Glactic Median Citizen

Created by Steven Baltakatei Sandoval on 2025-01-27T22:59+ZZ under a CC BY-SA 4.0 (🅭🅯🄎4.0) license and last updated on 2025-01-27T22:59+ZZ.

Summary

Below is a stream-of-consciousness essay I wrote after hearing a friend disilusioned with their work in helping develop smartphone technology.

My argument is that the smartphone is likely a very important ingredient for the future well-being of humanity to resist and fix the fascist tendences of current United States politics. However, like the printing press, anything that connects humans more, will unleash potential conflict previously inhibited by lack of information flow. In other words, racism and fascism are the first order results of any new communication tool. See Gutenberg's printing press and religious fervor sparked by Martin Luther. Ultimately, the printing press was a necessary ingredient for achieving a better society, but there was an ugly transition period required for societies to adjust. We're in such an adjustment period now.

Introduction

The productive reprieves we occasionally experience when people act en masse for their own collective benefit belie the stupidity of people.

Sometimes these tastes of rationality occur after revolutions or rarely when a benevolent king abdicates power. However, the forcing function of civilization is always the intellectual capacity of the median citizen.

Or is it? Anthropologists say that hunter gatherers were polymath artisans. They had to be in order to craft tools in a world without infrastructure. Are archeologists simply not able to find ephemeral networks of ancient equivalents to today's postal workers? Even the most erudite and handy 21st century person requires enormous amounts of resources to craft a computer chip; some video streamers successfully do so as a hobby but never for much profit. No, computer chips are made at-scale by groups of highly specialized people in semiconductor fabs, relying on transportation network, legal, and financial systems to facilitate the trade. Ordinary people simply buy tools with money, which is it's own can of worms.

But getting back to the question: is it really the intellect and crafting ability of the median person that defines the upward or downward course of civilization in some cumulative happiness space? Even the act of defining the space's metric as “cumulative happiness” sounds sketchy. But the hangnail dangles: how can we extend those brief moments of monopolists turning philanthropist, of people pursuing art and science rather than power, of exploration without conquest? Yes, I'm talking public libraries, school lunches, Broadway, and space probes.

Missing ingredient

Perhaps there is some missing organ. Some brain chemical of empathy that Homo sapiens have yet to develop that inhibits collective action. The macrobiological equivalent of what converts unicellular singletons into biofilms into microbial mats into cylindrical sea sponges into people that launch space probes into galaxy trekking scientists searching for anything more interesting than the Big Bang. Maybe it isn't a brain chemical but some material-agnostic architecture of neural network data filtration that simply isn't viable with our meat brains. Maybe raising a galactic citizen from Homo sapiens stock is like trying to build a skyscraper with wet sand. I suspect this is the case, but I doubt such a cognitive-social disruption will come sooner by simply sitting back and letting the currently fashionable oligarch-in-charge say “Let some rando create this transhuman ubermensch Frankenstein and if they prove profitable and exploitable, well buy their startup out and install our own subroutines into their kind and ride this Akira-class Leviathan to the stars.”. The kind of person I want to build that will value exploration over conquest and science over influence must be architecturally robust enough to survive attempts at corruption by mayfly exploiters. Put them in a den of hungry wolves and they'll convince them to build bridges, use protein printers instead of eating sheep, and lower their Gini coefficient.

Whatever the answer is, it must be found or all these thoughts and people will quickly become squiggles in mildly radioactive sandstone when the rollercoaster ride through happiness space dips below the medieval threshold, even momentarily. It's a bit ironic that the most enduring gestures of the Roman Empire is the Nazi salute, itself a product of fascist Italian longing for a lost golden age for centuries until the Renaissance. The knowledge of how Rome fell is obscured due to data loss caused by the same fall, but if we could track the daily life of a median citizen in detail, I think we could, from our future perspective, see echoes and analogues of demagogues and charlatans from our time. Surely a robust history recording mechanism should be an integral part of the transhuman galactic citizen.

By the way, is this pining for a transhuman superhero racist? Eugenical? Do I have such a low opinion of the median US citizen to not expect them to become more than a geologic film of microplastics footnoted in textbooks as “Anthropocene”? Honestly? Yes. Does that make me a misanthrope? No!

