To this list

Research has shown that group-based decision-making is responsible for complex behavior such as resource allocation. In a study where 50 cockroaches were placed in a dish with three shelters with a capacity for 40 insects in each, the insects arranged themselves in two shelters with 25 insects in each, leaving the third shelter empty. When the capacity of the shelters was increased to more than 50 insects per shelter, all of the cockroaches arranged themselves in one shelter. Researchers found a balance between cooperation and competition exists in the group decision-making behavior found in cockroaches. The models used in this research can also explain the group dynamics of other insects and animals.

Perhaps due to Godin’s didactic presentation of his musings as “truths” to live by, I had the nagging thought that reality was fast becoming a programmer’s world. That Godin can talk in such fashion, assuming such high authority as to assume a do-this do-that tone hints at the growing clout of tech designers. They now have stake and claim over commentary about reality(s), about the way we live our lives. Just a few decades ago programmers sat in front of their monitors, a silent minority. Today, they are in forum panels rubbing shoulders with social scientists, and military strategists and financial analysts who once dominated that exalted position called “expertise”. Among their ranks, too, are a new breed of dissident “hacktivists” gaining more clout, and sticking it to the Man in ways unprecedented.

Of course, as technology becomes ever more central to our lives, this should come as no surprise. Once quiet touch typing creatures of the night have become public speakers in forums of import, dressed in smart suits and looking like experts. The transformation of what was once at its most benign a pastime for shy awkward youths or at the other extreme shady illicit activity as packaged in the pop culture of barely two decades ago into a field of science and, some would argue, art, programming and related tech things slash stuff slash activities is admittedly to be expected from Foucault’s view of the typical character of the modern world. There may, however, be a fundamental difference between the psychologist speaking as an expert in a court trial versus a programmer. The latter is a creator more than the former. I think Rushkoff had it right when he said that programmers are in fact the new masons who will and are (re)building the world. But as the virtual and the real becomes an increasingly false dichotomy, it takes only a paranoid mind to marvel at all the potential dehumanizing possibilities of the future.

For now we reassure ourselves with our control over the off switch. It’s fairly easy though to imagine a world that fully merges with the virtual so that the only way to switch off technology would be not to live. And I do wonder whether the (re)built reality(s) will be the naysayer’s dehumanized future, or can it be more human(e)?