Read Online Escape Velocity by Mark Dery - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Dery
Tags: General, Computers, Internet, Social Aspects, Computer Science, Computers and civilization, Internet (Red de computadoras), Computacao (aspectos socio-economicos e politicos), Sociale aspecten, Ordinateurs et civilisation, Cybersexe, Cyberespace, Cyberspace, Kultur, Sozialer Wandel
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chaotic system appears to be adhering to an underlying order," then rushes in where angels (and chaos theorists) fear to tread:
This means that our world is entirely more interdependent than we have previously understood. What goes on inside any one person's head is reflected, in some manner, on every other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback and iteration, has the ability to redesign reality at large.^-^
By this logic, we arrive at an implausible cyber-reality where the "omnipotence of thoughts" prevails. Rushkoff uses the Gaia hypothesis as a springboard for his speculation that the planet may become self-aware once it passes through "the galactic time wave of history" (whatever that is). Formulated by the English scientist James Lovelock in 1974, the Gaia hypothesis (after the Greek Earth goddess) proposes that the Earth is a homeostatic system. Lovelock theorizes that the global ecosystem's attempts to maintain its equilibrium may be causing it to shift into a state unfavorable to human life as humanity becomes an ever greater threat to life on this planet. Global warming can be seen as an example of this process. In New Age circles, variations on Lovelock's thesis are used to justify claims for a planetary consciousness.
Rushkoff s belief that the planet is becoming sentient has its roots in the futurist Jerome Clayton Glenn's contention that the Earth will soon have as many human inhabitants as there are neurons in the human brain. At this juncture, he speculates, humanity will somehow form a collective consciousness, causing the planet to "wake up." Overlaying this notion with a New Age McLuhanism, Rushkoff sees the wiring of the world, through digital communications networks, as "the final stage in the development ofGaia."^^
Precisely how the fiber-optic interconnection of the number of humans equivalent to the number of neurons in the human brain will give birth to a planetary consciousness is left to the reader's imagination. Perhaps it has something to do with the chaos theory Rushkoff often uses as an anchor for his airier musings. Manuel De Landa, a postmodern philosopher whose ruminations have taken him to the far fringes of chaos theory and computer science, has observed that what chaos theorists call singularities-the transition points "where order spontaneously emerges out of chaos"-catalyze curiously lifelike behavior in nonliving matter: so-called "chemical clocks," in which billions of molecules oscillate in synchrony, or amoeba colonies, in which cells "cooperate" to form an organism.^"^
Extrapolating from these natural processes, in which "previously disconnected elements" reach a critical point where they suddenly " 'cooperate' to form a higher-level entity," De Landa conjectures that the out-of-control growth of the decentralized, nonlinear Internet could result in the emergence of a global artificial intelligence.^^ "Past a certain threshold of connectivity," he writes, "the membrane which computer networks are creating over the surface of the planet begins to 'corrte to life.' Independent software [programs] will soon begin to constitute even more complex computational societies in which [programs] trade with one another, bid and compete for resources, seed and spawn processes spontaneously, and so on."^^ Singularities have given rise to processes of self-organization in the biosphere, he reasons; why not in the computational ecosystem of the Internet? Quoting the computer scientists M. S. Miller and K. Eric Drexler, he concludes, "These systems 'can encourage the development of intelligent [software programs], but there is also a sense in which the systems themselves will become intelligent.' "^^
Indebted though it is to ideas of recent vintage such as chaos theory or the Gaia hypothesis, the techno-transcendentahsm of RushkoflPs cyberians owes much to sixties counterculture-specifically, to the scientific humanism mythologized by SF writers such as Arthur C.
This means that our world is entirely more interdependent than we have previously understood. What goes on inside any one person's head is reflected, in some manner, on every other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback and iteration, has the ability to redesign reality at large.^-^
By this logic, we arrive at an implausible cyber-reality where the "omnipotence of thoughts" prevails. Rushkoff uses the Gaia hypothesis as a springboard for his speculation that the planet may become self-aware once it passes through "the galactic time wave of history" (whatever that is). Formulated by the English scientist James Lovelock in 1974, the Gaia hypothesis (after the Greek Earth goddess) proposes that the Earth is a homeostatic system. Lovelock theorizes that the global ecosystem's attempts to maintain its equilibrium may be causing it to shift into a state unfavorable to human life as humanity becomes an ever greater threat to life on this planet. Global warming can be seen as an example of this process. In New Age circles, variations on Lovelock's thesis are used to justify claims for a planetary consciousness.
Rushkoff s belief that the planet is becoming sentient has its roots in the futurist Jerome Clayton Glenn's contention that the Earth will soon have as many human inhabitants as there are neurons in the human brain. At this juncture, he speculates, humanity will somehow form a collective consciousness, causing the planet to "wake up." Overlaying this notion with a New Age McLuhanism, Rushkoff sees the wiring of the world, through digital communications networks, as "the final stage in the development ofGaia."^^
Precisely how the fiber-optic interconnection of the number of humans equivalent to the number of neurons in the human brain will give birth to a planetary consciousness is left to the reader's imagination. Perhaps it has something to do with the chaos theory Rushkoff often uses as an anchor for his airier musings. Manuel De Landa, a postmodern philosopher whose ruminations have taken him to the far fringes of chaos theory and computer science, has observed that what chaos theorists call singularities-the transition points "where order spontaneously emerges out of chaos"-catalyze curiously lifelike behavior in nonliving matter: so-called "chemical clocks," in which billions of molecules oscillate in synchrony, or amoeba colonies, in which cells "cooperate" to form an organism.^"^
Extrapolating from these natural processes, in which "previously disconnected elements" reach a critical point where they suddenly " 'cooperate' to form a higher-level entity," De Landa conjectures that the out-of-control growth of the decentralized, nonlinear Internet could result in the emergence of a global artificial intelligence.^^ "Past a certain threshold of connectivity," he writes, "the membrane which computer networks are creating over the surface of the planet begins to 'corrte to life.' Independent software [programs] will soon begin to constitute even more complex computational societies in which [programs] trade with one another, bid and compete for resources, seed and spawn processes spontaneously, and so on."^^ Singularities have given rise to processes of self-organization in the biosphere, he reasons; why not in the computational ecosystem of the Internet? Quoting the computer scientists M. S. Miller and K. Eric Drexler, he concludes, "These systems 'can encourage the development of intelligent [software programs], but there is also a sense in which the systems themselves will become intelligent.' "^^
Indebted though it is to ideas of recent vintage such as chaos theory or the Gaia hypothesis, the techno-transcendentahsm of RushkoflPs cyberians owes much to sixties counterculture-specifically, to the scientific humanism mythologized by SF writers such as Arthur C.
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