Kardashev-Syndicalists of the world unite!

Allen Tate, "The Man of Letters in the Modern World", (1952): 'What modern literature has taught us is not merely that the man of letters has not participated fully in the action of society; it has taught us that nobody else has either.' 

Tate is fascinating for a modern reader because he comes from a position that is alien to most of us now, one that manages to be learned yet at the same time unapologetically moral. This is not in the often reactionary or defeated mode of T.S. Eliot, but somewhat closer to Emmanuel Lévinas. He calls for a distinction to be made between communication and communion, noting that what he terms secularism (as the death of the notion of "spirit") apparently seeks to do away with all ends in favour of the absoulte of the means. 

In thinking about Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, we can see how this idea is extended outward.  In the "Consul's Tale" we read in the colonization/invasion of a planet the profound cynicism of the WorldWeb. In this space opera, 28th century, the hyper-technological human society called the Hegemony has spread throughout the galaxy. Quoting from Wikipedia:
'The farcaster network (the "WorldWeb") is the infrastructural and economical basis of the Hegemony of Man and thus determines the whole culture and society. Also flowing across these portals are the structures of the datasphere (a network reminiscent of the Internet in design, but far more advanced). In that lurks the powerful, knowledgeable, and utterly inscrutable TechnoCore — the vast agglomeration of millions of AIs who run almost every piece of high technology of mankind. The unthinking hubris of man resulted in the death of the home-world (Earth), and this arrogant philosophy was carried forth to the stars, for centuries. The Hegemony itself is a largely decadent society, relying on its military to incorporate into the WorldWeb the colony planets, even unwillingly, and also to defend the Hegemony from attacks by the Ousters, "interstellar barbarians" who dwell free of and beyond the bounds of the Hegemony and shun all the works of the TechnoCore (especially farcasters)'
Anyway, in this tale (the first Hyperion book follows loosely the model of The Canterbury Tales or Decameron) we see the profound cynicism of the WorldWeb's entire reasons for existence. There is no actual thought behind all the magnificent technology described to us, and this is but a cosmic extrapolation of the circumstances which confront human society today.

We have always been tool-using creatures, but the question deserves to be posed as to whether we still use tools as we did before. Do tools now begin to use us? This is one of the classic topoi of science fiction (as in The Matrix trilogy technology actively takes over, or Mockingbird by Walter Tevis where we apparently just give up, entrusting everything to our creations). Once, in conversation with a friend, I jokingly referred to my overall philosophical vision as Kardashev-Syndicalism, a mixture of the kind of alternative to state-directed socialism (because, as someone who takes the ideas of spontaneous order and emergence seriously, I would require a non-centralized form of government) with something else, a broader idea of what being human can mean. It sounds good even if you think Kardashev may have been a obscure Ukranian labour theorist affiliated with the Mensheviks. He was not.

Nikolai Kardashev is a Russian astrophysicist who developed the idea of a scale according to which civilizations might be ranked, based on their energy use. There are three types of civilization, with Type I able to use all the energy on its home planet, Type II able to use all the energy from its nearby star, and Type III thirsty or hungry enough to devour all the energy in its home galaxy. An alternative version of this taxonomy, that of Robert Zubrin puts the emphasis on extension throughout space, rather then energy usage, such that Type I has spread throughout the home planet, Type II has outposts and settlements on numerous other planets, and Type III the galaxy.

Now, the nitty-gritty details don't really concern me here. Nor do accusations of cosmic smugness (although I may have to call my first album that). The phrase to me is more of a tool to rethink our present in the light of all the alternative paths we might take. Our thought might be better served by allowing the dynamic and daemonic power of possible worlds to explode our ideas onto a cosmic scale. Woah.

The universe of Hyperion is more than a metaphor of capitalism's viral logic, though it is undeniably this too. The value of science fiction is that it is a truly a mode of thought, rather than adjustment or technocratic problem-solving; counter-intuitively, these latter two are actually the impulses behind all realisms, such that they basically are modes of acceptance. "Let the market take care of it." Thought, in contrast, confronts the machine world which Allen Tate considers was born in the 17th century, along with modern science, the modern economy, modern technology. This world has ever since done its best to erase thought via standardization, universalization. In short, to destroy difference and the ability to try a new approach. This is not because of innate malevolence. It is rather the impulse of this machine logic to seek efficiency at all costs, and if that means saving energy by not thinking. The side effects of this are political, social, and cultural. Machine logic must be contextual, and there are even contexts where the logic of machines won't suit machines.

