Only Interconnect
A commentary on how we impact each other and the world around us. | 12 minute read
Introduction
Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, the novelist E.M. Forster witnessed the world’s swift metamorphosis to the Machine Age.
Railways, steam ships, telegraphs, and soon enough telephones and airplanes transported people, goods, and ideas around the world, enabling global connection at scale never before known. Entire industries and ways of life were disrupted then as they have been now; we’ve seen our own lives remade according to Moore’s Law, the compounding rate of technological development that charted the growth of computers from one that filled an entire room to one that fits in your pocket.
With the keen eye of a writer, Forster watched as his peers embraced new technologies without question, enraptured by their novelty but with no critical curiosity about their use or long-term impact. He saw how travel and communications spurred the expansion of social networks, and he observed how those relationships seemed to diminish as friends became replaceable. People had become as detached from themselves and their own inner lives, as much as they had disconnected from others. “Only Connect!” he wrote as the epigraph to his novel Howard’s End, initially charging people to reconnect to those neglected parts of themselves. The phrase, however, came to represent the essential theme in his body of work: the importance of human connection. It’s been oft-cited in our own Information Age as we retreat behind screens, preferring our virtual world to the material one.
Forster foresaw this, too. In his short story, “The Machine Stops,” published in 1909, he imagined that the earth had become uninhabitable and humans lived in individual pods within The Machine, which provided them with sustenance and entertainment without ever leaving their room. Such conveniences, artificiality, and unblinking connectivity proved fatal when people relied on the machine to facilitate all their needs; they lost the capacity to think and do for themselves and for each other, and became more isolated and dependent on flawed technology.
It’s easy to map this to our current predicament, as we sit in the blue glow of screens that enable us to reach almost anywhere around the world in seconds. Technology has given us ever more ways to connect, but how many of us feel connected? Have we become so burdened by the demands of the machine that we are lost to ourselves and each other?
Technology isn’t the foe; modern advances over just the past hundred years have enabled the survival of millions of people and enhanced quality of life for many around the globe - though not without costs. Today’s “machine” isn’t any one thing; it’s a complex stew of forces that has overtaken our essential human nature to cooperate, collaborate, and connect. The machine divides.
“What we do or don’t do matters, not just for us, but for the whole of the universe.”
The machine wants us to believe we are autonomous individuals whose day to day actions have no bearing on anyone else. This belief has led to the destruction of our planet and its creatures - including ourselves. Yet, every decision we make entangles us to a web of other beings whose lives are impacted.
The world can seem unpredictable, but chaos theory suggests an underlying logic behind seemingly random events. Patterns emerge from dynamic - chaotic - systems and by observing, or listening to these patterns, we can continually refine our response. Which is not to say we’ve become better at predicting the future, just better at understanding how even infinitesimal changes to a system can produce a multitude of possible outcomes.
The now infamous “butterfly effect” was coined by a meteorologist who noted how small perturbations in one part of the planet could impact the weather across the globe. Our individual actions have the power to shape the world, from the more mundane choices like what we eat for breakfast, to whether we’re silent witnesses to injustice. What we do or don’t do matters, not just for us, but for the whole of the universe.
For too long we have imagined humanity at the center of the world or at the top of the chain, as animals driven by survival rather than cooperation, as masters exerting our will over the natural world, and over each other. We have since learned that even the smallest organism among us plays a vital role in the ecosystem. We share kinship with all other matter in the universe, but we have forgotten our family. We live with the illusion of separateness, though we are born of the same source material, that which arose from the massive explosion that began our universe. The mother and father at the beginning of time. All the great prophets, scientists, spiritual leaders, laypeople, and the earth itself keep sharing the same message, if only we would listen.
In order for our species to survive, we must remember wholeness. It is not enough to only connect, we must only interconnect.
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