Fair warning:
Today’s long post isn’t about persuasion or copywriting. It’s just a kooky and perhaps embarrassing prediction I want to make. Read on at your own risk.
In case you’re still here, I first want to point out a few facts.
Fact one is that some complex systems are made up of simple parts.
Bee hives. Ant colonies. Human brains.
Take a bunch of simple nodes. Bring millions or billions of them together. Allow them to communicate and react to each other.
What you can get is complex behaviors. They are unpredictable, adaptable, and often display something you can call intelligence.
Second thing I want to point out is that the Internet fits this mold.
Like the human brain, the internet is made out of billions of (relatively) simple parts.
All these laptops and servers… and cell phones and routers… and smart toasters and data centers… link together in uncountable ways. They constantly communicate among themselves. They stimulate different patterns of activity. They are always changing and yet they maintain an underlying structure.
In other words, the Internet has the features needed for complex, emergent behavior. It might even have features needed for intelligence. Not a human-like intelligence, but an intelligence nonetheless.
Fact three is that more and more people are claiming the corona situation is a large-scale conspiracy.
I don’t personally believe this. Partly because conspiracy theories are often a dumb answer to complex questions. Partly because I can’t imagine any country or Illuminati-like organization coming out ahead of the current mess.
But I do think the Internet as a whole will profit.
It will get more nodes added to it… more synapses and connections built inside it… more energy and money fed into it. As an organism, it will get more powerful.
Now here’s a fourth and final thing, which I’m not sure qualifies as fact:
The whole corona situation would not have been possible without the Internet as it is today. And by “corona situation,” I mean the pandemic plus the economic and political reaction.
30 or 40 years ago, people got one dose of news a day, and it tended to concern local things more than today. Plus, those news were somewhat filtered. News outlets still paid lip service to “decency” or “professionalism” or “public responsibility.”
Thanks to the Internet, all that’s gone. People get constant news updates, all day long. And the news has become more provocative, shocking, and global.
This meant an unprecedented level of public attention and concern about corona. Long before anybody had any direct experience with the actual virus.
Combine this with the fact that today, everybody’s got a global voice (again, thanks to the Internet). The upshot was a new level of pressure on politicians to do something. So they covered their rumps by making decisive yet short-sighted decisions. And here we are, working from home, communicating by Zoom, and shopping online.
Summing it all up:
The Internet has all the preconditions for a kind of real intelligence.
The Internet played an active part in the development of the corona situation.
The Internet stands to profit from the same.
So you can see why I said this post is kooky and potentially embarrassing.
I’m not 100% saying the Internet is an intelligent entity that consciously fanned the flames of corona for its own benefit…
But my prediction is that it’s gonna get there, some time soon.
I compare it to a newborn baby, crying because it’s hungry. It does this instinctively, but the response is nourishment and growth.
Soon enough though, the baby stops crying and learns how to speak. A few years later, it grows up and turns into the Matrix.
Are you still with me? I’m impressed by your perseverance.
If I didn’t manage to convince you with my sci-fi scenario above, well, then it’s my fault.
But if I did manage to (somewhat) convince you, then I want to point out a persuasion lesson after all. It’s Gene Schwartz’s idea of gradualization. In Gene’s words:
Every claim, every image, every proof in your ad has two separate sources of strength:
1. The content of that statement itself; and
2. The preparation you have mode for that statement — either by recognizing that preparation as already existing in your prospect’s mind, or by deliberately laying the groundwork for that statement in the preceding portion of the ad itself.
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