_We here at NBN have a soft spot in our hearts for Cypher, the traitor who turns his underground colleagues in to the evil Agent Smith in one of the Matrix movies. Anyway you cut it, as Cypher says, ignorance is bliss. Which is why we’ve chosen not to ignore this article by Harvard evolutionary biologist David Rand. He writes about the statistically significant tendency of people in social networks like Twitter and Facebook to include in their networks only folks who are friendly and cooperative. With typical scientific discipline Rand belabors the “methods” of his experiment at the expense of the conclusions that might be drawn from it. At NBN it’s our job to recklessly speculate in ways these stogy scientists would love to but can’t, so let’s get started.

_What can NBN conclude from this study? The Hollywood smash hit movie series “The Matrix” might well be human destiny! Rand’s study about social networking tendencies seems to overlook the fact that the social interaction that makes this mass cooperation possible is really only available through the internet. Physical realities make it impossible to interact in one week with the number of people you can reach out and “touch” in one hour on the internet. That’s why NBN predicts virtual reality will inevitably replace what today is considered real reality. Who are we kidding? Look at this video above. Virtual reality is already replacing the real thing.