Hard Forking Reality (Part 2): Communication and Complexity

This post is the second in a three-part series. You can also read Part 1 and Part 3.

There was once a time, even within living memory, in which interpersonal conflicts among strangers in liberal societies were sometimes solved by rational communication. By “rational,” I only mean deliberate attempts to arrive at some conscious, stable modus vivendi; purposeful communicative effort to tame the potentially explosive tendencies of incommensurate worldviews, using communal technologies such as the conciliatory handshake or the long talk over a drink, and other modern descendants of the ancestral campfire. Whenever the extreme environmental complexities of modern society can be reduced sufficiently, through the expensive and difficult work of genuine communication (and its behavioral conventions, e.g., good faith, charitable interpretations, the right to define words, the agreement to bracket secondary issues, etc.), it is possible for even modern strangers to maintain one shared source code over vast distances. If Benedict Anderson is correct, modern nationalism is a function of print technology; in our language, print technology expanded the potential geographical range for a vast number of people to operate on one shared code repository.

Let’s consider more carefully the equation of variables that make this kind of system possible. To simplify, let’s say the ability to solve a random conflict between two strangers is equal to their shared store of social capital (trust and already shared reference points) divided by the contextual complexity of their situation. The more trust and shared reference points you can presume to exist between you, the cheaper and easier it is to arrive at a negotiated, rational solution to any interpersonal problem. But the facilitating effect of these variables is relative to the number and intensity of the various uncertainties relevant to the context of the situation. If you and I know each other really well, and have a store of trust and shared worldview, we might be able to deal with nearly any conflict over a good one-hour talk (alcohol might be necessary). If we don’t have that social capital, maybe it would take 6 hours and 4 beers, for the exact same conflict situation. Given that the more pressing demands of life generally max-out our capacities, we might just never have 6 hours to spare for this purpose. In which case, we would simply part ways as vague enemies (exit instead of voice). Or, consider a case where we do have that social capital, but now we observe an increase in the numerator (complexity); to give only a few examples representative of postwar social change, perhaps the company I worked for my entire life just announced a series of layoffs, because some hardly comprehensible start-up is rapidly undermining the very premises of my once invincible corporation; or a bunch of new people just moved into the neighborhood, or I just bought a new machine that lets my peers observe what I say and do. All of these represent exogenous shocks of environmental complexity. What exactly are the pros and cons of saying or doing anything, who exactly is worth my time and who is not — these simple questions suddenly exceed our computational resources (although they will overheat some CPUs before other CPUs, an important point we return to below.) This complexity is a tax on the capacity for human beings to solve social problems through old-fashioned interpersonal communication (i.e. at all, without overt violence or the sublimated violence of manipulation, exploitation, etc.).

Notice also that old-fashioned rational dialogue is recursive in the sense that one dose increases the probability of another dose, which means small groups are able to bootstrap themselves into relative stability quite quickly (with a lot of talking). But it also means that when breakdown occurs, even great stores of social capital built over decades might very well collapse to zero in a few years. If something decreases the probability of direct interpersonal problem-solving by 10% at time t1, at time t2 the same exogenous shock might decrease that probability by 15%, cutting loose runaway dynamics of social disintegration.

It is possible that liberal modernity was a short-lived sweetspot in the rise of human technological power. In some times and places, increasing technological proficiency may enable rationally productive dialogue relative to a previous baseline of regular warfare and conflict. But at a certain threshold, all of these individually desirable institutional achievements enabled by rational dialogue constitute a catastrophically complex background environment. At a certain threshold, this complexity makes it strictly impossible for what we call Reality (implicitly shared and unified) to continue. For the overwhelming majority of 1-1 dialogues possible over the global or even national social graph, the soft-forking dynamics implicit in the maintenance of one shared source code become impossibly costly. Hard forks of reality are comparatively much cheaper, with extraordinary upside for early adopters, and they have never been so easy to maintain against exogenous shocks from the outside. Of course, the notion of hard-forking reality assumes a great human ability to engineer functional systems in the face of great global complexity — an assumption warranted only rarely in the human species, unfortunately.

Part 3 will explore in greater detail the cognitive conditionality of reality-forking dynamics.

This post is the second in a three-part series. You can also read Part 1 and Part 3.