Maybe you said you dreamed it,
But certainly I know you streamed it!"
I assembled massive files filled with ramblings, dreams, essays, observations, stowed all if it in an enormous trunk, notebooks that show a tattered chronology because I never can lay my hands on the one I want. There are typescripts from the days of inked ribbons, journals pounded out on erasable typewriter paper, crumbling to dust.
Google stands to reel in the creative work of all the people on the planet, simply because they have the biggest server around.
Does this mean that Google data, with cross connections, lists and links, with books and blogs, and thoughts, comments on notes and paintings, and comments on comments, and testosterone driven hits, does this mean, that ultimately, maybe even very soon, someone will put this massive pile of data to nefarious use? Even to the worst possible use?
Perhaps even delete all of it, in a flash?
Will some dud Minuteman missile leaving a silo in one of the Dakotas blow up and with an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to magnetize bit of steel in a thousand mile radius, also obliterate all silicon-stored information in less than a microsecond?
Silicon death.
Imagine a tool, it can be built, if a tool can be built it will be used. And if it can be used for good it will be used for good. And if it can be used for bad . . . it shall be . . . because the simple computation power of the universe allows it to be . . . all permutations, all possibilities, all hopes, wishes, granted, or dashed to bits, everything, that you can conceive of happening . . . will happen.
Yet somehow this magnificent dance of light and dark stays oriented . . . towards light.
For now.
If on one hand you are able to conceive of someone like Dick Cheney and his temporarily ousted clan staging another 9/11 in order to frighten the public into passing a newer, harsher amendment to the Patriot Act, then they will.
If you can conceive of Facebook eventually relinquishing their files to the Department of Homeland Security so that friends of friends can be taken away, made to disappear, get made into Soylent Green, or fertilizer, because they can't pay their credit card bills, then they will.
Everything humans make possible they also make certain. That's the fine print of existence. Our possibility becomes our reality.
We live united in an embrace at the edge of light and the edge of darkness simultaneously . . . at all times. Life prospers in this zone of no decision.
Whatever you conceive of is, a certainty, either past, currently happening, or future. So why fight it? The light of your thoughts makes it happen. Whether Facebook uses all of this data for positive or negative matters not. The point is how do you use it? How do I use it?
I use it as a box to hold all those old notebooks.
So giant SERVER of HUMANITY, hidden and guarded, backed real time, pampered, updated, translated, a crescendo of leptons through copper and silicon, hermetic amidst ferrous iron, holder of our private lives . . . I do not merely ENTRUST you with my secrets . . . or my thoughts . . . rather I BURDEN you with them . . . . since you have made it your BUSINESS to be burdened . . . . . for now, this seems a fair trade. I store all this stuff on the left and middle . . . . and glance at the ads on the right.
Left wing to the left, Right wing to the right, here I am flying from the Center. If this results in me and a ton of my co-minded friends being herded into stadiums and butchered in years to come simply because mankind does this from time to time and in the most efficient way . . . so be it. We cannot escape tyranny except through our own actions while we are alive.
So to all of you Google and Apple leftists that voted for Obama the way I did, to you who run these pages and write these applets, do you dare think that these things could not happen . . . . because of Facebook? If so then you are wrong. We all play into the hands of greatness and tyranny both. It is impossible to take your tea and my tea and separate them in such a vast ocean of cause.
Wherever, and whenever a mass media became available, it was historically used . . . and then subsequently abused. Not through any fault of yours . . . no. . . simply because it COULD BE.
Where possibility exists, lurks a certainty more real than history itself.
History doesn't dodge bullets. It makes them.
When steel technology and the internal combustion engine allowed a machine gun to be mounted inside an armored car, the first tank was born, and very shortly thereafter it ripped apart a generation of soldiers on the fields of Europe in broad daylight. And at night when newly invented mustard gas settled into their trenches where the same flower of youth slept, did they realize that this was the flip side of the same chemistry that invented aspirin?
So why, Mr. Facebook, Mr. Dell, Mr. Google, why do I entrust you with my thoughts, knowing what I know, and what you count as my beliefs?
Because dear Computer Earth, despite the abuses that will eventually happen to this and all information, you, for the short term, represent a significant and positive shift in the psychic makeup of the individual and society at large
Here on these pages we wear our most inner, most personal and most private details more publicly than if we were to sit cheek to jowl on a bench at a nudist camp.
If I spot you on a bus I know only what I can deduce from your clothes, appearance and what you carry, but if I friend you here, I gradually learn your tastes, your politics, your mind, your loves, your hates, your tastes, your weaknesses, your strengths.
What a change that represents!
My friends here, to those of you whom I've never met, and to those of you I know well, you now know more about me than my classmates at school, or kids who played with me in our sandbox at home.
The Internet has turned the most public epidermis of each of us into the folds of something private, and the private into something public for all to see. As cells in a giant organism. . . we are now welded at the outer cell wall into a whole, we each get our feed from the same arteries that nourish all of us. . .and dump our waste into the same conduits of effluvium.
Thirty years ago, we drove past farms and if we were lucky, spotted the farmer behind his tractor. But chances were we didn't, and were content to know the farmer by the rows of his planted corn, or the way his equipment gleamed, or rusted in his yard.
Today you can know that farmer intimately, and never meet him in person.
We're cells of a giant live being. Call it Earth, call it planet, call it whatever you want. It's one organism. It's now alive and has a nervous system. This is it.
Private life is our discarded skin from collective coils of writhing, turned inside out.
Holding onto my written journals condemns them to certain death. . . much as I love my kids I know not to burden them with all my crap . . . so here Computer Earth . . . it's yours . . . read it . . . or dump it as you like . . . and if you deem me a threat to National Security that will be better for me because then my musings will be considered classified and shall be kept forever!!!
That would be hitting the jackpot. Perhaps they might simply amuse you. If you have the time to peruse them, the degree of your amusement will magically protect them from erasure, as will anything that attracts your eyeballs to the right side of the screen.
But THE most probable and eventual outcome, is that this great server of mankind to which I’m contributing explodes exponentially into a crystalline quantum silicon engine of light, maintaining it's fractal memory in pulses of listless ever-emanating galactic radiant power, processed and channeled by the man-purified quartz crystal skull of Planet Earth, a computer of titanic scale, knowing everything and holding it in radiant throb of listless, ever-moving and photonic light, until it gives all it knows to the All with an explosion that can be seen across the universe.
Humans! We thought we were masters of the elements. But are we just here to purify silicon? To remove and burn Carbon? To sequester metals above the planet surface?
Join me here. . . bare all. . . . turn yourself inside out. . . be part of Vishnu's awakening and shed your skin . . . segment by segment . . . into the glistening mucus of midday . . . let the sun shine in.
