“For this invention will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” -Socrates

In the same way the record of human events and ideas was externalized to the written word, similarly are we undergoing a transition in social capital. Social capital “in the old days” when humans lived in villages and towns was based on personal judgment and witness. “Knowing someone” was esssential largely because otherwise you were a nobody unless someone would speak for you, and they would speak for you out of their personal memory of who you are and what you’ve done. In the village this was easy, as virtually everyone would know you (or about you) from birth, and your character would be known even as you grew and matured.

In modern society the problem we face with social capital is that we often must work with and rely upon people we – and no one else we know – has known for any appreciable amount of time. We are constantly interacting with and relying on strangers. For example, we rely on strangers for medical care, we rely on strangers to practice politics, we rely on strangers for virtually every aspect of our lives. It is actually a miracle modern society works at all, given how little we can depend on people we know for anything – from among the group of “people we know,” very few are apt to possess the specializations required for all our needs.

Social capital, represented in people’s personal knowledge and willingness to testify as to character in the court of public opinion, is at an all time low in human history. The trend has only been increasing isolation. Outside of family, very few people ever know someone across their whole lifetime – and fewer of us are even forming or maintaining families. Likewise, as a result of the decoupling of vertical (parent/community-to-child) and horizontal (peer-to-peer) transmission of memes, an increasing number are actively alienated from their parents. We have on our hands something like a slow-motion crisis. At some point, a dearth of social capital contributes to conditions predisposing people to anti-social behavior.

Reputation is an informal mechanism of recognizing someone’s social contributions, whether positive or ill. Behaviors that would get one a reputation in a small town are unlikely to be tractable in a city. In a small town, one’s outrageous behavior is apt to be reported between peers, which gives more of an incentive to pro-social behavior. In a large city, there is less of a negative incentive against anti-social behavior. If you burn one person (or social group), you can simply move on and find another. The more of our interactions in society are dominated by anonymization, the less an incentive there is for developing pro-social behavior along any dimension.

Yet, it is also a fact that one is likely to get the best healthcare in the city. The best food, the best services, and so on are all available in cities. Modern society has developed mechanisms that act to approximate what reputation used to accomplish in villages and towns. For example, there are college degrees, which act as a proxy for someone’s expertise in a domain. We have journalism which acts a public record – if an institution were to go against expectations, they would be called out for it in the news and they would lose customers and supporters. These are external mechanisms that accomplish what used to be purely internal.

However, even these external mechanisms are subject to entropy. College degrees are not a perfect proxy for reputation. Many people are not suited to college but who otherwise deserve the reputation that we normally accord to one who possesses it. They would acquire such a reputation in a village or town where other people get to know them for their character, but in modern society the same lack of social coordination that prevents anti-social behavior being widely reported also prevents pro-social behavior being widely reported. In other words, unless one happens to be suited to the mechanisms and institutions recording external representations of social capital, one “falls through the cracks.” But they are not really “cracks” as such – from the perspective that modernity represents a transition from internalized social capital in the form of people knowing about you to externalized social capital in the form of degrees and public record, they are better understood as gaps that haven’t been closed yet.

Modern society is currently failing vast swathes of the public by having no better mechanisms of external social capital. It isn’t a solution to put more people through college, as that reduces the meaningfulness of the signal – but it isn’t a solution to provide nothing for everyone else who isn’t suited to college, either. College is expensive, costs a great deal of time, and only works as a measurement of certain aspects of personality, e.g. the willingness to spend a lot of time going to class and study for tests, which only represents a small part of an individual’s social capital. A lot of individual social capital is going unrecognized and unrecorded – not because it doesn’t exist, but because we don’t have institutions or mechanisms apt to measure and record them.

The solution is to develop mechanisms and institutions capable of accounting for the better part of character and personality. We are approaching something like a public record of personality people can search in mechanisms like social media, but these are very approximate and spotty in terms of signal. However, the public front people express on social media is not necessarily going to represent everything we might like to know about a person. There might be measurements of personality and character requiring long term analysis individuals cannot trust themselves to perform, e.g. due to their own personal limitations and bias. Likewise, social media accounts can be easily deleted, and some people might never begin one in the first place.

The long term trend of the externalization of social capital ends in panopticon. Cameras everywhere, surveillance drones, centralized collection of all data, AI’s sifting through all that data to detect characteristics directly from video, purchasing, music listening history, etc. AI’s that can tell you about people’s personality strengths and defects. China is taking a step toward this kind of world with their social credit score, and we will inevitably develop our own social credit scores as well. It will eventually be necessary to account for social capital. And if we do it right, we might make up for the deficits of our current system of external accounting of social capital. If we do it right.