… is that the most accurate notion of what it means to humans was perfectly summed in the title of Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody.
Never mind what the book’s content so impressively relates. And discard, for simplicity’s sake, any titular allusion to James Joyce, because that’s an enhancement along the lines of how the steel guitar in that one Kitty Wells song sounds briefly like an attacking ship from the video game Galaxian.
But: Recall the convenience store, slightly off your beaten path, in which you discovered a lone Galaxian machine sitting in a dusty corner & you spent the next half hour or so feeding quarters into the machine’s chromed slot, slowly increasing your score as you lost money and gained knowledge and skills – relevant only in that context – with each new game.
Now imagine all the people in the world crowding into that store’s corner, surrounding you & the machine, relentlessly kibitzing on what you’re attempting to accomplish in the game, getting themselves all up in your face, meanwhile continuing to conduct their own diverse business in the aisles, entire cultures colliding between the shelves of sundries, a multitude of personal lives playing out among the candy bars and cigarettes, the tampons and bottles of motor oil … and only an infinitesimal percentage of those people realizing that the Galaxian ship, diving toward your own ship in attack, sounds so much like the steel guitar in that one Kitty Wells song.
But even that infinitesimal percentage will be, like, a hundred thousand people.
That’s the thing about the internet.