Ask A Genius 790: Scott, a Fraternal Douche
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so preface, I’m being kind of a douche bag right now because we had a long, long preamble off tape, and I’m making you do it.
Rick Rosner: All right, so Scott right now is interested in joining fraternal organizations like the Elks and I’m twice as old as Scott, so I come from an era when these fraternal organizations that are now dwindling were more active. My dad was an Elk. My dad was just Shriner, a mason. He may have belonged to the Optimist Club. He belonged to the Downtown Boulder Businessmen’s Association. He had a weekly poker group for 40-50 years that continues to this day. It’s just he dropped out when he died, but the poker group goes on. It’s probably been going for pushing 70 years now. Anyway, I’ve worked in writers rooms. We have experience in various forms of human aggregation which were changing over the second half of the 20th century, kind of dwindling, and then super dwindling as the nature of human communication and business was changed by the Internet.
With the Internet really kicking in around 1995 and then internet business kicking in with Amazon sometime in the early 2000s, you couldn’t always buy shit easily on the internet, but now you can buy everything. And then social media kicking in, kind of along with the smart phone at the end of the odds, 2008, 2009, and now human aggregation mostly takes place via our devices. I mean we still have hundred thousand football fans gathering at sports stadiums. But that is a very fleeting form of aggregation. The organizations or friendships or whatever you have via social media are more durable often, though, they don’t have to be. I have Twitter friendships that come and go, and we don’t really need to talk about the landscape that much because everybody knows the freaking landscape. We’re all on social media, but what we can talk about is the future of human aggregation because the means of communicating with people are going to continue to get more powerful and more intimate.
Elon Musk wants to stick some kind of deli in your head to pipe information directly into your brain. And he probably won’t succeed with that because he’s kind of all over the place, but other people will. And then if you can set up brain to brain communication and contact lenses just are always on, that are like the miniaturized version of Google Glass. Google Glass was the Google Glasses that added information to your visual field, but people didn’t like them because you could tape people just by looking at them and pressing a button and they felt creepy. But there are the equivalents of Google Glass that are out there now that have less of a backlash.
So anyway, communication is going to get more information rich and more intimate, which will affect the relationships we have, the types of relationships where eventually people will more or less be able to share brains and people will be augmenting their thinking. We already do that in a shitty way with our apps. But our apps will eventually join with our apps with again more intimate connections and so our aggregations will be super intimate and we will evolve ways of doing that where couples may decide to link themselves, and this may turn out to be really great for 10%of couples, to be linked in their thoughts. And then for 20% it’ll be meh, it’ll be like, “Yeah, we were okay before, we’re kind of okay now.” And then for the remaining 70% it will be bad, but people will learn how to be linked.
Those linkages will probably be bad for workers because technological improvements that increase productivity generally just make all these things that have been promised. Like in the 30s, automation was supposed to bring about a 30 hour work week and in the 50s a 20 hour workweek and now basically we’re working, we’re on call all the time anytime you’re awake. Somebody can send you a DM or an email and ask you to do some shit. So being linked will probably make work even more of a pain in the ass.
But with fraternal organizations or human aggregations, eventually we’re going to have to let in people who maybe were formerly human and now are mostly replacement parts in their brains and thinking beings that were never human. And you’re tired. I haven’t really thought much about this, so I’m going to wrap it up and we’ll do part two of this tomorrow because I haven’t really thought about how it’s going to work. We don’t really know how it’s going to work, but we can come up with some reasonable ideas like knowing that brain to brain linkages, you don’t have to do much thinking to realize that, that would fuck up more couples than it would help. One more thing, just at the very most basic level, knowing what gives you a boner moment to moment and what gives your wife a girl boner moment to moment, most couples maybe people will learn how to not be annoyed by that, but at first, boy, that’s going to be troublesome.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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