Play A Game With Me….

Crazy week huh?

No sermon, salve, or sorcery this week from me. Just a short thought experiment I want you to play.

I want you to imagine a dating app that finds the one person in the world that is most like you. Every damn interest and vector you can think of. Going out on the date, you basically are out with yourself. How do you think that would be? Would you love it because you had so much in common? Would you hate it because you basically have your own features thrown back at you? Some combination of the above I am sure, but I think having that experience one on one would be off-putting eventually, and we might recognize that its not a good idea.

But let’s say the company is able to spread out their net a bit wider and find the 10 people most like you. How is that group? Now the 100. The 1000. The 100,000. Any number you want really. How far do you think you actually would want to go? How far do you actually want to stray from who, what, and where YOU are? Your values, your way of thinking? How big do you let your circle get?

Even more importantly, how do you think you would start to see people not in that circle? The app would let you fill your whole life with people who already share your values, tastes, and even your thoughts, so how does that effect the way you feel about and treat people outside of that circle? Does the way they think about things seem unthinkable? Do they think the same about you? Do you pity them? Do you hate them? Do you ignore them?

What are they different anyway? Do you reach out and find out why they think the way they do, or do you discuss the matter with your circle of like-minds and figure it out yourselves?

Let’s upgrade the app. What if the app could find the 51% of the world that was closest to you? Now you have real power. You will sweep every election and have little dissent in your party. Those other 49%? What is wrong with them anyway?

I got this little thought exercise from a book I read years ago called “The Age of Earthquakes” but I think about it a lot. The more I look around, the more prescient I find the experiment.

The world are starting to look like this.

Voting is starting to look like this.

We are starting to look like this.

If you are troubled by all that is happening in the US and in the world, I don’t have any salve for you this week. No Sorcery to make it all better. Just a thought experiment that maybe will provoke you to spend more time and effort on understanding than on hunkering down into your algorithm.

Thank you.

Jason