Is the destiny of the internet to become an integrated extension of the physical world, a separate parallel universe, or to supplant and subsume the real world of today? This question, which has been abstractly rattling around science fiction for decades, is so far unresolved.
It feels clear now, though, that after a long period of peace, the digital and physical worlds are going to war against each other. The conflict brewing today is likely to play a major role in defining the ultimate destiny of the internet, not to mention the version of “reality” we will inhabit in the future.
On one hand, the physical world is unquestionably and overtly attacking the historically open and free space of the internet. Until recently, the physical world’s swing toward globalization and openness was in line with the internet’s design and ethos. But we are now headed in the opposite direction. The global move to erect digital borders, eject specific apps from different regions, and actively control speech online are all direct assaults on the internet by real-world institutions.
On the other hand, internet meme-driven culture and power structures are starting to actively attack physical institutions as well. The summer of social and political unrest in the U.S. reflects the decisive crossing over of internet memes into the real world. The protests, the assaults on news organizations and academic institutions, and the tearing down of statues mirror internet power spilling over from the virtual world and attacking real-world hierarchies.
This escalating conflict is happening, of course, against the backdrop of Covid-19, which has rapidly increased the relative importance of the digital world in people’s daily lives. The pandemic has noticeably split the economies of the two spaces as tech stocks accelerate while the physical world’s economy pulls back.
No one can predict how this period of direct conflict will end and what technological path we will ultimately end up on.
In one version of the future, the physical world will successfully assert its dominance over digital space and bring the internet to heel. In another version, internet power structures will subvert real-world institutions, and we will live in a future dominated by internet culture. It is also possible that the two spaces will simply become more distant from each other, and people will choose which “space” they want to live in.
What is clear, however, is that we are in for a very tumultuous few years of outright conflict between the internet and the physical world. The era of dual citizenship, when we can live in both spaces and freely move between them, is coming to a close.
Here are a few of the key factors to consider as this conflict—and the internet’s ultimate destiny—plays out.
1. Centralized, hierarchical power structures located in the physical world and digital, meme-driven distributed power structures are fundamentally incompatible.
Power in the physical world flows through hierarchical institutions. This is not by accident: Facing the high friction of movement and community and the scarcity of finite resources in the real world, hierarchies provide the efficiency and control needed to hold power, coordinate people and drive change.
But in the alternative reality of a frictionless and abundant virtual world, central power and hierarchies do not work, for two reasons.
First, there is the problem of content. Hierarchies need to bring a lot of people along with a slate of ideas, which forces relative moderation to allow broad appeal. We all know that in the frictionless world of the internet, moderation loses to extreme positions and speech.
Second, there is a fundamental recruitment problem with hierarchical power in the context of the digital world. All movements need people to work on their behalf. But in the abundant and frictionless virtual world, where any leader or organization can easily speak to everyone directly, there is little to no valor, honor or purpose in being a local surrogate tasked with a strict set of guidelines and policies to apply. In the context of the abundance and freedom of digital space, people require more self-actualization, ownership and sense of personal identity to take action.
An alternative form of decentralized power in the form of memes, though, does work on the internet.
Meme power isn’t efficient in the real world because it is hard to precisely coordinate or control and it doesn’t handle internal conflict or alignment around scarce resources well. Meme power is, however, well suited for fast, frictionless and abundant environments where everyone is competing for attention.
That’s the case for two reasons. First, digital meme-driven power requires extreme positions and extreme speech. In the all-out competition for attention, we all know extremes beat moderation.
Second, and more important, digital meme-driven power recruits participants by creating broad platforms and slogans that are easy for participants to remix, adapt and evolve on their own. This is important because it allows participants to feel like they have a personal stake in the story they are telling to their community rather than simply being a cog in the machine.
2. The incompatibility of physical and digital power structures makes compromise hard.
The deep incompatibility of power structures in the digital and the physical space creates a serious problem when one form of power attempts to assert itself in the historical space of the other.
