Collective Agent

Positive vs Negative Liberty - William Gillis

Just some reactions I had listening to this, which seemed worthy of wider reading-

The brain does not just think in a linear way- the brain is in some sense internally a collective agent.

he explores the idea of technology augmenting the agent- I would argue that we are already experiencing this now.

For example, being able to post here enables me to stretch the boundaries of time, space, and available or acceptable extended social interaction in ways which would be simply impossible at a previous point - a kind of queer social tech.

We simply take it for granted that we can enter into what would have been private spaces for a culture previously and watch them. We take it for granted that it is possible for an academic to track the minute details of a run of the mill political actor they have not an iota of real world connection to- simply via the Internet with low cost or friction- a level of interaction which would have been exceedingly costly and rare just a few years ago- utterly impossible at long distance or without some long shared history. These are actually shocking acts socially- just not previously possible - I don't think we are even close to processing what this means socially or ethically.

This also expands and changes the viability of information processing- people who are doing this are simply parsing this information at a much faster rate, compared to those who can't or choose not to. It also makes it possible to get an incredibly much finer grain of detail on a situation- like the difference between a fuzzy black and white television vs high deff.

Culturally, going back and forth feels like watching both screens simultaneously- on one screen the situation is fuzzy black and white, and those watching have to fill in the blanks to some extent with their mental maps- in the other mode, the situation can be far, far more granularity examined with confluences in space or time. This REALLY changes the mindset and reaction - it's also odd because both sides are totally inured to the state of the information processing they use, and seem semi unaware there is an arbitrage happening here.

It also seems to me, to pull a little of what zizek was talking about with "3rd person beliefs"- that the change in medium influences what is possible there, what can and can't be transmitted, etc . Twitter and google are super powerful tools but it's almost an entirely text-based tool at its core - which I find totally flat and stiff-ling- a mere shadow of the full human expanse.

I think that while Gillis asserts a highly interactive borg collective being some dystopian future, to me, it feels already present- I wonder how someone from Britain 100 years ago, who sensed a great cultural shifts occurring in the span on a few towns, or from one valley to another- would they not see this as a giant, homogenize borg of people interconnected by incredible tech? How would the notion of a giant cultural collective spanning the planet near-instantly strike them? Why is absolutely pure technical access to the mind a necessity to speak of a collective mental agent? This seems like an unnecessarily high bar. Even within my own mind, I often don't know myself, or there are things there that are unclear - if my internal mind can be this chummed up with weird crap, how would this be more clear connected to another? I think rather than finding some clear, intelligible crystal, someone entering my mind would find a tornado instead, ideas and emotions flying about with force.

As an aside, I think he mentions somewhere in this economic libertarians having a notion of positive freedom through increased possibility via economics- I definitely have that thought. That is my positive liberty angle to be sure.