Words&Dirt

“There was only one thing you could do on Wegetit.com: show that you understood someone’s framing of an idea. There were two text fields, one for a word or concept (very short) and a longer one, for about a tweet’s worth of definition. You could let fly your idea of what something meant and wait. After a while, people would respond with restatements of your definition. If you thought a restatement accurately represented your meaning, you could click the Wegetit button. There was no button for disagreement.

Ideas were usually presented in the context of some issue or problem area, such as, in this case, aboriginal land claims. That was the domain the Haida negotiators wanted him to stick to. He started with basic ideas like government and agreement and worked his way up to emancipation and good faith. He had no idea who the people he was agreeing with were––identities were anonymized––but somewhere out there were thousands of people who shared his understandings of many basic concepts, even if they might disagree with his politics. Wegetit was drawing lines connecting all those people, and every agreement strengthened the connections.

According to Terry, this made Wegetit.com the opposite of every other Internet site with a discussion forum, because however well intentioned they might be, by their very nature discussion forums manufactured misunderstanding. Divergence, not convergence, was the rule in a forum. But give a problem––especially a thorny political problem––to a constellation of connected people on Wegetit.com, and however diverse they might be in their perspectives and attitudes, they would at least understand one another when they talked about it.”

––Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future, “Degrees of Freedom,” by Karl Schroeder, pg. 221-2

“The Republic had long been dead––now it was passing out of fashion too. ‘Shaggy simplicity is yesterday’s news. Rome’s made of gold,/And coins in all the wealth of the conquered globe.’ Greatness might have cost the Romans their freedom, but it had given them the world. Under Augustus their legions had continued to display all the martial qualities of old––pushing back the empire’s frontiers, slaughtering barbarians––but to the urbane consumer back on the Campus Martius, it was only distant noise. War no longer disturbed his reckoning. Nor, much, did morality, or duty, or the past. Nor, even, did warnings from the heavens. ‘Portents,’ a contemporary historians noted with perplexity, ‘are never reported or chronicled nowadays.’ But for this there was a self-evident explanation: the gods, surveying the scene of leisure and peace that Rome had become, had clearly decided that there was nothing left for them to say.

‘The fruit of too much liberty is slavery’ had been the mournful judgment of Cicero––and who was to say that his own generation, the last of a free Republic, had not proved it true? But the fruit of slavery? That was for a new generation, and a new age, to prove.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 5795-808