Listening to those Ted Talks, I see.
Fuck those guys. As a human, I'd rather work on making humanity prosper.
Destroy written communication, he says on a platform devoted to written communication.
First of all: I am not a virtuous man. Second: Writing, by itself, is fine. Cave drawings, paintings, illustrated church walls, even sermons and speeches and songs are fine. Mass dissemination without a personal context is the problem. If you write something down for the other guys in the office, or if your grandmother hands you your grand-grand-grand-mother diary, there is still a living person providing context to the.. well, text.
while I disagree with the idea that the written word is a bad thing, I honestly think he's on to something with the "mass media taboo" business.
Being the cynic I am, I'm more inclined to believe the "solution" will be RealID and everything will simply be digitally signed on upload so you know who it came from.
That's not enough. Granted, I am stating a belief rather than making an argument, but I do believe that any form of communication that does not allow you to literally punch the other side in the face (be it the messenger in the case of time-shifted communication) is potentially harmful. We are made/evolved to communicate with an immediate face punch always in the picture. Taking the human element away is bound to lead to consequences our human minds and souls can neither predict nor fully comprehend.
Evolution follows the contours of environmental pressures; viewing an arbitrary slice of time as proof of a static, immutable construct is to misunderstand the process entirely. Consider how wildly you might have gesticulated in protest were you alive during the period of natural language development.
