This book is very much about the religious impact of the Internet.
When I speak of religion, I speak not of any particular sect or any culture’s interpretation of its encounter with the divine. I refer rather to the common ground of humanity’s search for meaning, its hunger for a glimpse of humanity’s future development, and the feeling that, despite all our surface differences, we are somehow all part of one entity—call it what you will.
A mind, a connected human experience, is arising from the physical brain and central nervous system called the Internet.
I have spent more than a dozen years on and around the Internet and the industries that have built this infrastructure. My experiences seem, in retrospect, just part of the inexorable process of networked technology developing into something that is not just like an organism, but is apparently alive.
Telecommunication and information technologies are increasingly integrating themselves into the human body itself. Electronic prosthetics, direct neural implants, and the brain’s control of electronic and mechanical limbs are moving the boundary that used to exist between man and machine to some undefined frontier inside our bodies and our brains, and perhaps inside our minds. And if the electronics inside my brain connect directly with the electronics inside your brain, how is it meaningful to speak as though we are not part of one larger entity?
The Internet represents the latest manifestation, in the material world, of the ongoing evolution of consciousness.
Humankind has spread into every corner of the planet without breaking up into species, so that we now form a “single membrane” over the Earth. This new layer, the “thinking layer,” has spread over and above the world of plants and animals.
The world is still waiting for an answer to the death of God. Many people still attend church, but the myths and stories are no longer comforting. People are there, not because churches have answers, but because churchgoers still have questions. The anomie of modern life seems to result from an inability to find a reason to seek progress in the world—something that gives this material process a purpose.