Tate was right when he said we haven't participated in the action of society. We have accepted what has done before because it worked. Or we thought it worked. It worked within certain limits, and with the development of a science of ecology, of non-linear logic, of ever less authoritarian theories of government, we can see ever more clearly that what was accepted in the past is insufficient now. All thought is technology, and so we can develop new technologies of thought that do not limit us, because the limitations that we imposed (for reasons of expediency) do us no great service. Boundaries are lies.

See also Towards a Historical Cosmology and a Very Large Scale Ethics

PhiloSawphy

Some films manage to provoke me to think about old ideas in a new way, and reading some jottings from a while back when I saw Saw (zing) for the first time I thought I would inflict them on the internets. Effectively, what these films are for me is an examination of technology and its relationship with the subject.

The killer (although this word seems too small for the character), Jigsaw, gives his victims explicit choices and instructions which are so basic as to be an affront to our autonomy. Indeed, the question of choice in its entirety is slowed down to a crawl, so that even its most elementary aspect (of a to be or not to be, to be dead or alive) ceases to mean anything. We would take the approach which would regard this film as inhabiting the universe of meaninglessness – but this would be too easy. It reduces the genuine trauma of the encounter with nihilism to the level of cliché.

The creators of this franchise describe their serial killer as anything but this, instead preferring to call him a scientist (though these are not mutually exclusive terms). Is it all one big experiment then? Is it an investigation into the …. no. Short answer. No. First options like this are to be avoided, and so we must make the effort to cease considering “meaning” because it probably won't get us anywhere: this is a world without significance (namely the world from inside Jigsaw's “game”), but it has real enough meaning. Indeed this is just the point that he repeatedly attempts to make. In his attempts to redeem his players through violence, he wants to drive home - via blood and suffering – that meaning is reality, and that this has always been enough. Don't look for it in status, work, drugs. Accordingly, his world is satanic, in the original sense of the word, without the religious overtones (excusing the occasional set-piece evocative of images of Christian suffering). He is the opponent to the views of all his victims. He is the adversary of all who inhabit his creation, which the outside world never truly penetrates unless on his terms (consider Saw II and the policeman's son).

The choices he presents are those of one testing creatures to see whether they are truly worthy of life, but unlike the prologue to the Book of Job there is no implicit defendant against the vicissitudes heaped upon the characters we observe. The subject posited here by the film and by Jigsaw is one that is fundamentally alone and isolated. Co-operation, when it surfaces, is exploitation. This is the political philosophy of the film. It presents a universe, as we said, that has meaning, but this meaning is anchored by evil. This gives us a theodicy. The subject never does good, but rather realizes that they have done bad. Though Jigsaw claims to be freeing his victims, he frees them into death. The choices he offers are made within the realm of psychosis. This gives us both a thanatocracy and a schizocracy. Nobody could forgive, as he asks at the end of Saw III (nor would it be forgiveness as understood within any moral-ethical tradition I can think of, but simply another game.

He punished his protege at the end of Saw III for allegedly having made impossible tests. This demonstrated to his own satisfaction that she was “unworthy” to carry on his work. More consistent would be the interpretation that she was punished for her crudity, for making explicitly that the dice is loaded in his game. It shows his clockwork universe to be a vicious construction that serves only itself, and that the interaction with humans for which he uses it, some kind of perverse educational apparatus, has only one end. That end is for the machine to rend the flesh. It is beyond Kafka's In der Strafkolonie, for even in this story the punishment of the prisoner brings about an epiphany through blood. Saw is the world where the lacunae by which we are constituted as social and ethical beings are played upon with a viciousness that is troubling in its honesty. Our negative constitution, if I can call it this, is made all too obvious in Jigsaw's refrain: 'I want to play a game'. It shows the limits of all these game logics made social. It is the world where we are only ever subject to, subjected.

