This tendency toward complexification—which describes the history of the entire universe—also describes the history of the twentieth century, your life, the past six months. All of these processes have this tendency to go toward an endpoint of extreme complexity.
Technology in the form of cybernetics is becoming the coral reef or the technological excretion that is the truly hardwired portion of the unconscious now. And I see this as the feminine; the goddess reemerging into three-dimensional space in the form of what Teilhard de Chardin called the noösphere, but which is more correctly identified as Sophía (the emanation of wisdom as a feminine spirit), as puruṣa, as electricity which completely girdles the planet and transforms it into the alchemical stone; the entity. It is the planet which is the thing that is being worked on.
It’s possible to envision the solar system as a kind of human swarm world with thousands of these colony worlds, each pursuing the social dynamics that they had evolved or were interested in exploring, all suspended in a sphere of electronic communication and data transfer such that they are living in the same day.
Nine million computers a month are being hooked into communications systems, and most of these are for the networking purposes of small management groups. This is the new organism which is taking shape that is the organism which survives: our electronically linked groups of like-minded people who have clearly defined their goals and are working together to achieve them.
This is what all societies end up building—whether they build it out of mushrooms, morning glories, and tobacco smoke, or silicon, copper, gold, and plastic, you know? Everybody ends up erecting a cybernetic global network of information for transferring the information that they have culturally validated and seek to preserve.
Computers are machines now, but computers don’t need to be machines. Computers are arrangements of arrays and elements that can exist in any medium, and we’re simply passing through a phase where they are machines. Very soon they will probably be created by DNA and be rather like bone tissue or something like that. Once the biological and the cybernetic come together, why, the division between machines and life will be seen to be like the difference between a snail and its shell. I mean, the shell is not much like the snail, but to say that one is alive and one isn’t is a little begging the question.