Specifically, it is impossible for a hierarchy to negotiate with a meme-driven form of power because no one specific is in charge with whom the hierarchies can negotiate. And there is no single consolidated viewpoint for the demands coming from the memes.
This is the major challenge we are seeing with the summer of political and social unrest in the U.S. Fundamentally, several online meme-driven power structures have started manifesting in the real world, driving protests and taking actions. What we see happening in the real world feels like the internet brought to life.
This challenge of communication is only compounded by the fact that the real world works in moderation and the memes use very extreme language, sometimes as stand-ins for very reasonable policy ideas. The meme power requires extreme speech to spread. But that extreme speech, when brought to the real world, is incongruent with hierarchies that are used to negotiating with each other within the context of policies designed to appeal very broadly.
This problem of different forms of power “crossing over” cuts the other way as well. As physical-world hierarchies look to assert themselves in frictionless and abundant digital space, they are similarly going to find it hard to broadly force adherence to their rules against a decentralized backdrop of constant evolution without defined leaders.
Where this leaves the concept of moderation is the real challenge. Neither form of power can reasonably negotiate with the other in most cases.
3. Certain companies and platforms, like Facebook, are caught in the middle of the fight because they exist at the border of the digital and physical worlds.
In traditional kinetic warfare, the most dangerous place to be is at the border. The same is true of the war between the internet and the physical world.
Some organizations, like Facebook, are caught in the middle because their explicit mission is to bridge the digital and physical worlds. If you go back to the earliest days of the social network, the challenge was how to use real identity and trusted institutions to unlock safety and trust in what had been a scary alternative online space. Where other social products have grown up as more internet native, with pseudonymous identities and cultures, Facebook has always tried to bridge two worlds.
In times of peace, the interface of two civilizations is a wonderfully strategic place to be. But at times of war it is the most fraught position, as we are seeing now. And that means other platforms that are more internet native, ranging from Twitter to Reddit, are less caught up in the conflict.
While the product mission is one way organizations get caught between worlds, the other way they get embroiled in conflict is via their employees.
For a generation, business publications have been talking about how to prepare your workplace for the next generation of employees that have been brought up online. The general advice, exposed in stuffy business schools, is to move away from the hierarchies of the physical world and model your business practices in line with the decentralized, meme-driven, individual empowerment of internet culture.
The forward-leaning organizations that have adopted these policies—opened internal communication wide, made all employees think of themselves as owners and embraced decentralization—are now the organizations that are most at risk. That’s because their policies imply one thing about structure and power, which is at odds with the realities of their physical-world businesses needs.
There is a strong argument that in the context of this conflict, organizations are going to have to reevaluate what world they truly operate in and rematch their organizational structure to what they as businesses need to deliver. Organizations are going to have to pick sides, because fluidly moving between the virtual and physical worlds will no longer be possible.
4. The battle for identity will shape much of the outcome.
While there are several aspects to the conflict between the real world and the virtual world, the battle over personal identity is probably the cornerstone that will define how the rest of the conflict will play out.
In the physical world, you have one identity, which you live with for your whole life. Your identity is the sum of who you are, your relationships, your social capital balance, the trust others have in you, and the meaning of your words. This makes your single real-world identity extremely precious, and makes people very careful about where they use it and how they express themselves. This has a massive moderating effect on how people cooperate and how they represent things to each other. It also generally leads people to value assimilation, absorbing the people and cultures around them.
In the digital world, people are free to create, maintain and destroy as many identities as they want. This is magical and valuable for many people, and has allowed a flourishing of identity and speech experimentation on a personal and societal level that could never have happened in the physical world. In the digital realm, people seek out niches, focus on uniqueness and embrace differentiation of identity that is otherwise simply impossible.
If you talk to many young people, they will tell you how their alternative Instagram and Twitter profiles are deeply important to who they are, and how the ability to experiment with identity has changed them. Some will even tell you their invented identities are more important to them than their real ones.