What we are subjected to is clear. Metal, glass, clock-work. It is low-tech. Aside from video surveillance, much of the tortures would have been possible in the early days of industry- if Thomas Newcomen or James Watt had been completely, bat-shit insane. It is a return to a kind of simplicity, as in the Discovery Channel(s)' documentaries about steam engines, but inverted away from this techo-pastoralism. So many films attempt to convince us of our prowess, of our ability to be collectively in control. Conspiracy films especially manifest this, because somebody, somewhere holds the puppet strings. All Tom Clancy hi-tech propaganda movies say “behold, we are totally awesome”, it is pure techno-ideology. Reality proves otherwise. The mission to kill Osama (never mind the ten years it took to actually find the guy – what about all those super spy satellites) was less Top Gun and more Hot Shots given that they crashed a multi-squillion dollar helicopter in the process.

Jigsaw, trained as an engineer, points to the fragility of our bodies in the face of technology. And not digital, high-tech mechanisms of social control and surveillance (which Jason Bourne shows us can be outwitted anyway), but the metal and grease industrial type, of Blake's dark satanic mills, the capital of Marx and Engels. He talks of his rules as the rules. Disembodied and superficially logical (though diabolical), he says “follow them” and little else. It is utterly cruel because it we cannot follow such rules. These are the linear algorithms of the machine age, but we are inhabitants of the flexible information age. Does he perhaps have a point, noting in our political and ethical freedoms a lack of fixedness of purpose? No. It is utterly cruel, as we cannot revert to such a pre-scientific, dogmatic attitude, and using scientific tools of coercion is simply ironic. We are subjects, and Jigsaw seeks the erasure of this. Jigsaw is the inhumanity he claims to help us escape.

If nothing else, from this mess of philosophical confusion (my fault) we can note a contradiction between what still passes for a popular definition of the subject. You know the one; it rails against inauthenticity and atomization. two different, but related issues. Atomization is a derivative of scientific thinking, the person reduced to the smallest potential actor in the petri dish of human society (in some ways identity politics [wherein I am “gay”, or “a woman”, or “Christian”] is a further fragmentation, the sub-atomic splitting of the person...but there may be something akin to a principle of diminishing returns in this attempt at further precision). Inauthenticity posits some perfect ideal of coherence, one which is inimical to flow and change and development. The technology of today renders both of these irrelevant.

That we can be crushed and sliced by Jigsaw's blades and hammers, vices and spikes does points to the fragility of our bodies, it is true. We are not immortal. Our medical technologies cannot solve everything. We feel pain. This, however, is banal. We do not live in fear of slipping in the shower. We assume our proper-functioning. We live under the maxim that we will operate fairly efficiently, accidents notwithstanding. Jigsaw turns accident into necessity, however, and we are to take this as some sort of great lesson to be learned. But it is not. It is psychotic bullshit. Jigsaw is fucking mental. The best we can make of all this is that we are slowly leaving his machine-logic behind, and accordingly that we need to work to redefine the subject in the terms of our new technologies and scientific developments. The point about Jigsaw is that he should not be possible.

And I am only a little sorry about that pun.  

WAR (hyuh, yeah)... what is it good for? Tech stocks

Any time I get into a conversation with somebody who is either interested in philosophy, or involved in technology, I somehow manage to steer conversation around to a basic problem I have, which is that technologists (Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, Barabasi, et al.) often seem to have an all-too-unambiguous relationship with the applications of their chosen field to warfare. This is a primarily ethical problem, but we can displace it into the political realm if we wish to remain dispassionate. I would like to push our conceptual apparatus even further (mainly to avoid my own rhetorical excesses), and to attempt an alternative view, namely to consider this problem in even more abstract terms.

Step back for a minute, and consider G.K. Chesterton's words on the detective novel:

keep in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions … It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. (from “A Defence of Detective Stories”)

When I reflect on this, it leads me to note the quite peculiar status of nature's relationship with all things man-made. There is, however, no simple good versus evil opposition. There is no reason why we should consider nature to be more beneficial to us than something constructed or artificial. The ebola virus comes from nature, hospitals are constructs – a crude pair of examples to be sure, but consider this as an antidote to any opposing crudity. Man-made and natural simply are, and both have different functions, derivations, etc. To valorise nature over a product of civilization is no more than, to paraphrase LCD Soundsystem, borrowed nostalgia for an unremembered time (which is the essence of Heidegger's “The Question Concerning Technology”). At best, it is the philosophy of “I remember when all this was fields”. Now, returning to G.K. Chesterton, there is nevertheless a tension between these two, given that the natural is what we humans ever attempt to pacify and combat (Francis Bacon), to transcend (Ray Kurzweil). The status quo, on this cosmological perspective, is entropy. This is our opponent.

