America's Facebook Generation Shows A Submission To

I'm An Advocate Of Human Nature.

At A Minimum If We Can Just Have Enough Distribution Of Clout In Society So It Isn't Run By A Tiny Minority, Then At The Very Least It Gives Us Some Room To Breathe.

A Fashionable Idea In Technical Circles Is That Quantity Not Only Turns Into Quality At Some Extreme Of Scale, But Also Does So According To Principles We Already Understand. Some Of My Colleagues Think A Million, Or Perhaps A Billion, Fragmentary Insults Will Eventually Yield Wisdom That Surpasses That Of Any Well-thought-out Essay, So Long As Sophisticated Secret Statistical Algorithms Recombine The Fragments. I Disagree. A Trope From The Early Days Of Computer Science Comes To Mind: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Individual Web Pages As They First Appeared In The Early 1990s Had The Flavour Of Person-hood. Myspace Preserved Some Of That Flavour, Though A Process Of Regularized Formatting Had Begun. Facebook Went Further, Organizing People Into Multiple-choice Identities While Wikipedia Seeks To Erase Point Of View Entirely. If A Church Or Government Were Doing These Things, It Would Feel Authoritarian, But When Technologists Are The Culprits, We Seem Hip, Fresh, And Inventive. People Accept Ideas Presented In Technological Form That Would Be Abhorrent In Any Other Forms

External Reality Is Sort Of An Affectation Of The Nervous System.