From Disruption, Emergence and Conduction on to a New Morality

My thesis is simple: anybody who claims Twitter (or anything else) is disruptive technology is saying something contradictory.

I describe disruption as many people all of the sudden getting access to new options and opportunities. This refers not just to the capabilities of the technology but also to the exploration, discovery and collaboration people experience through the technology by meeting each other (I didn’t know you were there). Disruptive technology then gives people access to new options and opportunities that weren’t there before. But so called disruptive technology can’t be disruptive unless it destroys something existing, either by taking market share or by preventing people from spending their time elsewhere.

Disruption has to be rephrased as many people all of the sudden getting access to new options and opportunities so that options and opportunities of the past are no longer available or soon will no longer be available. Saying then that Twitter (or anything else) is disruptive technology is clearly a contradiction since it would mean options and opportunities of the past will become or are already unavailable. I can’t think of an example in the case of Twitter which doesn’t mean that there aren’t any but surely the size and alarm caused by anything disappearing due to Twitter can be the only measurement for its disruptiveness.

A solution can be to say Twitter may be disruptive technology. But what does that mean? Does it mean Twitter may all of the sudden give people access to new options and opportunities? Or does it mean Twitter may cause options and opportunities of the past to disappear? Clearly turning the statement into a discription of a future outcome doesn’t help.

The problem here is not the qualities and properties of Twitter or any other technology. The problem lays in the definition of disruptive. Attaching future outcomes to disruptive new technologies requires us to wait potentially for years until we can find prove for our statements. Yet the benefit of declaring something as disruptive technology is a very useful marker. Like a beacon in the night disruptive new technology is to be ignored at one’s own risk. If only we could make statements about disruptive technology true when we pronounce them.

The importance of this article is not in its weighing of Twitter as a service, or in the fact that I wrote it. Its importance lies in its grave consequences for the scientific community as you’ll soon realize. The scientific method is occupied with empirical truth in the sense of empirical reality. Something is observably true to the entire scientific community through experiments or predictions, or something is not. Science has never been interested in the question of being, instead relying on the fact that what is observable by all of us must be true. Truth then lies not so much in observing but in reporting. Scientists working in the same subdomains report to each other their findings, and review each others work to give it prominence. Truth is then what is reported, and it is up to each reader individually (or in assembly) to confirm or prove false written down discriptions of reality.

This belief in what is true based on what is being reported requires emminence in the scolars because nobody can expirementally explore everything that is being reported in all domains for sheer lack of time. Those that do find the time to specialize in one subdomain have an interest in respecting at all time the scientific methods in order to retain their employment in a field characterized by brutal competition for limited budget or at least retain their standing in the community. This is not a critique of science, it is merely a description of the forces that regulate the relationships scientists have among each other. It is therefore of little interest for scientists to venture into domains where no truth can be observed, meaning where one cannot report empirical observations of phenomena and assign truth values.

If we want to make statements about disruptive technology true we cannot do this in the domain of science because facts are only observable after the events that lead to them have unwinded. Ongoing events have no outcome that can be reliably predicted hence provide nothing that can be reported on. The world of constant change - where detecting and weighing ongoing events is all we can reasonably hope to do - is a dead zone for the scientific method. Or to put it in the words of Martin Heidegger: the most important aspect of being is becoming (over time).

Previously only accredited scientists - most of the time professors - were considered to be credible. Today people create value by making ongoing events whose outcomes are uncertain valuable. Credibility has shifted from explaining what the latest research indicates to pointing out what the newest opportunities are. This shift hasn’t just broadend the scope, it has made the scope obsolete. Today more people have something to say and more people are willing to listen than was ever possible within the scientific community.

All of this is a conclusion after the facts because we still have to redefine disruption and disruptive technology. Disruption happens when many people all of the sudden get access to new options and new opportunities which sets in motion events whose outcome cannot be reliably predicted. I name events which are set in motion whose outcome cannot be predicted as emergence. This allows me to rephrase disruption as many people all of the sudden getting access to new options and new opportunities which causes a state of emergence. Emergence can be caused by other sources as well but disruption is one of the most interesting because it doesn’t cost any money to anybody in particular. All that is required for disruption to happen is language, communication, a lot of people with motives all regulated by time.