That presents us with two paths we could go down as a society. One is a digital world where an individual cycles through many identities and personalities and can create more as they see fit. The other is a world of traditional singular identity and reputation. Which path we choose will be the cornerstone of which ecosystem, digital or physical, comes to dominate.
So when we think of the major fronts in the war between the digital and physical spaces, the battle for identity is probably the most important thing to watch.
Democracy, and much of our decision-making for allocating scarce resources in the physical world, requires a singular identity so people have a clear reputation and social capital balances they care about. The innovation and freedom of the digital space presupposes freedom of multiple identities. It is hard to see how these two frameworks can truly coexist. And frankly, it is hard to see much of the internet functioning with real names and identities, just as it is hard to see voting and decision-making work in a world of pseudonymity and disposable identity.
5. Covid-19 is an important and unexpected wild card driving the conflict in 2020.
If you had asked me a year ago which direction the war between the physical and the digital world would take, I would have put my money on the physical world asserting dominance over our virtual space.
The coronavirus, however, is changing the equation, for several reasons.
First, now that people are locked out of the real world in the U.S. and stuck living more and more of their lives in digital space, the relative importance of the physical and digital worlds to people is evolving quickly. The internet is becoming more of a legitimate peer to the physical world than it was even a few months ago. For many, digital identities, which were a second thought for most people in comparison to their real-world identities, are now rising in importance.
Second, strictly from an economic perspective, the internet is getting stronger while the real world gets weaker. It is shocking to see the internet ecosystem of companies and services completely diverge from the physical world. This is a simplistic way to think about it, but consider that while the real world suffers the blows from Covid-19, the stocks of most digital companies are up, not down.
Third, there is the jobs factor. We live in a time where across the real world countries are turning away from globalization. Yet the internet is fundamentally global. In a world where national economies were strong, this might have been a direction that the physical world could assert over the digital world. But in a world of high unemployment, it is likely that people will look out of necessity to the globalized and open internet for employment.
If the jobs people need are in digital rather than physical space, the internet’s side of the fight will gain a lot of power. A world where people come to earn money mostly online and disconnected from the physical world is a world of internet ascendancy.
Overall, the timing of Covid is a fascinating historical anomaly whose impact will be studied for generations to come. There is a strong argument that it will be seen to have dramatically tipped the balance of power in the war between the digital and physical worlds that was coming anyway.
6. We’ve reached the end of the rainbow.
Personally, for as long as I can remember, I have been a big believer that the internet should and can be shaped to extend reality, not replace it. It is why I was so deeply a fan of Facebook’s push for a real-world identity. It is why I am very fearful of developing virtual reality technology, which I personally enjoy but think is very socially dangerous.
I am a lover of physical-world reality for many reasons. We have thousands of years of hard-won experience as humans figuring out how to get along in the real world—and moving out of the real world into a newly created digital space is dangerous. I also fundamentally believe in progress for humanity. I want to see us come together and take on big important missions like alleviating poverty, exploring the solar system, advancing science, and working on deep problems related to understanding ourselves and our world.
That said, as many would point out, that is a somewhat moral argument, and there are other answers.
The alternative future, where we construct a digital universe that allows us to leave physical reality and instead come to occupy a space of unlimited digital abundance where all of our interests and desires are fulfilled, is a valid, if to me a bad, future.
Whether your moral and political views on these questions align with mine or differ, I would sum up the two things to keep in mind as we watch the next few years unfold.
First, we are watching these abstract conflicts and beliefs come into practical focus as the internet and the physical world go to war. Neither side is going to give up without an explicit fight.
Second, even if you believe in internet culture and meme-driven power, when it spills over into the physical world and attacks physical institutions, it is unclear how to deescalate that conflict. Reality still matters. So long as the world is not actually abundant, and we live with the realities of scarce resources and zero-sum allocations, hierarchical power structures and organizations are critical to our existence. So be careful when you attack them.