"What is it with “connecting people” and really terrible ideas?"
Hehe, nice framing. I'd say the answer is "power." Collectivising, aggregating and connecting people yields power, new abilities that exist as a product of increased network size.
Yuval Noah Harari (grand narrative historian) identifies this network effect as the defining characteristic of human progress. Increased size of a functional group.
The bottlenecks are travel and (more importantly) communication. To him, the difference between modern palaeolithic sapiens and archaic humans (including archaic sapiens chronospecies) is "fictions:" abstract concepts like kingship, nationhood, religion, law, money and such that allow cooperation between strange individuals. Airplanes yielded similar power.
Increasing cooperative group size and the quality of that cooperation yields power, a lot of it.
Air travel improved group size and quality. You can send a letter, visit or bomb places 1,000 km away within an hour. European ships allowed the subjagation of foreign places, transcontinental trade and centralised global administration.
Hehe, nice framing. I'd say the answer is "power." Collectivising, aggregating and connecting people yields power, new abilities that exist as a product of increased network size.
Yuval Noah Harari (grand narrative historian) identifies this network effect as the defining characteristic of human progress. Increased size of a functional group.
The bottlenecks are travel and (more importantly) communication. To him, the difference between modern palaeolithic sapiens and archaic humans (including archaic sapiens chronospecies) is "fictions:" abstract concepts like kingship, nationhood, religion, law, money and such that allow cooperation between strange individuals. Airplanes yielded similar power.
Increasing cooperative group size and the quality of that cooperation yields power, a lot of it.
Air travel improved group size and quality. You can send a letter, visit or bomb places 1,000 km away within an hour. European ships allowed the subjagation of foreign places, transcontinental trade and centralised global administration.