Put down that axe, Molly!
So, what are you saying, is that we're now going to have another translation of the Bible into cyber-speech? "Without beginning the Net created the heaven and earth " or " In the beginning of the Net's creation of heaven and earth, the earth was unformed, and the Net vibrated, and the light and the firmament coalesced". Without beginning, the Net created thoughts, desires, intent, something like that, right? Then we'll all have to get ceremonial clothes, build temples, newer temples, more expensive and faster and faster ones with micro processors, the Great Hacker in the sky's e-mail is not being answered at present. The Net is not a godhead, it's more of a railhead, a terminus, a jumping off point for the Unknown, for life off the screen. Haven't you heard the tune, "Discorporate--Part II" at all the raves recently?
It's just the perfect thing for the Millennium, isn't it? The perfect concept to get people's juices racing, to wind everyone up in the Western world. Mankind always seems to look for THE ANSWER around this time every hundred years, the precondition to the takeoff to the next What, the next section of time in the present retreating at a fixed constant. The only thing is that we're still running in the same place only things look different because we're still here spewing. It's always a question of man endures as he changes. We are always looking for something other than who and what we are, something that we think is the answer to all our woes. This time it's the Net and an almost knee-jerk lemming-like behavior is induced in its contemplation, in its orb, this great forward leap into cyber-space. I mean it's one thing to jump off a cliff of one's own volition, because it's there or because you're interested, quite another to be bullied, hyped, pushed, pulled, seduced and betrayed into doing it. Which is what all my antennae tell me, my vibes. It's an emotionally and psychologically seductive environment, and certainly not as benevolent in its intent as "Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream. Is it not being? is it not dying". NO, I don't think it's "Tomorrow Never Knows", and that's what worries me despite the fact that we're all here.
And there is that problem of control to wrestle with, elements of control out there in the ether. Of course you know the answer to this one, that the only way to fight that is with chaos. We hope it's of the benevolent constructive kind (even though we're just wishful thinking it if we do) which causes beneficial changes in universal consciousness, for that it what cyberworld is hyped as isn't it? If not, it has tendencies to become a tool for etherial kind of corporate capitalist behavior which you so well describe. And so long as it's freighted as a means for amusement and only amusement, then it's easier to frame the whole event within the context of some super Nintendo game, a virtual Nintendo Game. Have you noticed how they're selling the Armed Forces lately: war as high tech readouts. What control? are they are they serious? We're all Bozos on this bus, aren't we? and whether THEY like it or can deal with it, there is no control, and since this is an age of magnificent paranoia, it's a scary proposition. It's double scary because we've allowed to be created a system which is hostile of dreamers, it's hostile because the dreams are of the feedback variety and are distorted.
I personally am not enamored with the auto-hype about it all because then it gets into the emperor's new clothes kind of thing. I watched that when I was a rock critic way back when. I don't like that old high school peer group thing that if you don't see its possibilities then you're less worthy. The whole business is a facilitator, a thing, a tool, the only consciousness it has is the one that's injected into it, like that cyber-materialism which is just materialism only with flashier and more etherial goods. All the Internet is doing is acting as a particle accelerator, an amplifier of those waves, a headless and heedless machine. Without the accreted consciousness, it's just an inchoate force, and the more we try to close it in, the more amorphous it becomes in our paranoid fog which the medium has correlatively created.
I'm always amused about this idea that the government can somehow control, or better, exercise control over the genie that's definitely out of the bottle. CONTROL? They lost it years ago. A government can only hope if a "good" one to beneficently (wherever possible) oversee change, at least making sure that not too many fingers are burned. Now if as they say (or some do) that man is damned, a constant state, then the Internet is just the latest tool for its damnation, another good intention gone wrong.
GOD IS THE PROBLEM? God has nothing to do with it. Our problem is that we seek solutions outside ourselves. We seem to willingly want to give up our freedom as individuals to anything that promises a sweet surcease from doing the work ourselves, because we as individuals have to find the answers in ourselves. Plug in, tune in, drop in, drop out. The more we cede to it, the less able we are to live on our own. Soon enough we will all be so wired in that we will cease to move because we will have become blinded by the light show. Just think about the revolutionary possibilities of NOT being on the net, of living completely in the wind? There's that counter trend brewing in America if you think about those militarist libertarian, anti-tax free soilers militiamen out there on the fringes. ( Maybe because of where I'm living I'm a fringe sort of guy myself).
We're always looking around for God which everyone claims to own. The problem is that we're looking for God in all the wrong places, or better, that we're looking instead of living, and that's what this pictures appears to be to me, my cosmologist.
Pieces,
David
Howdy Dr. Mandelbrot --
OK, so maybe God isn't specifically the problem. From where I sit, the problem seems to be that the God(s) we have created are too small.
