That’s the message over at Eject! Eject! Eject! where Bill Whittle has posted another of his long essays. You Are Not Alone is broken into Part 1 and Part 2.
This is hard to sum up (which is why it’s so long), but he makes a fascinating connection between the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a concept from game theory, and the Greek/Biblical idea of the “Remnant”.
At the risk of spoiling his surprise, he is proposing “Ejectia” an on-line community which hopes to use the internet to perform an end-run around the end of Western civilization.
I still have a lot of reading to do (the real meat is in the comments). A couple of quick observations: I think his analysis leading up to the proposal is insightful. He may be on to something with the observation that the internet allows we, “the masses” to communicate with each other without the interference of the elite. I’m less enthused by his idea of everything in Ejectia being “free”. That smacks uncomfortably of “from each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs”. It could be all the Adam Smith I’ve been reading lately, but I really don’t see how any self-sustaining community is going to succeed without a free market. Maybe I’m misreading his proposal, though. The links are here for you to see what you think, and for me to have handy.
