Okay yesterday we talked about noosphere, today we are posting a short talk from the king of drug induced mysticism himself Terence McKenna. Are we crack pots?
Well this is a unusually lucid and almost materialistic presentation by McKenna, and we would suggest some of the wilder New Age ideas of the past century can provide means of thinking about the current changes in human culture facilitated by mobile Internet.
New Age was one of the key influential myths for early adopters of "Cyberspace", and we should not be surprised that the current revolution in our understanding is influenced in large part by it. Just as science was originally created by people influenced by alchemy.
The key question to ask is if McKenna's ideas sound familiar today because reality has come out as he predicted and is developing along the lines of ever rapid development, or because our culture has created a myth of such development. Certainly mobile computing and the Internet are evolving faster than anyone could have imagined, but the same can not be said for genomics, cancer treatment, space flight, or green energy.
Its important to keep in mind that part of the entire selling pitch of mobile technology is this kind of rapid evolution towards some kind of singularity. But in the end Web 3.0 devices are just mobile phones that go online. What we do with this simple concept is up to us as a civilization.
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