“It’s almost as though God’s joke on us is to give us so much power and knowledge that we will either transcend ourselves or we will certainly destroy ourselves because the power and understanding being given to us is of Godlike proportion.” – Terence McKenna ‘Culture and Ideology Are Not Your Friends’
The Internet and technology as they are today are giving us Godlike powers of perception and action: Digital Natives are the first generation of young adults to be endowed with them. Look at what these network-connected extra electric brains our parents got us are really doing here–the Power Macs, the smartphones, the tablets, which are connected to evermore relays and satellites, evermore detailed maps, evermore evolving encyclopedias are all upgrading our reach into the universe. We can be deep in space, beyond the center of an atom, in an Amazonian Jungle, or in a Massachusetts court house. We can be in the heart of Japan, or in the heart of a star, and we can be there in real time. We are becoming omnipotent. We have dropped torchlights throughout the world and the cosmos, which we access on a second by second basis–from our bedrooms to our phones. We are granting ourselves uncanny levels of perception and interaction. Our technology is telling us that given time, we can really go anywhere and see anything and mayben even move beyond time. We are amassing incredible potential. It is no surprise that one Digital Native worked very hard to get the simple action of copy and pasting to be acknowledged by his peers and his government as the sacred activity it is. Knowledge is the first religion. And this transmission of wisdom, of light, reveals that we are becoming the information we are gathering—and that it is our most ancient human quality.
From cave paintings and stone tools we have been growing an eye of media and a hand of technology. We have been extending our power of sight and our power of action as far as we can push them. But the internet is a combination of both these appendages, these arms and eyes, into something else entirely. Something completely “Outside history,” as Tim Wu calls it. It acts like a mirror, “A psychological object,” as Sherry Turkle calls it. Computers, smartphones, satellites, cameras, and screens—they are ubiquitous eyes, hands, and mirrors. While they offer us Godlike powers, they also reflect their users: the human beings and their world as they are. They are revealing us to ourselves. What do we see in this ancient mirror, this tunnel, this cauldron, this kaleidoscope of media technology? I think it has a very clear message: we are capable of great things. We are becoming more Godlike. We can see any point in space, we can hear any whispered message, we can cast any vote, we can say anything—and as we do so, we are gazing into a worldwide mirror that keeps updating faster than a second. For thousands and thousands of years we have been changing our cave paintings into an Internet. We have been staring into our own human record and it’s that record, that mirror–that’s given us a quality that we consider higher than mere animal. We have a visible, accessible changing record of what we have imagined the world to be. The home cave painting is now the home 3D HD Internet TV, but it’s still the same changing puddle, the same evolving mirror.
All media, from the word and the cave painting to the electronic billboard and the tweet, has been telling many things. But one message stands clear throughout history: wake up or die. That with Godlike powers comes Godlike responsibility and that the most worthwhile mind to grant access to such an immense power would have to be a Godlike love. Contrary to popular belief, a loving intelligence of that magnitude is not at all difficult to manifest: It easy when you feel that we are all sharing the same fabric–reality.