Have you noticed how abstract all that is in relationship to the inevitable fact of your own death? I mean, there is an end of the world built into your cosmology: the end of your world—which is, after all, the only world you know. So it may be that the planet will swing a hundred billion times around the [sun] before the consummation of time, but that doesn’t mean that you have permission not to contemplate final end states. Because you’ve got an appointment with one out there somewhere, ten minutes or fifty years in the future.
We’re moving into a world where the bankruptcy of ideology is obvious. All ideologies are faiths. Even science can be demonstrated to be a faith that rests on certain revealed truths which are never questioned. To build a non-toxic future, we are going to simply have to solve many of our problems pragmatically. For instance, right now we have many problems: AIDS, overpopulation, this and that. All of these problems could be solved, except that we have one rule when we approach a problem: the solution must make money. There are many problems where there is no solution that makes money. So if you refuse any solution but that type, you’re upriver.
We’re building something called the Internet, and furiously laying copper and fiber optic everywhere, and soon it will go wireless. I think that this net that we’re building is not the most artificial construction ever conceived. It’s a simulacrum of nature, is what it is. Nature is the original Internet. I mean, nature is some kind of interconnected, communicating, data-routing, self-regulating, non-equilibrium system.
Language is some kind of enterprise of human beings that is not finished; that we have now left the grunts and the digs of the elbow somewhat in the dust, but the most articulate, brilliantly pronounced and projected English or French or German or Chinese is still a poor carrier of our intent, a very limited bandwidth for the intense compression of data that we are trying to put across to each other.
Notice that what is interesting about the stock market (even if you don’t give a hoot about money or capitalism) is that it’s an effort to mass average change. It’s an effort to give you a very large-scale picture of many, many opinions brought into a final recension of some sort.
The whole purpose of data coordination—whether it’s occurring in an amoeba or a mega-international corporation—the purpose of data coordination is to predict the future. Always. That’s what your senses do for you. Notice: when you look over there and decide to walk over there, you’re also deciding to walk over then. In other words, you are coordinating data to move through time and space toward a future point. And the whole evolution of life, on one level, can be seen as a conquest of dimensions.
It’s a struggle between these two forces: habit and novelty. And in a period of a million years there’s a way to draw the picture of the battle, and in the last ten minutes there’s a way to draw a picture of the battle. So what is habit? Habit is repetition of activities already accomplished. Repetition is habit. Tradition is habit. Limited risk-taking is habit. I think you get the idea. Novelty, on the other hand, is high-risk, new, untried, strange, unusual, stands out from the surrounding environment, and surprises.
The reason people fetishize objects is because they have no accessible dimension of inner worth.
I don’t believe in the distinction between nature and technology.
One thing that the Internet holds out for many, many people is the end of the entire cycle based on the concept of office culture and commuting. Most people who work in offices don’t need to go to the office now. And the momentum continues to have commuting and so forth, but when these corporations realize how much money they could save by telling people to stay home, office culture is just going to dissolve overnight. Well, then, something like 65% of all automobile travel is in the pursuit of moving to and from the job. That could all be eliminated. I think the Internet is the physical analog to the psychedelics. Until the Internet arose, it was very hard for me to see how we were going to get from here to the Omega Point. Now I have no problem. It’s all in place.
The idea of real democracy is as threatening to the politicians of this country as it is to the Chinese leadership. I mean, they do not want the will of the people to be expressed. But I think as we cohere into a single organism, there will be less and less need for these eighteenth-century institutions that we have put in place and maintain with the power of the gun.
Hundreds of millions of people in the world lead larval, low-awareness lives—I’m not talking about the poor unwashed, I’m talking about people who watch TV six and seven hours a day: that’s a drug. And those people have chosen to check out of the historical adventure and just live in this miasma of pop culture. And we can decry the loss to them (of awareness and so forth and so on), but on the other hand, it makes it easier for the rest of us, I think.
If you want 24-hour a day tele-dildonic pornography, who’s to say you shouldn’t have this? But how it will affect your performance as a citizen—I don’t know. I mean, it’s just like mainlining heroin or something else. People have to make choices, but the fact that they will sometimes make bad choices is no argument ever for limiting their choices. You know, you have to come to political bedrock with this: are you a control freak or do you believe in the dignity of human nature? If you trust human nature, then your politics should be one of always removing control, because control suppresses human nature. If, on the other hand, you’re freaked out about human nature, and you think that if we don’t have laws everybody will turn to cannibalism, sodomy, and cocaine, then of course everybody has to be leaned on and so forth and so on. But if you don’t have faith in human nature, that’s a pretty existential situation to be in, because where do you put your faith, then?
You have two choices: you can consume, or you can produce. That’s it. And the people who consume are lost souls—and we all consume; and in those moments when we consume we are lost souls. We need to produce. And what we produce is art. The greatest era of art in the history of the human race is dawning right now.
It certainly has held human progress down that we have thousands of languages that are very tortuous to translate between. Imagine a kind of culture we would’ve built by now if we could effortlessly communicate with anybody anywhere, and they with us.
I think the leisure and the indulgence that is permitted us, the super-rich of this world—and we all are in that class; the upper 5% of the Earth’s population—you can’t live with yourself unless you give something back. And the thing to give back is: share your art, share your soul. The reason we are so controlled and abused and misused by our institutions is because we are divided from each other. You know, they have divided us by race, by class, by sex, by political style, all of these ways, when in fact it’s in everybody’s interest to have a future, to build a world where children can be raised with some reasonable expectation that humanity will be preserved.
There is no magic ceiling on the intelligence of machines. We are going to make machines more intelligent than we are. In many ways, in many areas, they already are more intelligent than we are. And what it will mean when suddenly the system awakens to itself is not clear. I mean, this may be cheap science fiction, or it may be precisely how the end of the world will occur. This thing is being born. How it will view us—I don’t know.
I think it’s amazing that with spoken speech—which operates at about 30 baud, I think—we were able to create and hold together a world civilization. Using speech transmitted over wire at 30 baud? That’s astonishing that any cohesion at all could arise at such a—and the level of ambiguity is insane! I mean, the most uncool thing you can do in most social situations is say to somebody, “Would you explain to me what I just said?” Then the illusion breaks down, you know, when you discover: no, we’re not all sailing on the same ship. But if we could see what we mean, if we could have an enhanced communication skill bordering on telepathy, there would be much less noise in the system, much less wasted effort, and so on.
The truth can take care of itself. It does not require your belief. The truth need not be treated as fragile. You can beat on the truth with ball-peen hammers and it will do just fine, thank you. So one should be respectful in the presence of truth, but not cowed or awed or something like that. The truth wants to be appreciated, it wants to be known. It can take care of itself. Belief is toxic—all belief. Don’t believe in anything. Live in the presence of the felt fact of immediate experience. Everything beyond that is conjecture. In contemporary society we’re always in the past and in the future. But what is real are feelings. And feeling attain a nexus only in the moment. Only in the moment. So explore the edges, keep your logical razors sharp, trust nothing that you haven’t verified for yourself, and my faith is that the universe will take you in and share with you its meaning and its intent and its conclusion.