Here’s a thought for the day: in 1439 (or thereabouts) Gutenberg introduced the printing press. It made everyman a reader for the first time in history. Prior to that, in the western world especially, the act of reading and writing was not necessary to living one’s life, most cultures on earth lived by oral tradition and these special esoteric arts were kept secret and passed down mostly along the religious orders where power was concentrated. The monks and priests were the keepers of all knowledge and utilized it, with the reigning monarchs, to hold onto power in a top-down hierarchy to keep the masses in order. This is not a dissimilar scenario in Vedic and Eastern cultures, religion and power were equally co-concentrated.

Gutenberg’s disruption spawned two movements that realigned the face of culture forever: one was the Renaissance and the other was the Reformation.

With the Renaissance, western epistemology was now cracked wide open and not only made available but subject to revision by everyone. The horizons of every individual were broadened beyond their eyelids and own individual labor. The world became large for the first time in human history: there was now a visible past that spurred speculation of the future and the rush of thinking, invention, philosophy and commerce changed the world. It was the blossoming of humankind.

But the Reformation had the most immediate and consequential effect. It broke the hegemony of the Church and busted up the power hierarchy by pulling their God out of the hands of a few and placing him in the hands of the many. You no longer had to gather at a communal focal point to receive its message and blessings through the hands of the chosen select, a place where they could continue to exercise power as well. Consequently, the influence of those that held that power was diminished and when a disruption is this severe it spurs a defense. And so the wars of the Reformation lasted close to 100 years and with it realigned power, land, titles, holdings and creeds. It fragmented society into broad camps, into larger tribes now held together not by their relationship to a monarch or title, but by a common bond of thought in how one relates to the supernatural. “I think this way and you think that way and that’s where our fences are built”. Where the promise of the Renaissance would bring us together, the factionalism of the Reformation kept us apart.

In the 1980s (or thereabout), we created the Internet, the 2nd great disruptor after Gutenberg. Now, everyman is an encyclopedia, a single container of the world’s knowledge, a holder of individual epistemology that can be arranged and re-arranged as fits that person’s needs. There is now no longer a need for communal affirmation and with that, no space for communal regulation: “I, alone, make the decision what reality is and what it is to become. I, alone, interpret history and I alone create the future. I am bonded to you only by your affirmation of my reality. And that can change at any time.”

The individualism that was curried by the Renaissance but also created the factionalism of the Reformation has now been hyper-realized. The Renaissance created the friction of the “marketplace of ideas”, where human progress was spurred by a Darwinian competition of competing ideas with a common good. It recaptured the ancient Greek notions of beauty for the sake of itself, allowing art to flow. The Reformation huddled us into ideological camps, constricted creativity as it pressed it into service to whichever ideology it served. Both of these movements took place simultaneously and over hundreds of years.

And so the internet carries the same twin competing forces but in virtual time with no obligation to chronology. Its ability to unite us and its ability to fractionalize us are being carried out simultaneously, but this time globally and at a speed that our primitive brains are unable to comprehend. It has favored our individualism and as a result has created our boundaries, as the only collective trait we share is a mutual cognitive dissonance, the feeling that our perception does not meet reality.

So if you’ve read this far, here’s my plea: shut down your computer and go out and start a conversation with someone. Don’t talk about your job or your friends. Talk about art, music, or a crazy idea you had. Talk about a place in the world you’ve never been to and ask that person to speculate on it. Re-enact the promise of the Renaissance.