In this framework of mind change is defined as an historical view point. Emergence means: things might change. Changing means: things are changing. Changed means: things have changed. Change itself doesn’t mean anything really without a time constraint - which the word change misses - but it only really makes sense as an historical viewpoint (as in changing and changed). When saying something will change one is really refering to emergence. And if not referring to emergence one is probably engaging in wishful thinking. States of emergence end when the events it has set in motion have completed which is when things have happened and when things have changed.

States of emergence that occur at the same time have the potential of influencing each other. This creates an enormous web of potentials in our very complicated world. This means very little is predictable, and the only way to predict anything about human actions is to assume people will follow certain social constraints. This line of thinking only really creates a pathway which reduces the number of possible outcomes in meaningful ways but doesn’t make predicting the actual outcomes any easier.

States of emergence can also create new states of emergence. When one state of emergence consistently creates other states of emergence over a period of time or significantly contributes in their creation I rename it to a state of conduction. There aren’t many states of conduction but the most powerful is certainly the Internet. Since its enception the Internet has contributed to the creation of many states of emergence. I consider the Internet to consist of all protocols, all software, all computing devices and all physical connections that make it possible.

I believe Twitter is a new state of conduction which creates many new states of emergence. Twitter is the real-time web, and it is so - just like the Internet - because many people rely on it for creating value. If Twitter is really a new state of conduction it cannot disappear just like the Internet cannot disappear without undoing all it has made possible for people. Notice thus that a state of conduction is a state of emergence at the same time, meaning that the outcome of all the events it has set in motion cannot be reliably predicted as long as that state continues to exist. This includes the events of states of emergence it has helped to create.

Let it be clear that since the Internet became accessible to so many we live in a state of conduction. If Twitter is indeed a new state of conduction this will again impact our lives profoundly. This raises a philosophical question for your entertainment: are there other states of conduction which have been started in the past and are still going on, and if so which ones? Looking at human society in terms of states of emergence and conduction is in stark contrast with the scientific method which only considers empirical evidence. Yet emergence and conduction clearly define our modern society. We no longer create value out of what is certain, we create value out of what is uncertain.

Class society claims to offer us certainty in this uncertain times. Yet believing in this certainty is cheating on oneself since behind those facades of certainty are people working very hard to fence off the uncertainty in this world in desperate preservation attempts. These attempts will fail simply because emergence and conduction is a spiritual experience which the people that helped create them and help sustain them are obviously unwilling to let go off. Not being in that spiritual state is then a liability. This understanding of the world completely shatters Thomas Hobbes’ Gutenberg morality, based on the nation state.

The only tangible thing constant in our world - at least according to the furthest extends of our perception - is the land itself. Nation-states are defined by their territories, yet that alone is completely meaningless. National society is a spiritual construct. Can it be empirically tested whether or not national societies exist? Yes. Why? Because everybody believes they do. Yet the morality defined by national society - individual protection within the territory of the state in exchange for social constraints - can no longer protect people whose lives are regulated by states of conduction. Something has to give.

Thomas Hobbes’ morality preceded and made possible the age of the nation states. On the same terms will defining our new morality - where it simply did not exist before - precede and make possible the post-nation-state age. What made Thomas Hobbes’ new morality stick were four things:

1. The moveable type printing press as a publishing technology.
2. The fact that his kind of morality simply did not exist before.
3. The emergence of nation-states.
4. The fact that people assumed the prevailance of nation-states as the dominant territorial and civil form of government was unstoppable.

Have I - in part - answered my own philosophical question? I leave that as an excerise to you. Make no mistake, many people were against the idea of a new morality in the 17h century, and against the idea of national society. Yet the people wanted it, and the politicians who saw opportunities for themselves handed the option to them out of the ashes of the European empires of the day.

What will make our new post-Gutenberg morality stick are again four things:

1. The Internet as a filtering technology.
2. The fact that this kind of morality simply does not exist.
3. The emergence of a non-national world government.
4. The fact that people assume the prevailance of a non-national world government as the dominant territorial and civil form of government is unstoppable.

The only way to let all people have their own truths is to re-affirm one common truth. The reason the UN has failed to affirm this truth 60 years ago is because it lifts nation-states and the international context up to something it is not. The international project is not credible because the power remains either national, or is unequality proportioned to super powers. The national sickness - the desire to accumulate national currency and power in public office - reigns unchecked on the international level. The scientific method has no answer whatsoever for this problem. The conduction method has. Under our state of conduction - the one we sustain - everything static is wiped out except for that what we desire to keep.

Crowd, let’s get to work.