Just in case the methodological questions that have been raised about Stanley Milgram's original "six degrees" experiment have led anyone to doubt the reality of the small world phenomenon, let me begin by noting that Tim and I once lived in the same group house, and Will Wilkinson's girlfriend was at a neighborhood rock show I attended last night.

Turning to our own ad hoc community, Clay asks:

The question it leaves me with is this: if we have a way of increasing people's satisfaction with their activities in flexible social spaces, is that a net gain, because it increases satisfaction, or is it a net loss, because blissing out on our local social contexts lowers our sense of injustice, in a way that makes us less likely to fight against it?

Aside from endorsing my erstwhile roomie's remarks, I think the best I can do here is to paraphrase, from memory, a scene from the '80s sitcom Who's the Boss:

Tony Danza: It's like my mother used to say, if you've got a headache, an aspirin will get rid of the pain, but it's not fixing the problem.

Chubby kid: But if you've got a headache, the pain is the problem.

Which is to say, to the extent the injustice we're concerned about here is a species of inequality rather than some form of absolute material deprivation, the subjective sense of "relative deprivation" that comes from recognizing one's position in the hierarchy is the central harm that accrues. If an injustice falls in the forest, and nobody's there to point and laugh, should we make a sound? To the extent that what we're centrally concerned with is absolute deprivation, on the other hand, I'm just not exceedingly worried about knitting as the opiate of the masses, or persuaded that large numbers of people will come to believe that casting Nullify Disease is an adequate substitute for health insurance.

I should probably add a caveat here: As a fan of Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment, I don't want to be read as glibly suggesting that experiential satisfaction is all that matters in life, or that we can legitimize a wrong by conditioning people not to expect better. But in the instances where it's intuitive to distinguish between happiness and value, we typically need to invoke some form of false consciousness--quite literally in the experience machine case. That is, we may regard someone as worse off despite being happy because their subjective state doesn't link up with their core values or metapreferences in the right way: A man happily believes his spouse loves him, when in reality she regards him with contempt. And in these cases we want to say something like "if he were thinking clearly and fully informed and free from various sorts of cognitive bias, he would either not be happy, or would not wish to be happy on these terms." But if we take seriously the idea that there is no inherently privileged status hierarchy, I don't think we're entitled to say anything of this sort about the cubicle rat who cares less about a promotion than about leveling-up his Night Elf.

It may also be worth bearing in mind that the "social bases of self respect," to borrow John Rawls' phrase, are not just a "primary good" that must be fairly distributed in any just social order. They are also a core prerequisite for achieving or maintaining justice. Clay writes a fair amount about the use of social media to mobilize groups for political action, but what I have in mind here is the prior role that diverse and overlapping identities play in enabling people to step outside their situations, and in giving them the psychological resources to resist unjust authority.

I recall a documentary that aired shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II, in which an interviewee, talking about the importance of the papal visit to Poland, explained: "He gave us our identities back." What he meant was that it was not enough for people to be dissatisfied with the communist regime; they needed a kind of mental platform on which to stand in opposition. And this is a pattern we see across cases of resistance to injustice, even when people are acting in isolation: Almost nobody has the internal resources to act against the grain supported only by their personal conscience. They need an alternative identity and community, if only an imagined one, to provide an alternative value ranking as the basis for their action. World of Warcraft may appear an unlikely fountainhead of social justice, but maybe the sense of personal efficacy that comes from slaying orcs gives our cubicle rat the confidence to demand better treatment in other spheres of life.

Finally, in the unlikely event that the readers who've made it this far aren't utterly gorged on my rambling, I limbered up for this discussion with a post back at my own site on some of the ways "ridiculously easy group formation" promotes dilettantism--which I tend to regard as a good thing.