What we’re doing furiously, as fast as we can, is exteriorizing the human nervous system into a global organism of some sort.
It’s very important for people to define themselves as artists, and learn tools, and understand just how the game is being played in this informational jungle that is being erected. Because you will either have a plan, or you will become part of somebody else’s plan. And there are a million plans out there waiting to ensnare the clueless.
I think we’re going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads, and that this has never been possible. I mean, we know each other by our surfaces and our symbols. We make small mouth noises and we assume we share the same dictionary. And by such rickety infrastructure as this we build community and understanding. But if everybody worked on the mansion of their soul in cyberspace, and you could invite people in and say, “You want to know who I am? I’m not this; this six-foot-two-inch piece of meat. That’s not it. Here’s what it is: here’s my hopes, my dreams, my fears, my past accomplishments, my unfinished projects, my catastrophes.” An incredible amount of intimacy, and hence mutual appreciation and empathy.
A telephone call is very low bandwidth, a television-assisted telephone call is higher bandwidth. And as we expand bandwidth between each other we will dissolve our differences. I mean, this is my faith. I think it’s amazing that we’ve built a global civilization in an environment of four thousand languages, and no better mode of communication than small mouth noises and their electronic equivalents. And so we’re about to take an enormous leap toward understanding each other.
What society is, is an elaborate structure to keep us believing certain things about each other which are in fact not true.
The human brain is the god of technological innovation. In other words, we want to do it that way: we want to do it that small, that fast, that neatly. So as technology advances, it’s going to look more and more like biology.
