How The Internet Threatens Civilization
As the year 2010 winds to a close, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of technology and how it affects the world. My own background is in high tech, and the high tech world has always tended to view the technology in general, and the Internet in particular, as a Very Good Thing.
My colleagues always see technology as "world-changing" in a positive way. The most common analogy that I've heard over the years about high tech is that "computers are as important as the invention of the printing press."
The assumption, of course, is that the invention of the printing press was a good thing. Unfortunately, the historical record says otherwise, at least in the short term. Far from being a wonderful event, the invention of movable type was the proximate cause of nearly 200 years of violent religious warfare.
A big fuss is always made about the Gutenberg Bible, as if publishing the Bible is obviously a Very Good Thing. In fact, the proliferation of published bibles, particularly in the vernacular, resulted in the fragmentation of the Catholic church and the rise of Protestantism.
Regardless of how you feel about the merits of the theology from both camps, there's no question that the resulting religious wars resulted in death, torture, and destruction on a scale that had not been seen since the later years of the Roman empire.
Few people realize that one of the first "best sellers" after the invention of the press was the "Malleus Maleficarum" (i.e. "The Hammerer of Witches"), a handbook on how to identify and prosecute people believed to be practicing witchcraft.
The wide proliferation of that handbook was responsible for the judicial murder of hundreds of thousands of people. In some cities in Germany, for example, the process of witchhunting spawned the burning of hundreds of men and women every day.
Similarly, today's Internet has become the proximate cause in the proliferation of radical religious ideologies. Groups from Al Qaeda to Christian Identity now use the Internet to spout hatred, fear, misconceptions, and (more importantly) recruit converts and give them instructions on how to kill non-believers.
High tech pundits often seem surprised when confronted with evidence that technology is used in such negative ways. They tend to treat it as an aberration, but if they were familiar with history, they'd realize that it was a foregone conclusion that any medium that "democratizes" communication would empower and engender more fanaticism.
The real reason that we're now in the middle of a global religious war isn't the religions themselves (which co-existed for centuries without much conflict), but the fact that the Internet has allowed the underbelly of religion to metastasize and organize itself.
Back when the printing press spawned the last great era of religious warfare, the most dangerous weapon that fanatics could wield was a siege cannon. While renaissance siege cannons were nothing to be sneezed at (one could throw a rock sphere with a 1 yard diameter the better part of a mile), they're strictly stick and stones compared to what the fanatics might wield now.
Today, various religious nuts are on the edge of having nuclear weapons. And they're nutty enough to use them. What's worse, the Internet is making these folks more stupid by further disconnecting them from tradition and (dare I say it?) reality.
Since we're not going to get rid of the Internet, and there's not the slightest indication that the intellectually weak-minded people of the world are going to give up on their wacked-up belief in the supernatural, we are now in the situation where religious nuclear war is almost inevitable.
Despite the fervent wishes of numerous religious nuts, such a war will NOT bring an apocalypse. It will probably result in numerous deaths in one or two urban regions (most likely in the United States) followed by vast economic upheaval.
Civilization will change, but the world won't end.
Eventually, things will return to the stasis that was enjoyed before. And maybe, over time, a majority of mankind will get wise to the fact that today's religions are neither more nor less sensible than worshiping Zeus and Apollo, and certainly not worth killing people over.
Until then, though, I believe that those of us who understand what's going to happen are going to be better off than those who are in denial and will therefore be caught by surprise.
I've built the likelihood of nuclear religious war into my planning for personal finance, career development, and business model. Have you? Has your company?
These are good questions to ask at the end of the year. Life is precious. Peace is precious. Your friends and family are precious. Your career, your ability to support your children, are too important to gamble, against hope, that the inevitable isn't, well..., inevitable.
Honestly, I'm not trying to be a downer here. It's just that it's my job to look at what's happening in the world and how it relates to business. I'm not gonna get all broken-record on this issue, but I do feel that I have to point out that the thrust of history is going in a pretty dangerous direction.
So have a great new year. Really. Enjoy life. It's too precious to waste in worry.
But when you go back to work on Monday, think about what I've written here and make sure that you'll be around, and making money, and taking care of yourself, your family and your firm, even if the worst happens.
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