TECHNOLOGY AND MUTATION

The locus of public decision making has changed. Previously, a public official based
his or her decisions, largely if not even mostly, on actual conversations and
experiences (including reading) - - filing away feelings, impressions, recollections,
thoughts, conclusions, decisions, etc., actively or passively as the case might be, to
be retrieved later when desiring to assess or weigh them as a basis for decision
making. In short, the locus of these pre-decisional events and sentiments largely
was the real world experience (lebenswelt) of the decision maker.
Today, however, the locus of these events and considerations is, increasingly, online.
This is not only increasingly true of the average person in society (as we come to
live and interact more and more on our smartphones and tablets), but especially true
of our media class, opinion elites, and public officials, who have been the first to
move (overwhelmingly) into this new locus.
If, as seems evident, consciousness is the instantiation of mutation, this shifting of
our species decision locus to an electronic medium would seem to imply that
mutation, such as it is, is even now accelerating. But towards what?