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Amy Letter's avatar

This makes me think of the differences between living in small towns and big cities -- someone I met recently described her upbringing in a town where she knew LITERALLY everyone, and conceded that while to her it was heaven, to someone else it might sound like hell. The fact that she was universally beloved in her home town, "a very big fish in a very small pond," as she said, has everything to do with it. I've mostly lived in vast metropolitan areas where running into someone you know at the store is a rare coincidence, and you can manage separate social circles easily, and you can, if you play yourself out or have a falling out with a certain group of people, give yourself a "second chance" with an entirely different group of people and the two groups will never overlap.

Social media has changed this too -- in the sense that social media tends to keep people connected to their "high school friends" or "old job friends" or any other past group of connections, and in the sense that it documents and latches you to your foul-ups for much longer periods of time, making "second chances" much more difficult. Social media does make the whole world a bit more like a small town or tribe, and that can be heaven or hell depending on whether your see yourself as the big fish or the "trapped" fish -- the fish who wants to start over, but can't, because the past is dragging them down like a dead albatross into the murky depths of sameness.

It's interesting to think that that cold, dark sameness could go on for tens of thousands of years!!

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Scythia's avatar

An alternative to the gossip trap (While I do think the idea has some merits, I doubt it is the whole story): the end of humanity's great migrations.

The main distinguishing feature that separates pre and post civilization societies globaly is the cessation of large scale human migrations with the crossing of the bering straight in 10,000BCE. There still existed small scale migration into peloponeisia, for example, but no large new landmasses that could support steady population growth.

Before this point new lands were available for humanity to expand into, so we did not need to live in social arrangements denser than Dunbar's limit. If a group grew too large to handle with gossip it would split and migrate. If a foreign group were to move into your home, you could migrate as well, displacing yet further groups in a chain ending at the frontier. With the absence of a frontier, groups need to learn to live together.

This explanation neatly avoids requiring some innate human nature that keeps us in prehistory, and also explains why civilizations started basically everywhere in the globe within the same time period, from the fertile crescent, egypt, china and the yukatan peninsula. It also explains where these civilizations were founded: in the paths of large migration routes. Bottlenecks in continents, now the melting pot of different migrating groups with no frontier to release the pressure.

This explanation also indicates that twitter won't destroy civilization. While people prefer to live in social environments where they can have full knowledge of social interactions, civilization is not built upon suborning that instinct by creating a hierarchy where some people are untouchable. It's just built on people finding themselves in a situation where that doesn't work anymore, through no fault of their own. Creating that hierarchy was just the most convenient method during a time before modern scientific, philosophical, and technical knowledge allows for a more egalitarian political solution.

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