14 March

Porn has sullied the word, but one thing Tarde did that is unique is reshape all of our ideas, around the concept of penetration. There isn’t a part of life that doesn’t rely on the idea of individual isolated ‘bits’ (people, atoms, countries) and aggregated groups of these bits. People argue about the individual versus the State, for example, or the UK versus Europe, my rights versus society’s rights, victim versus perpetrator etc. Tarde threw that all away. He said every ‘bit’ is already mutually penetrated by all other bits. Every person is already social in all their most individual thoughts, every country is already connected to everywhere else. It also means there is no separate individual and no separate group, there are just different degrees of penetration. I couldn’t stress enough how much this changes every part of life. (The graphic is from an IT ad, IT people do penetration testing to see how easy it is to breach their systems.)