Programming the Apocalypse

Invoking the illumination of synergetic community

11/22/1996

Creativity is defined by psychological researchers in the field as involving the cross-fertilization of ideas. Bring the elements of one discipline or culture into close proximity with the elements of another, let them stew in their juices for an appropriate subconscious interval -- and lo! Out of synthesis is born the new, like Athena emerging full grown from the forehead of Zeus.

We've been hearing for years about the globalization of culture, and the vast social transformation that we're all undergoing, as a consequence of our newly borderless world. Our new neighbor is from where? Uzbekistan? Saudi Arabia? They think what? They believe what? It's amazing, and there's no way to keep up without paying lots of attention, and throwing out prejudices and pre-conceptions. The emergence of global culture is non-stop creativity itself, and there's no more powerful medium for catalysis than this infinite-dimensional inter-everything Internet wonderwire that ties us all together.

Fifty years ago, a French Jesuit paleontologist named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was outlining his vision of the "noosphere," a global network of human relationships and spiritual light, foreseeing the emergence of our global network culture. Today, networkers and visionaries are coming together across the Internet from a thousand point of light, to weave this noosphere into an entirely new and brilliantly transforming vision of who we are and why we're here. Today, you can log into the Noosphere site, at www.sun-angel.com/noosphere/noosphere.html and be instantly linked to 350+ advanced new sites, woven together into a single tapestry of experimental spiritual alternatives and brilliant profundities.

The "above ground" world groans in its oversimplification of everything. Up there, in that commercial world, sound-bites rule, and there's no room for an alternative voice with too much to say. But in the vast exploding underground world of the Internet, millions of voices are heard in a rising clamor, demanding a new holistic vision of everything at once, where everything is meaningful and everything connects.

Psychologists have known for years that an individual human mind can only process so much at any one time. George Miller’s famous paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”, points to these cognitive limits: generally speaking, we can only hold seven simultaneous factors in our minds at once. But our world today involves millions of simultaneous factors, all competing for our attention, and all of some importance. Like the famous parable of the blind men and the elephant, each one of us is only seeing a part of the whole. Given these limits, how can we create a perspective on everything at once, on what is actually happening?

On our Bridge Across Consciousness network, we are experimenting with a new technology we call a "Database Communications Network.” Like 4-11 or Yahoo, or any other system that loads forms-based user input into a database, we are developing a system that can accept highly detailed personal information, through which any networker can intimately describe themselves and their attitudes and beliefs, on any subject whatsoever, including politics and religion or the state of the world. The database will have the slots, and a place to put the data. Unlike the sound-bite world, it will have an enormous capacity to listen, and to make personal details highly meaningful.

Once it is loaded with the intimate personal data of a million people, our database network will search and sort that data, and directly interconnect all the participants who see the world a certain way, who believe something in common, or who want to work together to build a better world. This database communication network will be the most powerful tool for community building since the wheel. It will create political coalitions and ad hoc spiritual and religious networks at the speed of light, interconnecting the human community through its Highest Common Factors in the most fine-grained detail a human mind can conceive. For the first time in history, the human race will be able to assemble the “big picture” of our collective situation. Like the “all-seeing eye of God” at the top of the pyramid on the one dollar bill, the network itself will see the whole.

Human beings are aching in their souls for an empowerment to raise us above misunderstanding. We’ve been half-blind since we emerged from the primal ooze. But these new network systems are growing, and the technology seems feasible. These things are going to happen, and there's no more powerful force for hope and inspiration on this planet.

Bruce Schuman (info@interspirit.net)

Cognitive scientist, spiritual seeker, network builder

Developer, Apocalypse Designs

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