Electrons were launched
like scout ships across static oceans, along routes gleaming copper and gold
from silicon ports. The human empire had walked on every shore of its planet
that it was possible to walk. Space had closed in on it, grown tight around its
girth. But still, it needed to advance. So it reasoned the means by which to create space. Infinite space. Those
first electron scouts were sent to discover the new Eden, the virgin continent,
the new world. They came back to their designers with hope and plausibility.
There was a New World. It was Cyberspace.
With a promise and a
dream, life rushed in. Eager prospectors who saw the means to profit in it made
port, putting cyberspace’s ready resources to use. It had cheap land to store
information. A data trade route that bested the fastest roads the world could
offer. Pastures in which to play, dangerous dimensions to explore. The ability
to speak out across time and space. The more humans needed space, the bigger
cyberspace became to fill that need.
But what was cyberspace, really? What set it
apart from the real world?
The answer goes back
way further than silicon and gold. The primal cyberspace was flesh and sound,
then ink and canvas, and only now is it electronic code. Cyberspace is
humanity’s oldest companion and greatest asset. It is, by the very nature of
the word, ‘A place of guiding systems’. Whenever something holds inside of it
information of things that are outside of it, that’s cyberspace. Everything
that is real holds only the information that exists within its own form. A tree
holds information about chlorophyll and photosynthesis and osmosis - only
things about its unique self and the forces that have shaped it. But the
abstract can be that same tree mashed and pulped into a book, filled with
stories of planets and people, a medium through which information is passed, a
language. Cyberspace was there in the savannah when a precursor human spotted a
wildcat and ran home with its image inside to tell the tribe. Cyberspace was
restive in the caves, splashed across the rocks with tales of birds and beasts
and battles, waiting to update a user.
Cyberspace grew, and
grew, and ran rampant whenever reality constricted, or broke apart to reveal
what was hidden in its own spaces. Until it at last evolved past all former
imagining into ones and zeros, photons and electrons, silicon and gold.
They once called it the Republic of Letters.
It was envisioned as a
free exchange of information and ideas. A place where philosophies could be
presented in abstraction, before selection for use in Reality. A place where information
could be accumulated before judgements were passed on their content. A
prototype, an imagination.
You want to know what
cyberspace is? Shut your eyes and think. That’s cyberspace.
Now imagine everyone
else thinking right at this moment. All those humming, drumming, buzzing
thoughts, just beyond the real world. The whole planet is pulsating with it.
Small notions, grand ideas. Each held in their own little cyber-sole, swimming
in a school of cyber-phish. Communicating constantly, reading one another. Each
gets drawn up in a network. Each contributes, in some small way, to the
mainframe of a single all-inclusive mind. We now call that mind The Internet.
Of course, a very
large part of it is devoted to memes and porn. That’s how a mind works, you
see. The fleeting whims and jokes and fears and fragmentary notions sit
bottom-heavy, rudimentary ruminations pulsing with energy, leaping up to the
top and trying to stay there for as long as possible. That’s society. Each
little tweet and tumble is a single possibility in a spectrum of possibilities,
submitted to the senses and declared true and valid, or not, or a confusion of
the two. But it is within our power to select the thoughts that are worth
paying attention to; an important memory shared through flashbacks of pictures
or video. News that may compromise or assist the network as a whole. Well-expressed ideas which provide the contextual framework for the influx of
data. The possibilities emerge over and
over again to assert their probability,
demanding attention and explanation.
We are not The
Internet. Not its consciousness, not its intention, not what makes its
executive decisions. If such a higher function exists in our great, many-headed
cyber-brain, it has never revealed itself. What we are as its users are things
used; little synapses firing off in cyberspace, forming something intelligible
only on a large scale. But to this leviathan, we are also its citizens. And as
its citizens we have something of a responsibility to understand its
mechanisms. Like any space on Earth, Cyberspace has its own state, ideology,
economy and culture.
New Terminology: Differentiating Cyberspaces
If I talked about how
cyberspace looked in a one-user mind, the picture would be very different from
how it looks in the internet. The way information travels through it is the
same, but the information itself varies. It is composed of wholly exotic
permutations of fictive structure. In the process of analyzing this structure,
it helps to approach each in turn, careful not to muddy issues by running
rampant paths from one realm to the next.
Intraspace
[Intra (within,
exclusive) + Space (The intersection of dimensions)]
An exclusive intersection of dimensions
Intraspace is the
cyberspace of a mind operating on an individual level. It is filled with
conceptual patterns that allow us to make sense of what is around us, and perceptual
figments or ‘spirits’ that are waiting to be fitted into a pattern, or form a
pattern of their own.
Imagine for the moment
that the human mind is a novel that you are writing. In a physical sense, it is
a book with a leather cover for a skull, blank pages awaiting abstraction and
ink to serve as a medium of abstract symbolism.
You start off writing
this novel on Chapter One. Word by word, sentence by sentence, it begins to
take form. You write the word ‘knife’.
