Welcome to Virtual Civilisation
It’s about a decade old, and is already challenging 10,000 years of physical civilisation. It has about 2 billion inhabitants, and will soon enfold all of humanity.
It could have happened in 1998 when Google was born. It could have happened in 2002 when mobile phones overtook fixed lines. Or it could have happened in 2005- 2006 when Facebook and Twitter gave shape and spirit to social media.
The precise timing matters less than the evidence: A virtual civilisation is taking shape all around us. Born on the Internet and populated mostly in the past decade, this virtual world is impacting governments, institutions and individuals faster and deeper than anybody understands. Why? Because as the opening line of the book declares:“The Internet is among the few things humans have built that they don’t truly understand.”
The laws ( the few that exist), norms and behavioural patterns of the virtual world are very different, and often in conflict, with those of the physical world, which has evolved over 10,000odd years. While the signs of the virtual civilisation are now unmistakable, its size, spread, and impact are uneven and unclear.
And who better than the top think tank of Google— the company that has been synonymous with the Internet— to explain and interpret the virtual civilisation. That’s what Eric Schmidt, executive chairman, Google, and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, have attempted in The New Digital Age.
Technologies ranging from cart wheel to computer have altered the course of human history. But none can match the speed and spread of the Internet. Be it the West Asian dictators underestimating the power of social media in organising regime- changing protests or the US Department of State’s shock and shame at the WikiLeaks, governments all around are grappling to come to terms with the power of the virtual world.
A Facebook post within hours of the death of Bal Thackeray exposed and redressed the politician- police nexus on the outskirts of Mumbai. It’s through 140- character tweets that the world first came to know of the US raid on the Abbottabad hideout of Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama’s re- election. It was also a fake tweet that erased $ 136 billion on the New York Stock Exchange in April this year.
Internet, like any other technology, is force that can help and hurt. Given its size and spread, it has already toppled governments, sour interstate relations, demolish institutions and made or unmade people’s lives. All of which means it’s a force of that needs to be understood
Notwithstanding the book’s opening disclaimer, its 300- odd pages are the most crisp- yet- comprehensive assessment of how profoundly the Internet is changing our lives— and how the change will accelerate in the days to come. Want to begin from the future? Start from page 29 and 30 for a fascinating description of what our crazy morning hours could be like in just a few years from now.
The book raises more questions than it answers, but then all books on the physical universe do exactly the same. A primer on humankind’s newest frontier.