Wild Wild West Dot Com - You've neighbors you didn't ask for

Thousands of people who care nothing for me are now my neighbors.   They vote me up and down at will when I appear in the digital swamp. They give me a jingle from the call centre and email me from Kenya.   Seems like the whole world is ready to put in their two cents for free.    It’s the Wild Wild West.com

It's complicated

Back in the day in village and tribe, we met our neighbors every week and were probably kin.  We took great interest in their sexual unions, their work and kids, status, belief and doings.  Without written law, we apparently shaped life with story-telling, shaming, kinship rules and brute force.    True, we now have nations and clubs and corporations  complete with  recorded  votes,  constitutions, patent law, health officers and enforcement officers.

But we’re simultaneously back in the village, an increasingly global culture, thanks to the speed of light.   The word "neighbor" is built around the word "nigh" or "near" and everyone with a cell phone is now near you.  Though we be thousands of miles apart, we can connect in less than a second and pay less than a penny for the touch.  So we're neighbors now. “Connect”  means “reach out to” and “like”.   It also means “target”.  (Think “deplatforming” and “doxing”).

Our institutions haven’t caught up. They are somewhat hierarchical.  The internet neighborhood is a looser network that admits initiatives from a lot of nodes.  The second is becoming more important than the first.  Managing what happens in your information neighborhood is getting to be as powerful and important for safety, wealth and health as voting for your MP and Senator.  Somehow managing the information neighborhood and managing the geographic neighborhood must co-exist.  The impetus for change is arriving at the speed of light.  Institutions will be playing catch up.

Story-telling, shaming, rules of association and force have regained great power.  How do we tame and civilize them?