Generational improvement

“Children should strive to be better than their parents.” That “should” carriers a lot of philosophical baggage, but the sentiment, I think, is a popular unspoken one, albeït evolutionarily enforced; babies do not simply grow on trees and children are indistinguishable from suicidal drinks until they can vote; possibly beyond, now that I think about it. But, nevertheless, as the author of this prose preparing to toss it into the Commons, I think we, as the current generation of Earth citizens owe it to the next seven generations to invent the tools they'll need to improve themselves. Did sailors spooling out trans-Atlantic telegraph cables have a similar sentiment? Do fiberoptic technicians feel moral satisfaction at connecting rural communities? I hope so, but I've never read any accounts. Microblogging such ideas is such a niche hobby.

So, what kind of groundwork should we lay for the transhuman hero? I omit the “super” since I'm concerned with median people, not outlier geniuses that I believe are mostly Gilderoy Lockhart salesmen anyway. Wikipedia and Creative Commons covers History. Debian GNU/Linux and it's use of the Free Software Foundation's GPLv3 license covers Software which History today runs on. ActivityPub protocols like Mastodon and Lemmy cover social Media. RISC-V is a start for lowering the barrier to improving computing. Solar panels are the obvious choice for decentralized energy production resilient from centralized manipulation. The IETF and W3C covers data protocols, although the boring parts of physical infrastructure and hardware implementation need attention. As far as governance, a mix of Modern Monetary Theory, socialism, and environmentalism, driven by decentralized money (See Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson) is the most equitable mixture I can imagine.

As for changing up the baseline Homo sapiens body plan, the most realistic augmentation I can think is already underway with the smartphone. If artificial augmentations to human senses make them a cyborg, then prescription glasses make those that use them transhuman to some degree. It would be nice if I could sit on my laurels and say “Smartphones exist! The galactic citizen is already here!” similar to how someone from 1890 could point at a steam locomotive and declare “Steam power exists! Prosperity from global trade is here!”. But smartphones didn't prevent Donald Trump from becoming elected. In the short term, they helped rally the median US citizen, which the 2024 Presidential election proved is okay with burning the government down with fascism so long as it makes their gut feel good. Likewise, the invention of steam engines did not prevent Standard Oil from monopolizing fossil fuel energy in the US. Anti-trust legislature from elected representatives later rectified that, but only after the damage was done and, even then, only temporarily until the Reaganomics of the 1980s. Should I be thinking more along the lines of Neuralink, the closest popular approximation of the EyePhone of Futurama? Again, I'm more concerned with the median citizen, not techbro toys. Paper ballots, newspapers, books, and guillotines were sufficient for the French Revolution. What I'm looking for is more along the lines of Gutenberg's printing press rather than Samuel Colt's 1846 six shooter. Perhaps a pocket neural net / personal knowledge database issued to everyone in elementary school to help them integrate their learnings and observations? Again, that sounds like a smartphone. Maybe “universal cultural integrator”, the secret sauce I'm looking for, will become a standard function next to “stopwatch”, “pocket calculator”, and “flashlight”. Like, a sapient talking embodiment of Wikipedia or, more palatably, a shadow of yourself that you treat as an extension of yourself much like how mitochondria are integral parts of eukaryotic cells.

Smartphones to resist corruption

Of course, the smartphone is still very much a toy of privilege built using rare earth metals mined with exploited labor and burdened with proprietary licenses. The printing press facilitated the Enlightenment by lowering the cost of acquiring information but also lowered the cost of religious propaganda leading to violent ideological conflicts. The potential for conflict existed before the printing press; its advent arguably unleashed it. Similarly, smartphones lower the cost of information transfer and unleash existing potential for conflict; the reëlection of Donald Trump and his Maga movement are examples of this: wealthy monopolists and upper middle class sycophants pay for and spread propaganda cementing fascist power in election results by convincing the median voter that a strong man mob boss isn't so bad. Facebook notifications, supercomputers. Twitter centralized control of social media data flows in data centers, offering a turnkey propaganda machine ready to exploit by the likes of billionaire Elon Musk who did buy it in 2022 and used it in 2024 to promote fellow billionaire Donald Trump. So, even if, long-term, smartphones are the key ingredient for a galactic median citizen, they will unleash unrest and trigger conflicts as they connect racists with racists who suddenly get much entertainment and satisfaction from swinging around their unrealized collective power.

Conclusion

In summary, given the cyclical nature of politics, one should not assume the high points of societal satisfaction are the norm. Instead, analyze the median citizen and their capacity for empathy. Communication tools like printing presses and smartphones help improve the median citizen's ability to overcome barriers to transmit information; however, first out the gate are malicous applications reflecting festering pent up conflicts held back until that point by those same barriers. Therefore, initial misuses of communications technology should not discourage developers from improving the technology.