The Science of Discworld Revised Edition

the history of some particular ruler, his greatest battles, excerpts from the Book of the Dead …
    Another important but apparently mundane function of writing in human society is taxes, accounts, keeping track of property. These sound dull compared with the list of battles, but a growing society needs something better than an old man’s memory of ‘who owns what’ and ‘who paid how much’. The list was a great invention.
    With printing came the possibility of disseminating information far more widely, and in quantity. Within a few years of printing becoming established in Europe there were fifty million books in existence, which means more books than people. Printing was a very slow procedure in those days, but nonetheless there were lots of printing presses, and you could sell whatever you printed, so there were plenty of pressures that encouraged printing to flourish. And then complicity really set in, because what’s on a piece of paper can come back and bite you in the ankle. The rulers started putting constitutional rights and obligations down on paper, to protect their own position: once it’s down on paper that the king has certain rights and obligations, then the paper can always be referred to later, and used as an argument.
    But what the kings didn’t realize, to start with, is that when they put their rights and obligations down on paper, they were implicitly constraining their own actions.
The citizens could read what was on the paper too
. They could tell if their king was suddenly assuming rights or obligations that were
not
on the piece of paper. The whole effect of law on human society started to change when you could write the law down, and anyone who could read could see what the law was. This didn’t mean that the kings always
obeyed
the law, of course, but it meant that when they disobeyed it, everyone knew what they were doing. That had a big effect on the structure of human society. One minor aspect of it is that we always appear to be nervous of people who write things down …
    At that point, extelligence and intelligence began to interact complicitly. Once an interaction becomes complicit, there’s no way for an individual to control it. You can push things out into the extelligence, but you can’t predict what influence they will have. What’s out there is growing in a way that may be
mediated
by human beings, but – for example – the people printing books were largely printing them independently of their contents. Early on,
anything
in print would sell.
    All words had power. But written words had a lot more. They still do.
    So far we’ve talked as if extelligence is a single unified external thing. In some sense it is, but what is actually important is the interface between extelligence and the individual. This is a very personal feedback loop: we meet selections from extelligence through
our
parents, the books
we
read, the teachers who teach
us
, and so on. This is how the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit works, this is why we have cultural diversity. If we all responded to the same pool of extelligence in exactly the same way, we would all be the same. The whole system would suddenly become a kind of monoculture rather than a multiculture.
    Human extelligence is currently going through a period of massive expansion. Much more is becoming
possible
. Your interface to extelligence used to be very predictable: your parents, teachers, relatives, friends, village, tribe. That allowed clusters of particular kinds of subculture to flourish, to some extent independently of the other subcultures, because you never got to
hear
about the others. Their world view was always filtered before it got to you. In
Whit
, Iain Banks describes a strange Scottish religious sect, and children who grow up in this sect. Even though some members of the sect are interacting with the outside world, the only
important
influences on them are what’s going on within the sect. Even by the end of the story the character who has gone into the outside world and interacted with it in all sorts of ways has one idea in mind and one only – to become the leader of the sect and to continue propagating the sect’s views. This behaviour is typical of human clusters – until extelligence intervenes.
    Today’s extelligence doesn’t have a single world view, like a sect does. It doesn’t really have a world view at all. Extelligence is becoming ‘multiplex’, a concept introduced by the science-fiction writer