this is an idea that occurred to me a couple of months ago; i've just never gotten around to blogging it.

basically, the idea that society is today organised so that people are less dependent upon each other is a fallacy.

really, i think that there was an old way, which was for each node in a network of people and dependencies between them to have a few strong, short-distance, highly-specific, long-timespan, personal dependencies upon other nodes (for example, that of a farmer on his blacksmith). by contrast, today we have many easily interchangeable, long-distance, abstract, short-timespan, impersonal dependencies upon other people. by "abstract", i mean that i need any checkout operator at a supermarket, not a specific one; so many are easily available to me (because of the size of supermarket operations, their ubiquity, and the transport options i can exercise) that i can choose one of very many to "depend on"; nonetheless, i still depend on having a checkout operator to let me out of the supermarket.

so the idea that we're now somehow independent of each other doesn't quite hit the mark; we still depend on each other, just in different ways, with less specificity.