Read Online Escape Velocity by Mark Dery - Free Book Online Page B
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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Teilhard de Chardin excerpt is from an essay written in 1950, but their refrains resound throughout cyberdelia. According to the New York Times Magazine, Louis Rossetto, the editor and publisher of Wired, believes that
Escape Velocity 47
"society is organized by a 'hive-mind consensus' that allows humanity to evolve into ever higher forms, perhaps even fulfilling McLuhan's prophecy to 'make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness.' "^"^ Wired's executive editor, Kevin Kelly, vs^ho has described his first visit to the Internet as "a religious experience," calls the net and systems like it "exo-nervous systems, things that connect us up beyond-literally, phys-ically-beyond our bodies."^^ He believes that w^hen "enough of us get together this w^ay, w^e vs^ill have created a new life form. It's evolutionary; it's what the human mind was destined to do."^^
Similarly, Jody Radzik, identified in a Rolling Stone feature on smart drugs and rave culture as "one of the [rave] crowd's resident gurus," believes that " '[t]he planet is waking up. . . . Humans are the brain cells. The axons of the nerve cells are the telephone lines.' "^^ R. U. Sirius hitches Radzik's ideas to McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin's rhetoric of transcendental liftoff. "I think we're going through a process of information linkup toward the building of a global nervous system, a global brain," he says, "which many people have seen as the inevitable first step toward getting off the planet."
It seems only fitting that John Perry Barlow embraces this all-pervasive paradigm. Barlow stands squarely at the junction, in cyberdelic culture, of the sixties and the nineties: A former "poet and SDS mischief-maker" who according to the New York Times "helped lead the psychedelic revolution at Wesleyan University," he is a Grateful Dead lyricist, frequent Mondo 2000 contributor, and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned with the civil liberties of computer users.^^ A self-described "techno-crank," he is also, like Rushkofif, Sirius, and Radzik, an unrepentant techno-transcendentalist.
"I'll cut right to the chase with you," he told me, in a phone interview. "I think that we-humanity-are engaged in a great work which is and has been, since that moment when we started abstracting reality into information and put cave paintings up in Lascaux, hardwiring collective consciousness. Not the collective unconscious, which is presumably pretty well wired already, but creating the collective organism of the human mind in one coherent simultaneous thing. I don't know why we want to do that but it seems to me that everything we're up to points in that direction. I think about Teilhard de Chardin a lot, [who] used to
talk about something called the noosphere, which was the combined field of all [human consciousness], and how that became stronger and stronger as civilization progressed and how what God wanted was to have someone to talk to on its own level and that was what humanity was in the process of creating. That comes as close as I can to describing what I think is going on.
"Have you ever read [the anthropologist and New Age philosopher] Gregory Bateson? A fruitful way of looking at this is the Batesonian model of mind, which simply stated says that you can't tell me where my mind leaves off and yours takes up. There's simply no boundary condition anywhere and there never has been. There's a coterminous nature of human minds to begin with; it's just a matter of making the tacit connections explicit."
In Cyberia, ideas related to Barlow's are accompanied by es-chatological visions of humankind being drawn inexorably toward "the chaos attractor at the end of time," a teleological endpoint whose arrival wall catalyze "the coming hyperdimensional shift into a timeless, nonper-sonalized reality." Although much of RushkofFs cosmic curtain closer is borrowed from the millenarian musings of Terence McKenna, variations on this
Escape Velocity 47
"society is organized by a 'hive-mind consensus' that allows humanity to evolve into ever higher forms, perhaps even fulfilling McLuhan's prophecy to 'make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness.' "^"^ Wired's executive editor, Kevin Kelly, vs^ho has described his first visit to the Internet as "a religious experience," calls the net and systems like it "exo-nervous systems, things that connect us up beyond-literally, phys-ically-beyond our bodies."^^ He believes that w^hen "enough of us get together this w^ay, w^e vs^ill have created a new life form. It's evolutionary; it's what the human mind was destined to do."^^
Similarly, Jody Radzik, identified in a Rolling Stone feature on smart drugs and rave culture as "one of the [rave] crowd's resident gurus," believes that " '[t]he planet is waking up. . . . Humans are the brain cells. The axons of the nerve cells are the telephone lines.' "^^ R. U. Sirius hitches Radzik's ideas to McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin's rhetoric of transcendental liftoff. "I think we're going through a process of information linkup toward the building of a global nervous system, a global brain," he says, "which many people have seen as the inevitable first step toward getting off the planet."
It seems only fitting that John Perry Barlow embraces this all-pervasive paradigm. Barlow stands squarely at the junction, in cyberdelic culture, of the sixties and the nineties: A former "poet and SDS mischief-maker" who according to the New York Times "helped lead the psychedelic revolution at Wesleyan University," he is a Grateful Dead lyricist, frequent Mondo 2000 contributor, and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned with the civil liberties of computer users.^^ A self-described "techno-crank," he is also, like Rushkofif, Sirius, and Radzik, an unrepentant techno-transcendentalist.
"I'll cut right to the chase with you," he told me, in a phone interview. "I think that we-humanity-are engaged in a great work which is and has been, since that moment when we started abstracting reality into information and put cave paintings up in Lascaux, hardwiring collective consciousness. Not the collective unconscious, which is presumably pretty well wired already, but creating the collective organism of the human mind in one coherent simultaneous thing. I don't know why we want to do that but it seems to me that everything we're up to points in that direction. I think about Teilhard de Chardin a lot, [who] used to
talk about something called the noosphere, which was the combined field of all [human consciousness], and how that became stronger and stronger as civilization progressed and how what God wanted was to have someone to talk to on its own level and that was what humanity was in the process of creating. That comes as close as I can to describing what I think is going on.
"Have you ever read [the anthropologist and New Age philosopher] Gregory Bateson? A fruitful way of looking at this is the Batesonian model of mind, which simply stated says that you can't tell me where my mind leaves off and yours takes up. There's simply no boundary condition anywhere and there never has been. There's a coterminous nature of human minds to begin with; it's just a matter of making the tacit connections explicit."
In Cyberia, ideas related to Barlow's are accompanied by es-chatological visions of humankind being drawn inexorably toward "the chaos attractor at the end of time," a teleological endpoint whose arrival wall catalyze "the coming hyperdimensional shift into a timeless, nonper-sonalized reality." Although much of RushkofFs cosmic curtain closer is borrowed from the millenarian musings of Terence McKenna, variations on this
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