The Social Network

Original here.

a new consciousness arising among the engineering and hacker class; one that is coming to realise that it has not been the artists and the philosophers who have been driving the human race forward toward its destiny. Insofar as they have managed to inspire the hearts of man, it was only to offer distractions and wild flights of fancy. Rather, it has always been the engineer that has been at the heart of progress. And now, after long having been taken for granted, the engineering class is preparing to launch the human race into a new era of change and development. The rate of change in this revolution is to be so blindingly fast that the artistic class will be totally at a loss as to how to frame it. The forms of life that technology is now making possible will be so new and alien, the super-structure of the technology itself so complex – that the stories being told by the artists will soon be seen as old and tattered relics of a bygone age.

Of course, the engineers have been driving innovation for a long time. But there does seem to be some truth to the idea that they passively provided (for some profit, of course) the tools that the artistic class then applied in the pursuit of their inspiration. What perhaps is changing is that with the dawning of this new consciousness, the engineer does not feel like they should hand over the products of their innovation to the artistic class to use in pursuit of their next big idea. Rather, they are possessed of their own vision now – one which makes a ideal of the innovative spirit that has always driven them, and rejects the process of idealisation that governs the artistic.