consider this period the inflection point in our technological history. This is point where we developed the tools to enhance our cumulative knowledge and technical know-how at a never-before seen scale. This scale gave us a new culture, we could nominally call it mass consumption. What we have today is the culmination and accumulation of knowledge, technology and culture on a grand scale.
This is how i see it:
1. Knowledge (controlling for the abstract stage of ideas) is what works, with positive or negative feed-backs. The feed-back loops necessitates variation and selection (pruning).
2. Technology is the tool(s) through which knowledge is enhanced and put to practice.
3. Culture is what scales knowledge. Culture will always need technology to scale knowledge. Any culture that has knowledge without technology (tools to put it to practice) will only remain in the fringe.
When knowledge or a way of doing scales, it becomes culture, and sometimes the technology is as simple as storytelling. Or imitation. In essence, dominant cultures have necessarily or inherently gone through variation and selection. Any culture that has not gone through this process (variation and selection) is just a passing fad or what biologists call memes and can never be dominant.
Once this kind of culture emerges, it can yield new forms of knowledge, which informs a new kind of technology and further enrich our culture. Human sociality is a cognitive technology that is innate and created by evolution. The limits of these innate cognitive capacity is what social technologies are excellent at. Not only are today’s social technologies scaling knowledge via culture, they are also scaling culture wholesale via culture.
The Economics of Culture
Don Boudreaux in this article noted that “an economy is largely the result of many small innovations, each of which is not very significant but the massive accumulation of which produces our unprecedented modern prosperity”.
Lately, we have become mass consumers/producers of culture. My contribution to Medium with this post is insignificant in the grand scheme of things, much like my contributions to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Wikipedia and others, but the effort I have expended to write the post is not insignificant to me. This matters because of the intricacies of the technology, my attention and compulsions. We have a mind that thrives on information in a way that commoditizes attention. So with social technologies, rather than hoard my attention, my cognitive social endowments given enough time would compel me to contribute instead — after all it is what others are doing. This partly explains our data-for-cash sentiments.
Boudreaux argues in the same article that people are objectively better off than they feel. This is curious for the arguments about facts and feelings. While it is true that the average Joe of today is relatively better than a royal of yester years, people also know that relative to the outcome, they are not being adequately compensated for a common pool they have helped to create.
Feelings of injustice fueling the culture war are not new but what explains the outrage explosion? Social media and its tendency to magnify any and all kinds of idea.
What social technologies have done is to capture the culture by allowing massive accumulation of small, not very significant contributions/inputs/ideas and use it create wealth. People have come to treat social media platforms like a commons of culture. It is a place we just go to be. This is understandable given the consumers and producers of culture on these platforms are one and the same. That is, demand and supply are not subsets of a universal set, they are all one and the same (demand set = supply set = universal set) governed by the same set of rules. This system of demand and supply and rules is the closest thing to a true egalitarian system we have today. The only other period we had it was during our hunter-gatherer years which is why our feelings today (as observed on social media) mimics that of the period.
Note that for most our history, which was spent as hunter-gatherers, we have always treated nature as a commons. When a need arises, we take from nature. Not until the Neolithic revolution did we plug into the supply system (mediating between demand and nature) to create more. This is a relatively short period in our evolutionary history which means our hunter-gatherer norms are still within our cognitive reach. So, essentially, social media is fueling our forager norms. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen. For all its flaws, social media remains egalitarian and the angst towards the tech industry remains objectively questionable.
