Modern Cartography
Into the muddied future we wander, hopeless without webbed feet and a well-filtered Twitter feed. Imagine one of the great philosophers given the gift of these, our vast intertubes. Where would they start? Would Epicurus think, “Hmmm, 10 to the 100th power…perhaps I’ll get lucky with a well-considered Google search!”? Little would he know that his careful punctuation would be filtered from the search results.
Nowadays, we endlessly seek signs of civilized culture, any beacon of thoughtful collective expression through the fog of self-propagating spam. How many times have you thought you found a message board, a content aggregator, a Facebook friend who you could trust to keep the content relevant and useful? How long did that euphoria last? Do you remember when the line started wrapping around the corner and it took ten minutes to find something that didn’t disappoint?
If you’ve settled on one medium for a good length of time, you’ve either struck gold and shouldn’t be tweeting about it, or you’ve found a horde of Galtian brilliance hiding itself to the benefit of the few (a society which inevitably becomes an echo chamber). The higher good has a democratic nature; it has heroes, authors, poets, politicians; a whole community striving—and negotiating—toward their collective excellence. Plato would would assign them all a role, but in today’s ethereal civilizations of bytes, we all wear many hats, contributor and consumer. The rules of influence are fluid, and on the best of days, one only hopes to find respite from the need to develop a well-considered Google search.
And so, a tip of the hat to the Medium founders. While at this point it may be Obvious, I hope this goes well.