You elaborate a little more and write ‘the
knife cut’. Already from the spirit of a few words, a conscious reader gets
an idea of what kind of novel this is: a slasher thriller.
But then you finish
rounding off the sentence into a grounded concept: ‘The knife cut the salmon’s flesh into three edible strips and the
smiling sushi chef placed them atop three scrumptious lumps of rice.’
The words – the
spiritual figments – are present in each stage of the process, but they can
confuse the reader when taken by themselves. They have to be considered with a
degree of anticipation for more information if they are to make any sense.
You finish off the
page, and reread what you’ve written. Already there’s a pattern emerging.
You’ve used the word ‘like’ an inordinate number of times, and the word
‘massive’ at least seven. You could accept this as your literary style, and
proceed deeper into the book page by page until the pattern of the novel is
complete. This is the equivalent of adopting a worldview based on the things
that you know – deciding that it’s the best way to get things done, and
continuing to do it. What works on a small scale, works for mass production,
right?
But then you decide
that maybe this isn’t the best way to go forward. Maybe the style was wrong,
and you really should be writing a slasher thriller. Maybe you should just see
what it looks like when you remove the unnecessary ‘like’s and find a few
synonyms for ‘massive’. You turn the page.
Chapter One, you start again.
This part of the
process is lateral, generative thinking, in which you produce a number of
competing patterns in order to select the best one. You could fill the whole
book with different versions of Chapter
One, and still not exhaust all the possibilities. Lateral thinking is often
accompanied by observation, or what we can call inductive thought. The more
possibilities of pattern you are aware of, the greater chance there is that you
will find a naturally superior way in which to stylize information. But without
pausing that industrious work at some point, you’ll never get past Chapter One.
After five drafts of the
first page, you select what you see as the best. The metaphors are rich, but
the vocabulary is simple. It’s the kind of writing that engages the senses, but
packs deliberate symbolism behind every sensation. Eagerly, you rush forward.
Page after page, the
book gets deeper. The story is simple: you set out the premises on the very
first page, and now you’re just following them to their most natural
conclusion.
·
The
protagonist is Suzie.
·
Suzie
likes Sushi.
So it would be pretty
odd if in Chapter Three Suzie decided to open up an Italian restaurant. Less
believable than if Suzie decided to become a sushi chef, anyway.
This pattern
extrapolation moving forward is vertical thinking, or Logic, in which you take
the things that you know and squeeze as much information out of them as
possible, stacking up the cubes of data block by block to make the story as
tall or as ‘deep’ as possible.
But every now and
then, just like in real life, you add more lateral possibilities to the novel
to bring richness to the story. The main plot – the main pattern – is about
Suzie travelling to Japan to learn to be a master sushi chef. But there’s also
a subplot about a Japanese wishing tree where Suzie makes an offering to a kami
spirit and begs it to help her become the best sushi chef in the world. This
happens in Chapter Seven, so you rush ahead and write Chapter Seven, and then
know that logically for Suzie to get from Chapter Three to Chapter Seven she
has to take a plane across from Jamaica, where she grew up.
We do this all the
time in Intraspace. On one level, we’re deepening the story of our day-to-day
existence. But then we decide that in the future, we might like the pattern of
our life to change. So we begin to construct a pattern between the present and
that possible future with a set of concrete changes: learning a language,
learning a craft, dealing with emotional barriers. When the two patterns merge,
they form a kind of super-concept that makes a new kind of sense we couldn’t
possibly have been aware of just by imagining the possibility.
The novel continues.
With twenty chapters behind you, you’ve got pretty good at this. Suzie’s kami
answered her prayer and took her into the spirit world to be the sushi chef of
the gods, where this kami fell in love with her and decided she could never go
home. Suzie laces his next meal with a magical poison, and instead of dying he
turns into an Oni. She escapes until such a time as she can feed him the cure,
which heals his spirit and softens him to the idea of her going back to her own
world.
And while the story’s imagined
space has broadened dimensions laterally and vertically, so your own
configuration of cyberspace has mirrored that expansion. Do I use the word ‘terrified’ here, or ‘frightened’? you consider laterally. You find synonyms,
because there’s one that’ll most accurately portray the emotion in context. You
select it, running it up the flagpole vertically, and it can have a dramatic
effect on the story. You do this about twenty times a minute in the process of
writing, refining your style, editing to break up old patterns and replace them
with better ones.
**
We use terms like
‘lateral’ and ‘vertical’ to emphasize that Intraspace is space. Lateral
length is a dimension, and vertical height is a dimension. A series of
intersecting points between them* form a shape of consciousness we refer to as
‘Ego’. The bigger the Ego is, the more self-conscious it is – the more aware it
is of the pattern that has been scrawled across the intraspace by its thoughts**.
