Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Echo Chamber

Borders are a funny concept. It’s odd the way the hand of fate paints these arbitrary lines, often invisible, but sometimes made painfully obvious by barbed wire. Lines that divide people into peoples and determine, on the basis of random chance, how children are raised and adults are governed. But within the borders of a nation, there is such diversity that it seems  artificial to insist that all of those people constitute a community capable of governing itself through shared ideals. There is so much antagonism between all of the different groups in any democracy. It seems like the clash of civilisations is going on within as well as between them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to allow these armies to separate out? Why not create a red nation and a blue nation, instead of having two that are both vague shades of purple? Citizens of the red country wouldn’t have to worry about tax-and-spend welfare, and citizens of the blue country wouldn’t have to fight off creationism being taught in science classes.

This is, of course, a totally infeasible plan. Its impossibility stems from the fact that, as Amartya Sen pointed out, everyone has multiple parts to their identity – political, religious, social, and so on:

“The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness.”

There is no way of sorting everyone that could possibly take account of those multiple identies, without resorting to such extreme Balkanisation that countries would not remain. There is also the problem of the totalitarian imposition required in moving to such an end state from the status quo. Partitioning post-occupation Iraq into three or more smaller countries, reflecting sectarian divisions more accurately than the current British-drawn borders, was considered at one point. But the difficulty – logistically and ethically – of forcing people to leave their homes (and the attached resources, like oil) made it impossible to implement.

Yet for all that, conflicts remain, driven by each person’s desire to see their values reflected in the single set of legislation to which all citizens must be subject. Having a central government set the rules for everyone is making plenty of them unhappy, and they’re not all Tea Partiers. But we’ve also just established that geographic reality makes it impossible to allow each person to set their own rules – because they will have neighbours who cannot feasibly be asked to move if they disagree. So what can we do? I wonder if a new paradigm may end up being pressed onto us by the increasingly social nature of the Internet.

Many people are already members of simple online communities, set up around particular hobbies or beliefs. Political ones are especially prominent, with immense debates and flame wars that no undecided independent will ever read anyway. I think we may see these form the seeds for a sort of opt-in governance in the future. As people spend more time online and less time in the real world, they are more free to set their own rules online – where they don’t hurt anyone else – and less subject to physical laws.

We may see a sort of societal escapism where people can exit the real world to experience a world of their own creation, with a set of laws that reflects the political and religious beliefs shared by their group. Given sufficient artificial intelligence, such a world could even be populated by millions of software-controlled pseudo-people to fill it out, so that even the most isolated and esoteric morality could give rise to a fully realised world, rather than only existing for the lonely person who dreamt it up.

Now there are two caveats to this. The first is that avoiding the debate by living in a virtual world does not eliminate the questions in the real world. Spending all your time in a simulation where hate speech is illegal, for example, does not prevent somebody publishing Mein Kampf in reality. But I think for many people, this is just an advanced form of the political disengagement they already practise, and they would be content with the easier task of engaging with the simulation that trying to bring about actual change.

Secondly, it is obviously predicated on the virtual world being a compelling place to spend time, which is not the case with current video, simulation and virtual reality technologies. But these will improve, although it may take many years. When Second Life actually becomes similar in realism to the physical world, the demarcation between your hometown friends and those spread out across the world will be blurrier. On social networks like Facebook, your online list of friends is currently a subsidiary reflection of your set of real friends, but over time that will change.

To summarise: people already like echo chambers, especially on the Internet. As virtual reality improves, it is possible that these will go beyond being mere discussion forums that entrench opinions. They could easily become parallel societies, where people are able to set their own rules in line with their values; something which is impossible in the real world, because of the impact that would have on your geographic neighbours.

Another interesting factor is that such communities could be used to trial new ethical systems before implementing them in the real world. Imagine if we had been able to run a virtual simulation of communism before it resulted in the deaths of millions and everyone switched back to capitalism. Such experiments would have to be interpreted carefully but might be an important tool in the arsenal of future governments and academics.

One barrier to this rise of geography-transcending communities may be the context in which people currently use the phrase “Balkanisation of the internet”. Recent developments in government censorship and regulation, coupled with technological and language disparities between countries, have taken a toll. The network that used to be quite globally homogenous is fragmenting into a set of smaller country-focused ones, as Lawrence Lessig writes. In this context, developing cross-border communities that are reliant more on attitude than geographic location could become harder.

Even if these communities were to arise, and the fierce and sometimes hateful rhetoric that results from the clash of values was to die down, would this be a good thing? This engagement is very likely necessary for success in the long term, with a sort of Schumpeter-esque creative destruction going on in the marketplace of ideas. A harmonious society may be one in which the noise and mess of this public debate has been stilled, replaced by a peaceful idleness. It may be quiet, but would it be – as in an old Western – too quiet?