I've been thinking a lot lately about what I think is my primary focus in life, which is social technology. I don't mean technology with a social component like facebook or twitter. Instead, I mean constructs and systems that can be made in the domain of social interaction. Probably the easiest example of social technology is language, which allows people to communicate with one another. Language is a particularly interesting example since it contrast with the stereotypical definition of technology in an interesting way - while language can be deliberately designed and instructed, it also happens in a very natural or organic way. I believe this is a general feature of social technology, but more on that later. I fundamentally think that most important thing for us to be developing as human beings is social technology. The past twenty or thirty years should make it obvious to most people - better industry and better technology are not going to meaningfully fix or advance human problems or experiences. The bottom line for the problems that plague society today remain in place - a need for better empathy, a need for joy and happiness, a need for community, a need for support systems for grief. I think that social technology is the best way of addressing all of these problems. I think that groups and cultures in which social technology is meaningfully developed are the groups and cultures that are the best at addressing and providing solutions for these problems. Unfortunately, social technology comes with a few caveats. One of the most significant caveats are that social technology does not exist outside of people's minds. Instead, it needs to be developed in people's minds. For social technology to work, all the people involved need to support the social technology in question. Here's an easy analogy: if two devices have bluetooth modules, but one device has a newer version of bluetooth than the other, then they have to use the older form of bluetooth in order to communicate. of course, while mechanical technology has delineations like version numbering, social technology does not. This makes sense, since social technology is fundamentally formed at the level of each individual. each person's set of social libraries is going to be different. I think it's not unreasonable to imagine social technologies like libraries installed on individual computers. Each person is like a computer with a set of libraries installed that tells them how to process incoming information. Some of these libraries are general use, like vision processing, but other libraries are focused specifically on communicating with other computers. These libraries might anticipate a certain set of flags or metadata in the communication that they receive from other people-computers, and have rules about how to process those flags or metadata. These libraries would be what we call the social technology. Let's consider the types of social technology that might exist. At a base level, a lot of social technology is required to expand the bandwidth of communication. If we consider the "primary" communiation to just be the words that we speak to one another, we can tell that level of communication happens on the order of bytes per second. As denizens of the digital age, we can tell that that's millions of times slower than the rate at which computers communicate. Human beings get around this in two ways. The first and most obvious way is via non-verbal communication. When you include vocal inflection, tone, body language, timing, context, etc, the level of information that can be communicated goes up dramatically. the information space that can be conveyed with these analog signifiers easily multiplies the information rate a thousand fold. There's a perspective that autism causes incorrect function in this library or social technology. With this in mind, it can be clear how much more communication is necessary for you to convey the same level of information when these things don't work properly! The second way is by encoding a vast and powerful internal library to process the information that is given. informally, we call this "culture". Consider the phrase, "Are you ok?". It's a very small message, information-wise, but depending on the context and culture that you're in, it can communicate a massive amount of information. The raw sentence can additionally combine with the above additional information to explode in terms of information density. If someone were to ask me "Are you ok?", the message I might actually receive might be more like "I've been noticing that you've been acting differently in ways that indicate that you're having a hard time dealing with life the ways you normally would. I want to find out if there's anything i can do to help your situation because i care about you as a person and I want to create a space where you can talk about whatever has been causing you trouble without judgement." I imagine that this example would be intuitive for a lot of people, but let's break down the ways that cultural context can provide additional cues. When communicating with other people, there's many details that are extremely nice to have as metadata. One of these details is mood. At its lowest level, mood metadata probably boils down to "bad mood or not" or "safe to interact with or not". Depending on how a person grew up, this metadata may be aggressively or inaggressively established. When this library gets better, it's able to sense mood with deeper resolution, happy, sad, upset, frightened, etc. When this library gets really good, it may be able to recognize moods in others as quickly or even faster than people recognize moods in themselves. This might seem weird or presumptuous, but it makes sense - a mood can inhibit a person's ability to recognize their own mood to the extent that someone else can recognize it more quickly. Why do people feel compelled to express their opinions? Because this is another piece of social technology. Expressing your opinions broadcasts what your values are to others and reinforces your values in others. Both of these things support social technology. It encourages the same libraries being installed in other people's systems and it encourages people with the similar libraries being in your community.