Neomedieval Invisible Colleges of the Present and Future Digital Age
Discussion
Alice Maz:
"There are three classes of people who will be able to navigate the electronic age. Some will become hardened to everything, impassive rocks in a raging ocean. They will check out and focus on other things like work, family, hobbies, or pet interests where they can thoroughly vet everything they consume. Others will be captured by ideas that are relatively benign, establishing a mutualistic relationship where these memeplexes rely on them to spread but protect them from more insidious ones. And finally, some people, with a deep sense of their core values, along with mission and purpose, will seek each other out and organize on the basis of their shared vision of reality to accomplish great things.
This is very much similar to the medieval situation, with an added layer of self-awareness. While the peasantry was checked out because they had no stake in their society, the information-immune will check out as a defensive measure, and be unable to meaningfully participate in it, except possibly as members of craft guilds who keep to themselves except when selling to market. This is not necessarily a bad thing, considering the history of mass politics. As long as they can be provided for, and in exchange made economically useful, this is an acceptable arrangement for both sides.
The benignly infected will be fervent monks, and some enlightened laity. And if we assume going insane has a negative effect on your ability to live a good and healthy life, eventually the benign beliefs will outcompete the destructive ones, in the same way that a virus which quickly kills its host cannot spread. These people will develop heuristics for staying grounded and content in a hostile world, and after some generations arrive at a process to cultivate those beliefs and transmit them to their children. This will form the basis of future world religions, whether they evolve from present ones or are invented de novo. Practitioners in our lifetimes will look like wild mystics, but the core principles they discover will later have their esoteric practices sanded off to be made safe for public consumption. It will only be possible to distinguish the benign from the malignant in hindsight.
Those who gather and organize to inscribe their visions on the world will form the bedrock of new societies. They will be united by shared worldviews in much the same way as nation-states once were, but they will come from across the globe and choose their affiliations for themselves. This mechanism is fully robust against the breakdown of consensus reality, because for them, is no consensus to enforce. It is entered into willingly, with full knowledge of alternatives, and as a result will enable even smoother coordination than the era of mass politics, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Much like the monks, their associations will be cults, but less like esoteric religions and more like secret societies or fraternal organizations. The best of them will cut across professions, forming microcosmic societies that interface with the broader world in a radically different way from how they deal with each other internally. With superior networks, shared purpose, and implicit trust, they will be able to amass class resources; though their membership may come from any economic stratum, they will be able to raise up their poorer members and cultivate shared prosperity.
Eventually it will be members of these groups that build the platforms that filter and guide information, merely to automate their own preferences and offload work to the machines. Someday those platforms will be pointed at the masses, first to guide and protect them, but eventually to yoke them, and entrench a superior class in power that it no longer deserves to wield."
(https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/neomedievalism-and-transnational)