Technology is making it easier to build clones. For example, when you browse Amazon.com for a book or songs, you instantaneously will receive suggestions prompted by your hits for writings and music derived from what other shoppers have similarly viewed. Your selection is compared with thousands if not millions of fellow buyers and their choices. Your purchases produce connections to comparable interests or tastes. If you like those, you must like these.

Likewise, with online movie applications one can select and rank your likes and dislikes and the program will suggest other shows that the accumulated intelligence says you would like. If you enjoy old James Cagney flicks, then by computerized comparisons with others who similarly marked Cagney with four stars you will love, let's say, Humphrey Bogart. And if you voted for Cagney and Bogart then you are statistically also fans of Hitchcock. There are messages such as: people who bought this book or watched this movie also liked these additional items, including this car or this pair of colored socks and bought this size of pants.

There is a problem with this homogenization of reading what everyone else is reading who reads what you read or watches what you watch. The risk is that we can all very easily become the same. We become clones of others, not our own unique beings. We create a social network of similar preferences without personally interacting with another soul. Social networks influence behavior. Who you hang out with makes a difference on your health and your thought. It is not that being alike is wrong. It is just that with monocular vision we begin to see the world like everyone else opines we should. With the collection of sameness there runs the added risk of self-righteousness. If there is no opposing perspective, then the only thing we know must be correct. We become a big circle nodding yes to the next person in line. As the technology expands, the narrowness of view can expand with it.

Learning a different perspective could help us better understand each other and ourselves. If we are molded by these cloning machines we become no more enlightened than scholars from the Middle Ages who believed in a flat earth. To them the upside-down side was populated by a people called anti-pods. By being totally poles apart these anti-pods must be totally bad to their opposite totally good. Therefore as conquistadors and priests the toplanders justified destroying language, culture and people because they were different.