So, to leap back to where we were with this in mind, war/defence (choose your euphemism) is an example of this will-to-break-down that is the reality of life. This is a fairly awkward definition, but bear with me. It is inevitable, this destruction; there is but a difference of time-scales between the cosmological entropy of the second law of thermodynamics, and our own short-term analogy in social and political conflict. 

This is not an apologia for violence, but it is the recognition of a (deeply unpleasant) fact of our present social reality (and, contrary to arcadian myths of noble savages, it is our past too). What we continually do is find ways to reduce the prominence and frequency of this fact of strife in our lives. It is not geological fatalism to say that erosion happens (allow me this minor contradiction in terms), and so it should not be considered fatalism that to say that similarly a type of socio-political erosion will happen. As I am being crushed under the weight of this belaboured analogy I will just say we should erect defences to protect ourselves and our institutions from this decay. It is our duty to recognise the existence of conflict, strife, warfare – and to do something about it. Human activity, technology, ideas are a part of a concerted effort (better a musical than a martial metaphor) to diminish, in an on-going manner, destruction at our own hands, as well as obliteration by the forces of nature.

Now that I have lost just about everybody with this line of argument, I can return to philosophy and technology. War and destruction are not addressed in the philosophy and history of technology as the catalytic forces they are (only Schumpeter comes close with "creative destruction"). I find this fundamentally troubling that human ingenuity and the ideology of technology (Daft Punk's harder, better, faster, stronger) is so readily applied to killing and exploitation. This is the impulse behind this tortured argument. As such, I have attempted to see matters from a different perspective, considering ourselves on the Darwinian time-scale. Survival in the present moment in order to pass on genes to the future is what is of prime importance to the organism (there are limit situations where this does not hold, but they are exceptional). Thus, any new technology could follow a distribution whereby it will be applied to these immediate needs of survival, even if these needs are only apparent (this requires a whole subsidiary caveat whereby we note the corporate-media nexus, and how “need” is created as part of a market strategy). In my dangerously telescoped argument, rocketry begins as warfare, and becomes a tool of government and science, and expands into the civilian and commercial realm. What was once closed-source becomes marginally less so. Vast sums of money are spent on defence in the United States, partly because it is effectively a standing tradition of budgets in that country to spend the rest of the world (i.e., enemies) into submission, so inevitably a lot of that will filter into research and development.

The top right-hand corner is the amount spent by the U.S. on the Iraq war. Click to see full-size version.

A part of that then will go into military applications, and then a smaller amount of that will be considered viable for actual manufacture and deployment. Even if, as the argument goes, the space race was the Cold War-by-proxy, note the difference whereby the “by proxy” in effect negates “war”. Yet another example is of course the Internet as we know it today, which was developed by the military as a means of decentralizing communication which would ensure that in case of an attack, the system would continue to function.

Returning to the ethical argument, which I bracketed away at the beginning of all this, there is surely room for us to be involved in war/defence, and yet to be doing our best to reduce the possibility of it ever happening. We are aware of the genesis of the Gatling gun, and how its inventor hoped that it would end warfare by its very efficiency and the enemy's fear of deployment; this utopian view did not account for how cheaply politicians and generals regarded their soldiers' lives. That said, the war-gamers at the RAND corporation, DARPA, the NSA, each in their own way undertook the effort to make nuclear war an ever less attractive option via their development of a doomsday logic, namely the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. (Interestingly, a friend of mine informed me that this was communicated to the Soviet side too, in both abstract and concrete terms, for M.A.D. could not have functioned unless both sides were aware of its rules, according to the nature of Game Theory). We can but hope that by developing M.A.D., this leveled out the curve of inevitability which saw an ever increasing number of fatalities with each global conflagration, with WWI surpassed by WWII, which all feared would be surpassed by a WWIII. Large scale war became an ever less attractive possibility, such that now wars are economic, diplomatic, and both of the above, as well as the actual wars which the superpowers waged either by proxy or by feigned ignorance in the second half of the c20^th (see Niall Ferguson's The War of the World on this).

We should allow ourselves to be reigned in, then, by an ethics of technology. Let there be a stricture set down, following Mario Bunge's observation that technology's morals right now are dubious at best, whereby we will not develop any technology which is dedicated to our own oblivion. Let a philosophy of possible worlds (and not just Candide's “best of all possible worlds” which seems to govern the most rosy-VR-goggled futurists such as Kurzweil) consider the worst possible outcomes of each new technology.  

