all potential competitors. Crude versions of the same pattern are seen among chimps, wolves, and many other species. The logic of Darwin and Malthus may be pervasive on other worlds, too. Could this help explain the daunting sky-silence?

One important exception was by far the most successful Earth-based civilization—the Scientific Enlightenment—which broke from the ancient feudal pattern, fostering instead what Robert Wright, author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, called the “positive sum game,” encouraging individualism and copious self-criticism. (It’s a theme typified by self-reproachful messages like James Cameron’s movie Avatar.) What better way to detect, reveal, and resolve myriad potential pitfalls than by unleashing millions of diverse, highly educated, technologically empowered citizens to swarm (like T-cells) on every apparent failure mode, real or imagined?

This noisy process was supercharged in the late 1980s when the U.S. government did something that still seems historically anomalous: releasing the Internet it had invented from near-total control, simply handing it over to the world. Ponder, in the light of the past 4,000 years of recorded history, the likelihood of such a decision. Was there ever anything comparable, under the most beneficent kings?

I want to defend this rambunctious culture of freedom for all the usual reasons (such as “freedom is good!”), but I wonder. Such an experiment was rare here on Earth and seems unlikely to have been tried very often, out there across the cosmos. In fact (and here’s the point of this digression), our latest, tech-amplified version of the Enlightenment could become a fiercely effective problem-solving system helping us become the exception… a sapient race that survives. That is, if it is allowed to. And if it ever matures.

But getting the most from our potential also requires better tools. In his book Smart Mobs (2002), social scholar Howard Rheingold envisioned a future when the savvy, liberated populace forms resilient, ad hoc, problem-solving networks that pounce on errors and dangers, adapting much quicker than stuffy, traditional, hierarchical institutions. Recall that citizen-power was the

[Con TinUeD froM P. 120]

success may depend
on new skills and
tools that empower
our “adolescent”
traits, the drive that
makes us hunger for
adventure, surprise,
even fun.

only thing that worked well on 9/11. We’ll surely need such agility and initiative in times to come.

Still, no one has yet disproved the hoary adage that “The intelligence of a crowd is that of its dumbest member, divided by the number in the crowd.” Could any blog, social-networking site, or twit-mesh be described as a “problem-solving discourse”? Not unless you have very low standards of “discourse.” Today’s communications platforms seem obstinately, even proudly, primitive, encouraging dumb-down groupthink that Jaron Lanier called “digital Maoism” in his Future Tense essay “Confusions of the Hive Mind” (Sept. 2009), not the vigorously new-citizenship I forecast in my 1989 eco-thriller Earth.

Connectivity scholar and Google Vice President Marissa Mayer says the Internet is in its “adolescence.” Indeed, many of the traits tech-zealot Clay Shirky ( http://www.shirky.com/) adores and that Web critic Nicholas Carr ( http://www.roughtype.com/) abhors are qualities we associate with our own teenage years. Take the rampant flightiness of scattered attention spans, simplistic online tribalism, and tsunamis of irate opinion; picture 10 million electronic Nuremberg rallies. These punk attributes blend and contrast with positive adolescent qualities like unprecedented vividness, creativity, quickness, alert compassion, and spontaneity. No generation ever read or wrote so much… albeit, never was such a high fraction of the writing such drivel.

There’s nothing wrong with self-
expression. Not everyone is required
to engage in erudite discourse. But
must the medium conspire to make
discourse next to impossible, leaving
each decade’s version of “conversa-
tion” more terse and lobotomized?
Must the interface assume that super-
ficiality is the chief desideratum and
self-fulfilling expectation?

David Brin ( http://www.davidbrin.com) is a scientist, technology speaker, and author whose stories and novels have won Hugo and nebula awards. He is also the author of the nonfiction book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? (Perseus books group, 1989).