Have you ever been inside a cult? I certainly have. When I was at Bain & Company, the management consulting firm founded in Boston by Bill Bain, we were known as ‘Bainies’–a reference to the Moonies, then a prominent cult. Bain & Company certainly ticked Arnott’s three boxes. Curiously, though, I derived enormous benefit from my three years at Bain. And most of my colleagues, past and present, seem to agree. Bain regularly tops surveys of the best place to work. All excellent businesses have strong cultures, and most are cultish. For sure there are dangers, especially to family life, if outside links are neglected, if you don’t share the firm’s values, or if it fails. But intense experiences are sometimes hugely empowering, especially if you are aware of the dangers and don’t stay too long.
So what do we make of hubs?
They are wonderful, and they are flawed.
They are wonderful because they are the main locus of human cooperation, the reason why we humans have freed ourselves from the tyranny of nature and been able to build a world richer in every way. Human cooperation has flourished through the division of labour–by building ever more varied and specialised hubs which do better things than our ancestors ever dreamed possible, and do them more competently and using fewer resources than in the past. Trading between hubs and nations has been at the heart of progress, creating a more interdependent world, where variety and individual differences soar alongside our number of personal connections and the links between all humans.
The upshot has been a huge increase in the number of hubs we join during our lives, and in the choice we have of hubs to join. The choice is great, but so is the opportunity to make the wrong choice, and the cost of doing so.
Choice and specialisation are marvellous, because they increase personal opportunity and diversity, allowing each of us to become a distinctive individual with unique talents and roles. We gain the freedom not only to benefit and learn from an infinite variety of hubs, but to start our own, whether this comprises a new venture or a new group of friends.
But choice can also overwhelm us. With so many options and so much time pressure, we often neglect to spend sufficient time on the few decisions that will make us happy or miserable–the groups we decide to join or leave. It is as well, therefore, to acknowledge the traps that hubs present. The psychological forces we’ve cited–groupthink, authority, conformity, fear and our tendency towards empathy with the people we see, which can make us stop thinking and acting independently–combine to produce what we call ‘the gravity of hubs’. Powerful hubs–those to which we make commitments of time and emotion–exert a strange control over us, dragging us ever deeper into the purposes of the groups and powerful members within it, restricting outside influences or even cutting them off, and often causing us to stay within the group longer than is good for us.
The gravity of hubs, and their bias towards authority and groupthink, exhibits itself in all kinds of ways, from the false consensus leading to the launch of a faulty space shuttle, to protectionism, communism, apartheid, mindless violence in support of a football club, suicide cults and many other ills. How could so many big banks in the United States and the United Kingdom, with full complicity of regulators and almost no internal dissent, have built their businesses on sand? How can the most democratic and open societies bring themselves to lock up suspects for years without trial, or practise rendition and torture? These are grave phenomena indeed, and are not just due to the villainy of bankers or politicians, who, after all, are much like you and me.
More prosaically, the gravity of hubs may lead us to spend years working or living where we are not happy or most useful. In business, hubs often supplement their natural pull with financial manipulation, which itself has insidious routes into our minds–golden handcuffs and options or bonuses that ‘vest’ in the future a sum of money that is ‘ours’ but which we can’t access yet. Of course, we don’t want to ‘lose’ what is rightfully ours, so we stay. We may cut ourselves off from wonderful contacts and opportunities, and sacrifice our time, judgement, conscience and freedom to explore the outside world. Being wired to connect may mean we’re just not wired to disconnect; and we probably should more often.
It pays to be discriminating and demanding of our hubs, just as they are of us–to experiment, to find hubs where we are truly part of the same network in body, mind and spirit, where we share the same values and aspirations, where our individuality is not curbed, but rather enhanced.
We said earlier that humans are constantly evolving new hubs and new types of hub. The Internet is further evidence that we are moving to a world of ever more hubs–cyberspace makes it easy for us to join increasing numbers of hubs, and many of us spend a lot of time in them. Pundits claim the Internet changes everything, that it’s the biggest change in communication since the invention of language. Is that true? And is it good for us? The network perspective can show what the World Wide Web really means for our lives.
CHAPTER SIX
CYBERSPACE–BRAVE NEW WORLD?
Does the Internet change everything?
I was trying to describe an unthinkable present. Science fiction’s best use is the exploration of contemporary reality…Earth is the alien planet now.
William Gibson43
Vancouver, Canada, 1984
Having told the Vietnam draft board that his life’s ambition was to try every mind-altering substance known to man, William Ford Gibson fled the United States for Canada. By 1984, he’s a struggling science-fiction writer hunched over a typewriter, writing his first book. Perhaps inspired by the year–or the pursuit of his life’s ambition–he imagines a future where consciousness, reality and technology blur. He coins a new word:
Cyberspace:
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions…in every nation…a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
44
It’s striking that a computer illiterate using an ancient typewriter created the idea of cyberspace–and of netsurfing and the matrix– a decade before the Internet took off. Gibson’s book, Neuromancer, went on to sell 6.5 million copies. Time magazine named it one of the top hundred modern English novels.
The Internet does seem to maintain a futurist aura. Perhaps it’s the lingering ghost of Gibson’s writing–inspired sci-fi can be amazingly predictive, and his vision was pretty strange. Or is it the overworked prophecies by ‘experts’ that the Web changes everything? Perhaps it’s just our fear of the new and fast-changing Internet. Huge hubs like Facebook seem to spring up from nowhere, often displaying behaviour that seems, to the uninitiated, hard to understand or even weird. Is cyberspace really so distinctive and important?
Have you ever asked, ‘What has the Internet done to my life? Has it changed me at all?’ In 1964, as television began to dominate our media diet, Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan famously claimed that ‘the medium is the message’. He meant that the dominant medium affects our thought processes in a fundamental way, so that when the dominant medium changes, so too, in profound ways, do society and even human nature. Is this true, and has the Internet generated such fundamental changes?