If you go back and look at creation mythology in any society, primitive or otherwise, you will see that the myth is self-referential: In other words, the creative deity/deities in each case are imagined to be interested only in the particular tribe or race they supposedly created. Anthropologists from Levi Strauss on down have discussed this phenomenon of self-referential mythology, describing, for instance, how the name of virtually every Native American tribe can be translated to mean "The People". In creation mythology, God (whatever that concept is actually called) is merely the facilitator of the existence of Tribe X. If Tribe X were not to exist, that particular God wouldn't exist either. Which makes sense when you consider that Tribe X invented their God in order for their God to be able to create them.
Jewish theology is a good case in point. Back at the beginning, the Hebrew God was essentially a mirror image of the gnarliest old warrior in the tribe. He was a cantankerous patriarch, riddled with choler, indigestion, lust, envy, and incipient dementia. He could, when sufficiently buttered up, do His supplicants a favor or two: part the Red Sea, bring down the plagues on the Pharaoh, that sort of thing but mostly He was just an unpleasant motherfucker, like the hooligans who created Him. Of course He underwent periodic image makeovers: when the Jews wandered into Egypt and Babylon, He started talking with funny accents; in Spain during the Golden Age of Kabbalah, He became an alchemist and a metaphysician, etc. As a hardy survivor, He knew the value of adopting protective coloration, lest He be subjected to pogroms or an Inquisition.
Arguably, this old Yonkel Yitzy didn't survive the Holocaust. Although He mellowed some with age, He was still a crotchety old cuss at the dawn of the 20th century. He essentially perished because He proved to be the wrong man for the job. As a leader He was fine if you only needed to vanquish a few surly Assyrians or put the frighteners on the Egyptians, who despite their engineering skills tended to marry their sisters and so were rather weak in the wits. But when it came to those damn existentialists, old Yonkel Yitzy turned out to be better at sawing wood than presenting cogent arguments for His right to exist, or at excusing Himself for his myriad of fuck-ups down the millennia. Like all adolescents, sooner or later everyone has to grow up, reject the shibboleths of the older generation, and learn to think for themselves. In the end, that is probably the only thing that has saved us as a species saved us from our Gods, that is: that tendency to want to be adults, to grow up and strike out on our own, however wrongheadedly.
Hopefully we're smart enough to learn from our mistakes. Not all of us, but enough of us to enable the species to crawl forward. Sure, it's always one step forward and three steps back, but as long as some of us can keep our eyes fixed on the larger picture, progress is at least theoretically possible. And that, Professor Einstein, is where we came in with this one -- the larger picture.
My beef is not with Yonkel Yitzy of blessed memory -- it's with the systems we as a species create to keep our viewpoint deliberately small. It's not the fault of our technology that everything nowadays tends to be reduced to "data" and sound bites; it's the small minds, and their petty agendas, who tend to seize control of the technology. The Internet is inherently large; the only limits on it (until the government steps in and commandeers the whole thing, the way the FCC did with radio and television forty or fifty years ago) are the limits of imagination. If we understand that the Internet can be used for enlarging the human sphere of consciousness, rather than closing it off into cul-de-sac of trivia and dis-information, then maybe there *is* life after ConGlomCoMedia. Vigilance is necessary -- the present-day situation, vis-a-vis the Internet, is similar to the way things were in the 1930s, just before the FCC stole the airwaves from the public. That was a bloodless coup; no one saw it coming, no one even realized it had happened, except for a few informed observers whose comments were dismissed as nattering nabobbery. Because the Internet is so universally accessible, it is a far more valuable resource than were radio and television and all the more vulnerable to ConGlomCo maneuverings. The idea of having access to millions of minds, even if only potentially, is apt to get the Strangeloves and Rupert Murdochs drooling uncontrollably. Maybe, as you say, the genie is out of the bottle but you can better believe these strange bedfellows are sitting around someplace right now trying to cook up ways to get *their* three wishes. It's our job, us freelance pallbearers and mutant thinkers, all six or seven of us, to prevent them from harnessing the 'genie' and narrowing our field of vision even more.
Sure, it's revolutionary, in a sense, to be "off the grid", as they say. But in the long run, if you're off the grid, you're also out of the loop. The key to survival in the world today is *information*, real information. And a lot of that information is out there on the Internet. Of course it's in Mark Twain, Tom Paine, Thoreau, and a lot of other places too. In the old days you might have tried a public library if you were looking for subversive literature -- a library or an independent bookstore. Now, since library budgets have been slashed across the country and independent bookstores have been swallowed up in the ConGlomCoMedia takeover, the Internet is often the *only* place you can find the information you need.
It's never easy to reject God and start to think for yourself. But as a species, we have that ability. In its best and highest form, the Internet can serve, not as a bible for the promotion of small thinking, but as a tool of liberation for true expansion. That is, until we hear that the whole thing has been sold to Time Warner.
Your axe-woman at large,
Nigey
(Editor’s note: This ends the first group of “The Lost Episodes”. The authors went on to write a second group, and are contemplating resuming the project. David Walley is currently working on a biography of Herbert Feis.)
