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I sometimes think about informational life before the invention of effectively instantaneous communication aka telegraph. Before then it didn’t matter how important a bit was, it traveled at the speed of transportation on average. Best case was line of sight optical semaphore.
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Civilization was designed around fundamentally delayed information flows. Want to track a shipment? That information could not really travel faster than the shipment itself. Want to tell someone you’ll drop by for dinner? Drop by now to tell them (or send another human)
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Lightspeed communications create a temporal duality in civilization. States that can be synchronized instantaneously vs those that cannot. Materiality is non-simultaneity. The fact that a thing has mass is less relevant than the fact that it cannot be somewhere else instantly.
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It’s easier to understand this in futuristic terms. If you’re chatting with someone from Pluto, it’s a 5 hour delay. Optimal way to talk is via duplex 5 hour monologues. The optimal way to use letter writing when telegraph and telephone are NOT options for escalation is forgotten
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Yes, great point! But Virtuality is winning here: every cloud connected device becomes a material projection of the *same* "zone of synchronous Virtuality". The same view of Wikipedia. The same knowledge, at the same frontier of the "now".
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Additionally, the homogeneity of material experience we experience in our daily lives (due to mass market prod of everything) leads to a lack of distinguishing texture. Just like homogeneity of fast food chains & gas stations renders photos of highway rest stops indistinguishable
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