The Internet is not only going to be a site for the contest of ideas and values, which is what museums do; it could very well be the site of a serious struggle for control of our culture.
We’re going through a rapidly accelerating epistemological sea change. We’re using tools with unprecedented power, and in the process, as the scientist J.Z. Young wrote, we’re becoming those tools. What we’ve lacked is an intellectual culture able to transform its own premises as fast as our technologies are transforming us. The only place you’re going to find that is in sciences where empiricism and epistemology collide, and everything becomes different … We’re living through the most intense change in the history of the human race. It’s absurd to hide one’s head in the sand. It’s just as absurd to commodify that change as the next chic lifestyle … We need to cultivate a critical perspective toward the tools we use.
I would say that a Chinese or Russian future is a radically different future than an American future. Much less human freedom, much less diversity … It’s change done by modeling rather than change done by control. If we establish an information-age, economically decisive, exciting America, the rest of the world will imitate us … You have to go in phases. Phase one is conceptualizing; phase two is applying it to America; phase three is encouraging the world to learn what we’re doing; and phase four is interacting with the world. You’ve got to do it in that sequence, although phases two and three can be parallel … The genius of a free society is that if you are in fact correct about your perception of the future, people will aggregate and reinforce it.
Microsoft is just the next idea; I don’t think it’s the next Standard Oil. My guess is that there will be new classes of inventions and that Microsoft’s period of dominance will be relatively short … You’ll need a driving entrepreneurial force and a pretty large amount of capital just to establish the new systems. If you delay all that with years of bureaucracy and litigation, frankly, you allow the Japanese, the Germans, and the Chinese to figure out what they’re trying to do and simply replace them.
If you can’t control predation and disruption, the community can’t survive … The rule of law has been the primary way: the self-governing capability to set rules. Your bias is always first in favor of freedom, and second focused fairly narrowly on the suppression of disorder rather than the establishment of order – a very important distinction.
Many users treat their desktops as pesky, if powerful, sprites. As online agents, smart networks, and intelligent gizmos permeate the space of our everyday lives, these anthropomorphic habits will leave the Turing test in the dust. Some industry observers worry that all this popular response to computers mystifies our essentially dumb machines. But it’s too late. As computers blanket the world like digital kudzu, we surround ourselves with an animated webwork of complex, powerful, and unseen forces that even the “experts” can’t totally comprehend. Our technological environment may soon appear to be as strangely sentient as the caves, lakes, and forests in which the first magicians glimpsed the gods.
Pagan spirituality on the Net combines the decentralizing force that characterizes the current stage in human development, the revitalizing power of spiritual practice, and the evolutionary potential of technology. Revitalizing our use of technology through spiritual practice is an excellent way to create more of those evolutionary contexts and to unleash the alchemical power of it all.
Computers can be as sacred as we are, because they can embody our communication with each other and with the entities – the divine parts of ourselves – that we invoke in that space.
The Web is … the future of direct-response marketing … Of course, anybody who believes that all of this is not going to have a first-order-magnitude impact, particularly on the entertainment business, is incredibly foolish and will probably end up at a huge competitive disadvantage.
All life, at its core, is a process of digital-information transfer … The rise of cheap processors and parallel architectures creates the ideal digital ecosystems to spawn software rather than build it. Nature – not rational cognitive planning – becomes the guiding force for the next generation of software solutions.