Please give/read generously

The principle of charity is one of those difficult to maintain bits of basic conversational decency, namely the assumption our interlocutor is neither a moron nor evil. All too frequently, however, it is the first piece of excess weight to be jettisoned in the high-speed game of debate. Calm and considered becomes fast and dirty. It is the triumph of a certain type of rhetoric over reason, and the ground for all ad hominem attacks. What I wonder is whether there is room for some middle ground, or some manner whereby we can attack...justifiably.

The first need not be the face-saving, third-way, risk-averse, Swiss-inspired take on argument. Perhaps the reductio ad absurdum  is one way for this to take place, since in this way we accept our opponent's terms, and take them to a final conclusion that in its extremity whiplashes back in a shockwave of ludicrousness on the starting premises. This too, however, involves a certain suspension of the principle of charity, because our partner in this discussion (which is what we should probably consider our opponent to be) can protest that they did not intend for their position or argument to have the scope which we may have imputed. The second could be a kind of "just war doctrine" for argument.

I believe that the best route is to start with a technological, network approach, allowing this to inform our discussions and arguments. As such, if something (an idea, critique) creates more information or even knowledge, then it is valid. If it is posturing, cynical, opportunistic, then it is not. Only that which is constructive (or not overtly destructive) is valid. Cynicism and the "cool" attitude of neo-conservative, laissez faire post-modernism is a performance, an act of being "knowing" rather than the effort to created knowledge.

Your argument is invalid.

Well, all I can hope is that my interlocutors would start with the premise that if I managed to somehow feel my way through the fug of idiocy, to mash my troglodytic hands against a keyboard for long enough to eventually produce something that borders on grammatical consistency and logical intelligibility then that maybe, just maybe, I am not some sort of satanic imbecile hell-bent on the destruction of civilization and indeed the universe itself via the twin idols of incompetence and depravity. I should be so lucky.

The Fallacy of Invention

In the sixth chapter of his book, The Nature of Technology, "The Origin of Technologies", W. Brian Arthur considers how technology is actually brought into being. It follows on from his observation that a technology is the exploitation of a natural phenomenon or principle to a specific end. As such, he notes that:
'Typically several groups of inventors have envisaged the principle in action at more or less the same time and have made attempts at a working version of it. Such multiple efforts and filling in of key pieces make it difficult to speak of "invention" in the sense of being first.'
He goes on to give an example of this, but consider it in the abstract for a moment. If we cannot say that invention in the "hard" sense of the lone genius tinkering away and creating something civilization-altering, then what type of reconsideration does this call for us to make?

Well, if we move from a "hard" notion of invention (which, as an aside, is a part of the myth of creative genius that was adopted to a large extent by those who wrote about rather than practiced scientific and technological investigation. I'm looking at you Mary Shelley...) to a "soft" one, we can then have either:
   (a) the idea of co-operation, with science as a collective enterprise, which is a standard refrain of the sociology of science, and finds support in the advent and successes (though subject to diminishing returns?) of Big Science.
   (b) the idea of there still being an individual innovator, but now their particular works contributes to an external, even transcendent "atmosphere" of innovation. This is the view that notes both Leibniz and Newton worked on the calculus in the c17th, and so there was something in the water that caused them to make these advances.

Well, I have problems with both these views (which is funny, since I was the one who proposed them). The first is a crushingly dull, pragmatic view of science. It is descriptive in a way which doesn't inspire further investigation. It seems content to accept this view as a fact of reality, without setting it up as a platform for further investigation. "This is this is this, and that's that." The second, though extreme to some, as it will appear to set up technology as a disembodied force, an autocatalytic entity that exists unto itself. Radical though this interpretation may seem, I read enough science fiction for this view to not go far enough (italics = I really mean it).

The question I want to pose is the following: if we allow that the standard idea of invention is sufficient, do we go on finessing it into newly watered-down versions (development, for example), purely to conform to some ideal whereby words precisely mirror something found in a natural state in reality? Clearly not, as this suffers the fate of infinite regress - "turtles all the way down". Still, words are imprecise, and we still use them, so we need to borrow a bit from column a, and a bit from column b. From the first in terms of invention we need to recognise the messy aspect of social reality, and from the second we need to recognise that there is something weirdly sci-fi about technology when considered in the abstract. It does seem to have a logic of its own, and so perhaps our social reality ought to reflect this, rather than trying to force invention, scientific creativity, and technology (the sources of this information age) into an out of date model of high-industrial capitalism.

