Those have become sorts of milestones, against which I compare the development of human thought and culture. I had to read a few books of late 1960s social philosophy for this week's exam, and all of it just seemed to speak of a world that no longer existed. Humankind's capacity for spontaneous self-destruction and the creation of a forum that not only houses the bulk of human knowledge but also allows individuals to communicate anonymously, ubiquitously, uniformly and universally; those things have fucking changed us.
And we're only really starting to study the question of just how they have changed us.
In the 60s they posited in all earnestness that two people aware of the same facts and sharing the same perception of said facts could not come to disagree. You need pick any Internet forum, any one at all, and you'll see how they went wrong.
I often find myself both wondering what some of the great past thinkers would have made of these phenomena, and immensely glad that they never had to witness them. If the breadth of human cruelty toward humanity hadn't broken them, the Internet surely would have. Can you imagine Socrates trying to get himself heard on Eljay? Sure you can, there's one in every community.
This is one of the things I really want to live to see. How much for the better and how much for the worse we become for these things.
