Know This
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Blockchains thus qualify as the most important kind of news, the news of the new—something that changes our thinking, causes us to pause, where in a moment we instantly sense that now things might be forever different.
Singularity-class science and technology breakthroughs are news of the new. Advances such as deep learning, self-assembling nanotechnology, 3D-printed synthetic biological life, the genome and the connectome, immersive virtual reality, and self-driving cars might well revolutionize our lives. However impressive, though, these are context-specific technologies. So when a revolution comes along as general and pervasive as to possibly reorchestrate all of the patterns of life, that is noticeable news of the new—and that is blockchains.
In existing as a new general class of thing, blockchains reconfigure the definition of what it is to be new. We see the elegance of Occam’s razor in redefining what it is to be new. The medium and the message are simultaneously the message; the message is stronger, because it has reconfigured its own form. The blockchain redefines what it is to be new because the medium and message create an entirely new reality and possibility space for how to do things. Where previously there were only hierarchical models for organizing large-scale human activity, blockchains open up the possibility of decentralized models and hybrid models—and not just improved methods but an expansive invitation to new projects. The blockchain news of the new is that we are in a whole new possibility space of diversity and decentralization, no longer confined to hierarchy as the sole mode of coordination.
Blockchains as a class of the new startle us with the discomfort and fear of the unknown, because it’s not clear whether blockchain technology is good or bad news. Even more fearful is the implication that it is we who will determine whether the news is good or bad. The underlying technology is, as any other technology, itself neutral—or at least pliable in dual use for both helpful and limiting purposes. Blockchains invite the possibility of action and, more deeply, the responsibility of action. We are developing the sensibility of the algorithmically-aware cryptocitizen, where the expansion of the apparatus of our thought and maturity is proportional to the force of the new experience to be mastered.
Cryptocitizen sensibility and the blockchain news of the new invite the possibility of our greater exercise of freedom and autonomy and rethinking authority. In a Crypto Copernican turn, we can shift the assumed locus of authority from outside ourselves, in external parties, to residing within ourselves. This is the Enlightenment that Kant was after—an advance not just in knowledge but also in authority-taking. A Cambrian explosion of experimentation in new models of economics and governance could ensue. Blockchains, being simultaneously global and local, could coordinate the effort, equitably joining the diversity of every permutation of micropolis with the cohesion of the macropolis, in connected human activity on digital smartnetworks.
When we have an encounter with the new, that is indeed news. This is the news we crave and seek above all else, an encounter with the sublime that reconfigures our reality. The galvanizing essence of the blockchain news of the new is the possibility of our further expansion into our own potentiality. The Crypto Enlightenment is the kind of authority-taking change we can make within ourselves as a maturation toward the realization of an empowering relationship with technology.
Envoi: We May All Die Horribly
Robert Sapolsky
Professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery, Stanford University; author, Monkeyluv
Well, the obvious place to start answering the latest Edge Question was that little paper about scientists using CRISPR technology to show that Homo naledi buried their dead next to coursing rivers on Mars. Despite that slam-dunk of a choice, my vote for the most interesting/important piece of recent science news comes in two parts.
Part I: Back to December 2013, when a one-year-old boy in a Guinean village died an agonizing death, and as a result many of us learned the names of some West African countries for the first time. By now, everyone is familiar with the broad features of the West African Ebola-virus epidemic. The disease had been flaring up intermittently in Central Africa and then quickly burning out. It is devastatingly lethal, rapidly killing most people infected. The virus requires contact with bodily fluid for transmission, and it has evolved to facilitate that, as sufferers die in an explosion of bodily fluids—projectile vomiting, continuous diarrhea, and, with some viral strains, external hemorrhaging. If Joseph Conrad had known about Ebola, he would have written it into Heart of Darkness.
And then the virus made the nightmare jump from the rain forest to high-density urban settings, bursting out almost simultaneously in the cities and towns of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. This was inevitable, given modern mobility.
The countries were utterly unprepared—poor, with large shantytown populations, still recovering from years of war, and with minimal medical infrastructure (Liberia had some fifty doctors at the time). Nearly 30,000 cases, over 11,000 deaths—numbers that are probably underestimates. An even larger number of people sickened and died in the secondary death toll, because hospitals were overwhelmed with Ebola patients. At the epidemic’s peak, there were thousands of new cases each week.
Entire extended families were wiped out, as people cared for relatives, or washed their corpses, as per custom. Villages and towns were emptied, the capitals became ghost towns as governments urged people to stay in their homes, to not touch other people. Any semblance of healthy economic activity disappeared. Hysteria flared in various predictable ways: Some denied the existence of the disease, insisted it was a hoax; quarantine centers were ransacked by crowds intent on “liberating” their relatives; burial teams were attacked when they came for bodies. Virus-free survivors were shunned. And, naturally, suspicion and fear of the disease prompted various shoot-the-messenger scenarios; in a machete-the-messenger variant, eight aid workers were hacked to death in a village in Guinea.
