Jordan Hall on How Ephemeralization through Digitalization Is Creating a Post-Urban Civilization

Discussion

Jordan Hall:

"The innovation of the printing press massively increased the communicative capacity of Western civilization and radically rebalanced the psychocultural sensibility of the West. But, even then, the majority of communication was face to face and the center of collaboration was grounded in physical proximity.

Until recently.

My third thesis: the invention and development of “the digital” brings an end to the cultural logic of the city that has been driving civilization since the beginning. We are now exiting the epoch of the city and entering the epoch of a new relationship. The civium.

From city to civium

Let’s take a moment to examine the nature of “the digital.” When Andreeson pointed out that “software is eating the world,” he wasn’t kidding around. Digital represents the absolute essence of ‘mediation’. Consider: writing mediates some aspects of language while the telephone mediates other aspects. The telegraph still others. A photograph mediates some aspects of image, a moving picture still others. But digital can (and does) perform *all* of these functions. Digital can express any particular form of mediation.

What this means is that this notion of the ephemeralization of communication will reach its ultimate extension somewhere in the domain of the digital. Barring a significant social collapse of our technological civilization (which is entirely plausible!) it is just a matter of time. The helter skelter endeavor to solve the problem of how to get more and more people into communication by means of innovation and wealth finds its end point somewhere in the digital.

And if the power of superlinear scaling is as I suggest, then the driver moving the history of civilization will continue to do its work. But, with the center of superlinear scaling moved from the physical to the virtual, the balance of power between these two regimes will begin to shift. While the territorial powers will do their best to hold onto their populations, and may succeed for quite some time, ultimately the dynamo of superlinear scaling will subordinate them, just as the city subordinated the indigenous modes of humanity that preceded it.

In the end, this attractor will seek to bring everyone into a single “network”. But, instead of a giant megalopolis, the forces of superlinear scaling will turn their attentions towards the formation of a planetary network connecting, in principle, all minds.

The story of this planetary network, the dangers it poses, and the diverse forces that will govern its shape and trajectory is interesting, but will have to wait for another telling. The point of focus for this essay is that the shift we are witnessing portends a tremendous change in the winds for our physical lives.

For one thing, the city (as we know it) will begin to fade from the earth. With wealth and innovation increasingly found in the virtual, rather than in the urban, those people who are most lightly connected to the city will begin to go elsewhere. And this produces a feedback loop in the opposite direction: as the population of cities *decrease* their wealth and innovation also will decrease — superlinearly.

We might expect this to produce a series of interlocking feedback loops that could accelerate the evaporation of cities. What took thousands of years to create might fade in centuries or even generations.

Of course as people leave cities, they will go somewhere. But where? My thesis is that with the superlinear scaling attractor no longer driving people into cities, the new dominant attractor will become the oldest dominant attractor: we will begin to return to wholesome, human-scale, ‘indigenous’ contexts.

As the earliest pioneers of this new world leave cities in search of a new way of living together, they will begin to congregate around places guided by deep values. Values that guided human choice for hundreds of thousands of years and which have been subordinated by the logic of urbanization for only a brief (ten thousand year) moment.

Liberated from the allure of the city we might expect people to be naturally attracted to places that are physically beautiful, that are safe and clean. Places that are rich in community and make raising a family as easy as it can be. Where meaningful life is most fully supported.

In most cases, of course, we will have to re-build these kinds of places. In most cases, in fact, we will need to re-learn how to live in this way.

Civium is the name that I am giving to a hypothesis: that the most powerful form of network is a properly architected planetary virtual network populated by wholesome, healthy humans who are in intimate relationship with place and each-other.

(https://medium.com/@jordangreenhall/from-city-to-civium-5838e0cdfe31)