Invention needs to be brought into line with what we know about ideas and how they permeate and power our information civilization. We are a network society, in Manuel Castell's phrase, and we are moving away from the zero sum game logic that resulted in the destructive rapacity and exploitation of the c19th entrepreneurial model. Even the high priests of this (such as Rockefeller, Carnegie), knew their way of doing things could not be maintained. They sought to atone after the fact via their good works (giving us insidious nonsense as found in that hateful coinage "philanthrocapitalism"), blighted in their thinking by a tit-for-tat, linear logic. From the very beginning, however, we must see the structural conditions of any situation.

Caption reads: "Forty-Millionaire Carnegie in his Great Double Role. As the tight-fisted employer he reduces wages that he may play philanthropist and give away libraries, etc."

Back to invention, and we see that invention is always a part of a network of ideas, building upon previous advances, and drawing upon the work of others (in terms of both actual physical, back-breaking labour, and the other mentally creative sort). The short-cuts taken by a business to increase productivity are also part of a network, but one that impacts others, elsewhere, at some other time. Why should our social reality (in legal, political terms) not directly recognise this? The creative commons and open source are a direct and logical corollary of social reality's inherently networked nature. Invention (here a synecdoche, not a straw man...I hope) is evidence of this, and we need greater fidelity in our conceptual apparatus when thinking about technology.

I retrodict the riots

New Economics Foundation Fellow writes about the riots

"Officer Krupke, you're really a slob.
This boy don't need a doctor, just a good honest job.
Society's played him a terrible trick,
Und sociogic'ly he's sick"

I love the NEF, and the way they attempt to tackle problems in a way that is quite different to most think-tanks. That said, I don't see the point of invoking quasi-Jungian collective memory horseshit whereby he smells the whiff of "the faint folk memory of the Gordon Riots in 1780, when racist anti-Catholic mobs went on an orgy of burning and looting across London, culminating in the release of prisoners from Newgate and the destruction of the gaol." Ehh, right. That's lovely and everything, but let's get to the issue at hand right now. If we are drawing parallels with history, then how attempting to see what is not historically conditioned here since mobs have occurred in the past, and will again. We do not need a hermeneutics of violence at this stage; we need a cessation of violence.

This is obliquely approached when he asks whether we have a political language which can adequately deal with this. If we had a more comprehensive, or nuanced approach would this allow us to wonder why we need to politicize a mob? He says that our "political debate is now so impoverished that we barely have the political language to stitch together an alternative." I would suggest is that both hand-wringing and send-in-the-army-hanging's-too-good-for-them can wait, because you cannot have a dialogue with violence.

If it's not on Facebook, it didn't happen.

That's the popular wisdom of today at least. But hey! Let's not assume we are surrounded by idiots and instead try to find the dust off the scrapings off the husk off a seed of truth there somewhere.

In this there is first the point that our memories aren't the best, and so we outsource to various technologies. Previously these would have included journals, diaries, letters, then Polaroids, Super-8, up to the blogs and various other media of networked communication. That's the basic 'storage' problem.

There is also something else, however, which is a bit more numinous, and it is that nebulous idea that fetishists of technology (be they committed, or opportunistic such as those in technology marketing/p.r. [I refuse to give public relations a seal of approval via capitalization]), in terms of a supposed innately human need to connect. Remove the hyperbole, and there is simply the structural resilience of connecting things to other things that brings the storage of my first point to a quite different level.

We are inhabitants of a social rather than a merely physical reality. So if you have a thought or an idea, this is wonderful, but it has no social reality, and it has no reality that can be accessed by anyone other by yourself via your own memories - and that's assuming you remember. So, by embedding this idea or thought in a formal structure (and this is a purposefully inclusive notion, so that it can include writing, painting, photography, programming) it becomes a part of social reality.

In network terms, a node is a node is a node if left to itself. What makes it become more than this is if it is connected. So, by communicating in this manner, an escape velocity is attained such that we can escape the circular logic of  solipsism. The argument for open-source and the commons holds for all thought and creativity. I may have had the occasional idea in the past that I scribbled down in a notebook...but if people can't read it, why bother write it?