#134

#134

COMMUNITIES FORMING AROUND INDIVIDUALS MAY BE AN ILLUSION

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

C

ommunity is more than an illusion.

The individual controls the day, although without the community that day would be singularly minimalistic – perhaps even blindly boring.

The community is a bit of an illusion, no doubt, selling top tier living when not everyone can ever reach that threshold of success – not in one lifetime anyway. The entire capitalist system requires obedience to the reality that only the few get rich, while everyone else must pay their way. For many people, success is something only their children will achieve after their parents made the sacrifices of a lifetime.

The community though still provides more than would be achieved than without the community. Once individuals gather and start to coordinate activities, a community has a benefit.

And a community will often form to improve what already exists.

Humanity has a social sentient that compels people to want to belong. And this longing to belong to something greater results in the need to share.

But sharing can sometimes be destructive. The lineups to the football stadium are tedious at times. Waiting for concessions can be excruciating.

Individuals not only share the stadium on their leisure time, but they share the commute to work with many other individuals, and thereby make that journey as miserable as possible – just based on the sheer volume of vehicles on the road.

Community brings the world wonderful joy of peace and also the horrible miseries of war, often in equal parts that cancel out the day from history without any positive net gains to civilization.

One community will set you in chains, and another community will set you free.

Once tied to the soil beneath their feet, humanity transcended subsistence living and progressed more toward greater prosperity for more people as economies became industrialized.

Life became easier, no doubt.

The food supply chain for example exist in relative terms, initially with a loose collection of individual farming families helping each other out and taking produce to market to share with the larger urban community. And the community may provide an even wider market outside of the transportation hub.

To serve a table of five or a community of hundreds or a nation of five billion fastfood junkies takes humanity from isolated individualism to global economics.

The food industry, though, cannot get that much ground beef to all the burger joints all around the world without a bit of government massaging of the logistics chain. The just in time distribution takes a lot of effort, a lot of deal making, a lot of cooperation and a lot of infrastructure for making the transportation of goods economical.

Not anytime soon will corporations be teleporting merchandise – although Amazon runs the illusion to on-line customers of doing so already.

A love for a burger is not the only characteristic shared within society. Communities form by people sharing significant characteristics in common, and if they don’t share a bit of commonality, the community will find something in common for them to share.

Community members do not just share a parking garage near work but they also share the perception that everything is fine with living and dying in the commute. The virtual workplace being built is still a ways away into the future, especially for factory workers who have a physical job.

Moreover, virtual communities may have an easier, less resistant path to forming, but the authenticity of the other party members may always be in question. Is he a bot or is he not a bot?

Billionaires signing a morality accord about the development of “artificial intelligence”  between themselves like one big, happy community of the ultra rich – the details to be discussed at a later date in private – was a Trumpian spin doctor move designed to stymie the growing hysteria about artificial intelligence uncontrollably hacking into the water supply or into the power supply or turning all the deep fryers so high as to take all the luxury out of drive-thru dining.

The e-universe is forming in parallel to the brutal reality of the ultra rich currently driving the have-nots against the haves, and everyone being weaponized with questionable “artificial intelligence.”

Everything can still go wrong, even now that they have the added edge of rebranding to “superintelligence”.

And, the fall-out of the only board-certified professionals losing jobs left and right, may only be tallied in the near distant future, after all the lights have been turned out, and the rivers having been run dry by the needy data centres.

The theory of the tech giants agreeing to do what is considered morally correct to a “bot” mentality, after having created the e-universe with algorithmic curation, is just as fantastical an incongruency as the coexistence of click farms and viewer feedback for the benefit of dining on a hot curry.