Suspicion and fear also played out in conspiracy theories: A leading Liberian newspaper, a Liberian professor in the U.S., Pravda’s English edition, and Louis Farrakhan all declared that Ebola was invented by the West. As a bioweapon that escaped from a lab. As a bioweapon being field-tested on Africans. As a strategy to decrease the African population. Or, in Pravda’s capitalist critique, as a bioweapon released to let the West hold the world hostage by charging exorbitant prices for a patented cure—i.e., a military-pharmacology complex. And of course, various West African clergy announced that God had sent Ebola to punish West African countries for the supposed laxity with which they persecuted homosexuals.
Unless you were a conspiracy theorist, the story had no villains (although the World Health Organization got a lot of criticism for not being prepared, as if that were feasible). But there were heroes. Doctors Without Borders achieved cult status, both for its presence and effectiveness but also for its lack of institutional BS. Medical missionaries were extraordinary (something I was initially loath to admit; having worked regularly in Africa for thirty years, I spout a secular leftist’s obligatory condemnation of missionaries). And most of all, there were the heroics of the West African healthcare workers—doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, burial teams—with scant resources to keep them effective, or safe. They accounted for a tenth of the deaths in the epidemic. In August 2014, Science published an Ebola paper five of whose West African authors were already dead.
We watched all this from afar, free to turn the page to the next story. And then it came home.
First were the handful of infected expatriate healthcare workers who were brought, using remarkable care and containment methods, back to the West for almost invariably successful treatment. Then came Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian visiting relatives in Dallas, whose Ebola was the first case diagnosed in the U.S. He was a good Samaritan, having driven a sick pregnant neighbor to the hospital thinking her illness was pregnancy-related. Thus he had failed to note his exposure on health forms and was allowed to fly; he went to an ER in Dallas with beginnin
g symptoms of the disease, and someone failed to ask him whether he had come from another country, let alone from the West African hot zone. He was sent home with an antibiotic prescription and returned to the hospital a few days later to die. Soon two of the nurses who had cared for him contracted the disease. The second, aware of the first’s diagnosis, nevertheless flew to Akron to buy a wedding dress; the shop went out of business as a result (which did not prevent her, in a move that defines chutzpah, from requesting a refund on her ostensibly tainted purchase).
Then came the doctor back from treating Ebola in West Africa who visited a bowling alley in Brooklyn the evening before he developed symptoms. And the returning nurse who either did or didn’t represent a health risk but refused to be quarantined, biking around her Maine town for photographers, asymptomatic and virus-free, wearing her bike helmet.
By then, we were all collectively wetting our pants with terror. The question that usually appeared at the end of past articles about obscure Central African hemorrhagic viruses—“Could it happen here?”—had become “It’s happening here, isn’t it?” And this produced what I consider the most important scientific moment in 2014. It wasn’t spurred by Legionnaire’s disease, toxic shock syndrome, the anthrax scare, or even AIDS—and certainly not by global warming. The U.S. population finally reached the collective realization that we may all die horribly unless some scientists figure out a way to save us.
Part II: The (beginning of a) resolution: As the most scientifically significant moment of 2015, a twenty-eight-author team published in Lancet the results of a Phase II clinical trial of an Ebola vaccine.* The carefully designed trial involved nearly 8,000 Guineans and demonstrated the vaccine’s 100-percent effectiveness at preventing disease occurrence when administered immediately after exposure to someone with Ebola.
Yes, this isn’t the end of Ebola disease (and the research started long before the West African epidemic). But it’s a rough approximation of how science can indeed act to save us. It would be nice if the general public thought the same.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Peter Hubbard of HarperCollins and my agent Max Brockman, for their continued encouragement. A special thanks, once again, to Sara Lippincott for her thoughtful attention to the manuscript.
Also by John Brockman
As Author
By the Late John Brockman
37
Afterwords
The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
Digerati
As Editor
About Bateson
Speculations
Doing Science
Ways of Knowing
Creativity
The Greatest Innovations of the Past 2,000 Years
The Next Fifty Years
The New Humanists
Curious Minds
What We Believe but Cannot Prove
My Einstein
Intelligent Thought
What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
What Are You Optimistic About?
What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
This Will Change Everything
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
Culture
The Mind
This Will Make You Smarter
This Explains Everything
Thinking
What Should We Be Worried About?
The Universe
This Idea Must Die
What to Think About Machines That Think
Life
As Coeditor
How Things Are (with Katinka Matson)
Copyright
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Digital Edition January 2017 ISBN: 9780062562074
Print ISBN: 9780062562067
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