Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization. Few world religions were born after this time. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don’t. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born. There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine.
In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds … We will live inside this thing.” This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. The Web is becoming “the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. In the future, according to Kelly, the Web will grant us not only the vision of gods but also their power. “I doubt angels have a better view of humanity,” he writes.īut that’s only the beginning. Kelly, erstwhile prophet of the Long Boom, surveys the development of the World Wide Web, from the Netscape IPO ten years ago, and concludes that it has become a “magic window” that provides a “spookily godlike” perspective on existence. Levy’s article appears in the afterglow of Kevin Kelly’s sweeping “ We Are the Web” in Wired’s August issue. In a profile of Internet savant Tim O’Reilly in the current issue of Wired, Steven Levy writes that “the idea of collective consciousness is becoming manifest in the Internet.” He quotes O’Reilly: “The Internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at Esalen in the ’70s – except we didn’t know it would be technology-mediated.” Levy then asks, “Could it be that the Internet – or what O’Reilly calls Web 2.0 – is really the successor to the human potential movement?” Web 1.0 may have turned out to be spiritual vaporware, but now we have the hyper-hyped upgrade: Web 2.0. We were the same as ever.īut the yearning for a higher consciousness didn’t burst with the bubble. The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us. Somewhere along the way, the moneychangers had taken over the temple. And when the new millenium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed. The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune. We become free-floating netizens in a more enlightened, almost angelic, realm.īut as the Web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The early texts of Web metaphysics, many written by thinkers associated with or influenced by the post-60s New Age movement, are rich with a sense of impending spiritual release they describe the passage into the cyber world as a process of personal and communal unshackling, a journey that frees us from traditional constraints on our intelligence, our communities, our meager physical selves. On the Internet, we’re all bodiless, symbols speaking to symbols in symbols. And why not? For those seeking to transcend the physical world, the Web presents a readymade Promised Land. įrom the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing. This post, along with seventy-eight others, is collected in the book Utopia Is Creepy.
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