RealityApologist posted:

The pruning will happen whether or not we advocate for digital alternatives. Natural systems grow to over capacity, and then settle back into more stable configurations. That's to be expected.

But pruning doesn't mean genocide and killing, which by the way we're already doing quite a lot of without any digital anything. Pruning just means a reduction of the connections between nodes. Technological unemployment is a kind of pruning; it removes the redundant or unnecessary jobs being performed by big clumsy humans, with machines that perform more accurately and efficiently. That means more people unemployed, which means that resources will have to be distributed in some other way than through the labor process, because we can no longer rely on the network of employment for allocating resources. In some sense, it frees up the economic situation to find other stable patterns of interaction.

For instance, you see people worried about the economic implications of things like renters services. If I can just rent a car when I need it from Zipcar, or get a ride from Uber, then I'll never need to own a car. So you get pruning in ownership, and that corresponds to new structures that support the new sharing networks.

Another kind of pruning we'll see is probably a reduction in the size of the really massive social networks like Facebook, as the digital population gets better at finding and cultivating more personalized and immediate communities in other parts of the net. These are forms of organizational pruning that are perfectly normal and expected and shouldn't give anyone cause to freak out. In many cases we can anticipate and prepare for these events, like we do for earthquakes and tsunamis.