Associate with anyone, anywhere

In this way, we will have freedom of association in a radical sense; increasingly freed from geographic constraints and equipped with powerful search tools, we will be able to pick out exactly the people we want to associate with, and we will be able to associate with them whenever we want. We won't devolve into disembodied brains, of course, and geographic proximity will always play an important role in our lives. The point, rather, is that we can maintain more continual relationships with whomever we associate with, near or far.

This is already happening as family homes break apart into separate media spheres for each individual, everyone with their own television, telephone, and Internet connection. It is also happening in industry as people change jobs more quickly while maintaining networks among their former co-workers. And it will intensify as the informational architectures of our various relationships become more complex.

All of this is good and bad. The opposite extreme from an always-on world is feudalism, in which everyone assumes that all relationships are fixed, static, permanent, and God-given, so that everyone knows their place and fully expects to spend their lives maneuvering within a specific, small, stable repertoire of relationships.

Feudalism has its virtues: if the relationships are good ones, then they can acquire a depth and comfort that comes from the confidence that they will always be around. The problem with feudalism, of course, is that most of the relationships aren't good ones, so that everyone is trapped in the relational world they were born with.

The always-on world has the opposite problem. It is a world of freedom, but it is also a world of anonymous global forces that ceaselessly rearrange all relationships to their liking. We don't understand this world very well, but we will soon have plenty of opportunity to study it first-hand.