The Free Association of Free Individuals

Author: Wang Dingding
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-10-01
Features: The cost of human interaction largely determines the scale of human society and our ability to understand the world. The rapid reduction in interaction costs caused by the network economy is expanding the horizontal revolution of organizations from the production sector to other areas of human society, and will eventually integrate the thinking networks within each of our brains into the vastly expanded external information network, thereby fundamentally altering the traditional "subject-object" cognitive model of humans. The era of "I think, therefore I am" is coming to an end. The internet enables the creation of new knowledge through collaboration among people who do not know each other, while also posing a test and challenge to human "morality." The internet provides the ultimate technical conditions for the free association of free individuals, but only when the moral conditions necessary for such free association are also realized can Marx's ideal from over a hundred years ago become a reality. This collection of reflections primarily discusses these topics.