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Supra-organisms, including human ones, can lose their minds
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”
— from W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
“The Internet is Rotting” is a really important article:
https://medium.com/the-atlantic/the-internet-is-rotting-5dd5478cc5e4
It may prompt you, like me, to buy a printed copy. It reminds us that, as far as we know, the Second Law of Thermodynamics still applies. We may think of digital memory and communication in ideal, logical terms, exempt from the laws of physics, but our actual computers, communication devices, and our human behavior are still subject to inevitable accumulation of errors as time passes.
There should be many implications for us of that realization. First, there is the understanding emphasized in the article that we cannot rely on the internet alone to preserve our shared knowledge. It tends to become lost or corrupted with passage of time. If we are to save important information for the long term, we need to save it in multiple, disparate forms. Although, even then, the different copies may diverge and become inconsistent in content.
Second, recent political events should remind us that human groups, like individual people, tend to change…
