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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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Clarke.
Although it was published in 1953, Clarke's SF classic Childhood's End was a reference point for sixties counterculture, as evidenced in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Noting the novel among the "strange, prophetic books on Kesey's shelf," Wolfe links the conviction shared by Kesey and his Merry Pranksters-that they were hurtling toward "that scary void beyond catastrophe, where all, supposedly, will be possible"-to Clarke's evocation of "the Total Breakthrough generation" that becomes "part of the Over-mind . . . leaving the last remnants of matter behind."^^
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose screenplay was cowritten by Clarke and the director Stanley Kubrick, takes up the theme of posthuman apotheosis. At once a psychedelic and a technological epiphany, the film evoked a journey to the center of the mind even as it realized the cosmic promise inherent in John F. Kennedy's proclamation that America would head for the "New Frontier," space. Passing through the hallucinogenic, light-streaked "Stargate Corridor" of the "voyage beyond the infinite" at the movie's end, the astronaut protagonist arrives at the place where odysseys into inner and outer space meet-the realm of the numinous, where he transcends humanity altogether, metamorphosing into a godlike "Star-Child."
Childhood's End and, after it, 2001 presage the cyberdelic posthuman-ism that crops up in Cyberia, where the magic mushroom-gobbling philosopher Terence McKenna asserts that evolution is poised to break free of "the chrysalis of matter . . . and then look back on a cast-off mode of being as it rises into a higher dimension."^^
More profoundly, the cyberians' visions of escape velocity derive from the teleologies of two thinkers whose ideas percolated into sixties counterculture: Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin's contributions to the emerging mythos of techno-transcendentalism were, at points, strikingly congruent. McLuhan's concept of a "global village" borne of communications technologies evolved, over time, into a vision of the "[pjsychic communal integration" of all humankind, "made possible at last by the electronic media."^^ This global
46 Mark Dery
cosmic consciousness is not unlike the evolutionary epiphany foretold by Teilhard de Chardin, who proclaimed the coming of an "ultra-humanity" destined to converge in an "Omega Point"-a "cosmic Christ" w^ho is the "consummation of the evolutionary process."^' McLuhan, a devout Roman Catholic, once observed that the psychic convergence facilitated by electronic media
could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man. ... I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will. . . himself. . . become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey.*^
Likewise, Teilhard de Chardin, a theologian and paleontologist who predicted the reintegration of science and religion, maintained that
[w]e are today witnessing a truly explosive growth of technology and research, bringing an increasing mastery, both theoretical and practical, of the secrets and sources of cosmic energy at every level and in every form; and, correlative with this, the rapid heightening of what I have called the psychic temperature of the Earth. . . . We see a human tide bearing us upward with all the force of a contracting star; not a spreading tide, as we might suppose, but one that is rising: the ineluctable growth on our horizon of a true state of "ultra-humanity."^^
The McLuhan quote is from his 1969 Playboy interview and the
Although it was published in 1953, Clarke's SF classic Childhood's End was a reference point for sixties counterculture, as evidenced in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Noting the novel among the "strange, prophetic books on Kesey's shelf," Wolfe links the conviction shared by Kesey and his Merry Pranksters-that they were hurtling toward "that scary void beyond catastrophe, where all, supposedly, will be possible"-to Clarke's evocation of "the Total Breakthrough generation" that becomes "part of the Over-mind . . . leaving the last remnants of matter behind."^^
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose screenplay was cowritten by Clarke and the director Stanley Kubrick, takes up the theme of posthuman apotheosis. At once a psychedelic and a technological epiphany, the film evoked a journey to the center of the mind even as it realized the cosmic promise inherent in John F. Kennedy's proclamation that America would head for the "New Frontier," space. Passing through the hallucinogenic, light-streaked "Stargate Corridor" of the "voyage beyond the infinite" at the movie's end, the astronaut protagonist arrives at the place where odysseys into inner and outer space meet-the realm of the numinous, where he transcends humanity altogether, metamorphosing into a godlike "Star-Child."
Childhood's End and, after it, 2001 presage the cyberdelic posthuman-ism that crops up in Cyberia, where the magic mushroom-gobbling philosopher Terence McKenna asserts that evolution is poised to break free of "the chrysalis of matter . . . and then look back on a cast-off mode of being as it rises into a higher dimension."^^
More profoundly, the cyberians' visions of escape velocity derive from the teleologies of two thinkers whose ideas percolated into sixties counterculture: Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin's contributions to the emerging mythos of techno-transcendentalism were, at points, strikingly congruent. McLuhan's concept of a "global village" borne of communications technologies evolved, over time, into a vision of the "[pjsychic communal integration" of all humankind, "made possible at last by the electronic media."^^ This global
46 Mark Dery
cosmic consciousness is not unlike the evolutionary epiphany foretold by Teilhard de Chardin, who proclaimed the coming of an "ultra-humanity" destined to converge in an "Omega Point"-a "cosmic Christ" w^ho is the "consummation of the evolutionary process."^' McLuhan, a devout Roman Catholic, once observed that the psychic convergence facilitated by electronic media
could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man. ... I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will. . . himself. . . become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey.*^
Likewise, Teilhard de Chardin, a theologian and paleontologist who predicted the reintegration of science and religion, maintained that
[w]e are today witnessing a truly explosive growth of technology and research, bringing an increasing mastery, both theoretical and practical, of the secrets and sources of cosmic energy at every level and in every form; and, correlative with this, the rapid heightening of what I have called the psychic temperature of the Earth. . . . We see a human tide bearing us upward with all the force of a contracting star; not a spreading tide, as we might suppose, but one that is rising: the ineluctable growth on our horizon of a true state of "ultra-humanity."^^
The McLuhan quote is from his 1969 Playboy interview and the
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