* These intersection points can be thought of as memory ‘beacons’; points
of awareness within the mind than hold ideas together as though they were
constantly being viewed, either episodically or through abstract connections to
other ideas that are being viewed.
**Which isn’t to say a person with a big ego is a particularly adept
thinker, or has made a sensible pattern across their intraspace. It just means that
they are aware of their own ability to think. The consequent metaphors for such
people are bound up in Earthling meatspace analogies, where air is often
thought of as the basic medium for empty space. People with a big ego and
little pattern are thought of as ‘windbags’, or ‘full of hot air’. A person
with any ego in an undeveloped intraspace is an ‘airhead’.
But ego doesn’t
encompass the whole pattern scrawled by thoughts, because we forget things;
sometimes deliberately, but mostly unintentionally. They never really go away,
they just reside outside of the shape of the Ego. And because we have eyes and
ears and noses we’re getting these little nodes of thought popping up
representational images in Intraspace all
the time, and there’s no way we can be aware of them all at once. So Intraspace
is automatically broadened by inductive data (expands laterally), and some of
that data more fluidly yields itself to immediate knowledge of a concept (such
as the perception of a clock’s moving gears giving a better understanding of
mechanics than the clock’s face), and this is the basic awareness of reality we
attribute to the sentience of animals.
But it’s also the
grounding for what we call the Id – the unconscious functions of Intraspace
that operate outside of memory and outside of directed thought. The mechanism
of the mind sorts through data nodes in order to organize them the most
effectively. In some cases a perceptual permutation of data may be structurally
similar to a conceptual form of another
permutation. So they end up being organized in a way that groups them together.
So when the conscious center shifts – such as when the Ego expands or behaves in
a way that deliberately seeks out an alternative pattern, in dreaming or
creative thought – then we end up with a surreal combination of confused
symbols. A giant rabbit checks the watch it keeps in little red waistcoat. The
hydra rears its head, with many mouths attacking to feed a single corporate
body. The Tower looms above, telling its own story in endless cycles revisited.
Part of why these
symbols are dragged into the ego is because they are relevant composites of
data structures already within conscious awareness. This means that when consciousness focuses on
a pattern in its immediate memory, the unconscious mind prioritizes data that
is relevant to that memory. Actively we think ‘loan shark’ and understand what
that description represents. But it is likely we will also get an image in our
heads of something else, like a businessman in a pinstripe suit and a red tie,
smiling with a row of shark teeth. This kind of sympathetic repatterning is how
the Ego and Id interact. It’s often described as a ‘bubbling up’, as though
there’s been a reaction in the Id that results in a particularly volatile
association. But since the brain uses electricity I prefer to see in as a
static discharge: as the brain storms, pockets of clouded data get charged with
electrons. They are ‘grounded’ by an assembly of thoughts in the ego, and spark
them as though pulled to a lightning conductor. Sometimes those thoughts are
coherent enough to charge a lightbulb moment.
The Superego is at
once similar and different from the Id. Like the Id, it exists in that realm of
unconsciousness surrounding the Ego. But unlike it, it doesn’t produce and
merge data: It orders it. This is subtly different from what happens when
percepts collide in the Id: When the Superego functions correctly it is
non-perceptual, focused rather on integrating conceptual information. But
concepts have to be generated by first passing through the ego.
There were these
stencil spinning tops that were popular when I was a kid, and I think of them
as a perceptual image of the Ego-Superego interaction. The spinning top is the
ego, moving across a piece of paper that plays the part of surrounding
Intraspace. The needle is the accumulated pressure of conscious thought,
pressing deeply into the page so as to make a mark. The needle at the tip of
the spinning top roves around quite a bit, leaving a complicated trace of
pattern that could, under analysis, tell a person everything about the spinning
top that they want to know. If the spinning top is the ego, then that pattern
is the ego extended to every instant of its existence – consciousness’s profits
unrestricted by time and space – The Superego.
The brain is not a
stenciled page, so the deeper pattern formed by the roving consciousness is a
thought pattern. And the more fixedly the needle of consciousness attends to
those patterns, the more difficult it is to get out of them. They form a kind
of localized race track in the vicinity of the Ego, though they do not entirely
encompassed it. The Ego may have traced an unusual pattern once in a moment of
epiphany, only to veer off in another direction.
Id is composed of nodal points: small, localized patterns.
Superego is composed of a nodal network: an extensive, interconnected pattern.
And Ego, to complete the triptych, is
pattern recognition and directed pattern formation.
*
Intraspace is a
fascinating realm, and arguably the most important of all cyberspace. Every
single one of us operates in Intraspace – we can choose to avoid any other
platform of existence, but not the platform of existence that allows us to
think, and have choice. You have a kind of responsibility to yourself to understand
your own mind. Everything done elsewhere is blind grasping until you do.
Socialspace
[Social (Relating to
the aggregate of people living in an ordered way) + Space (The intersection of
dimensions)]
An intersection of dimensions between people.
The novel you wrote
about Suzie and the Kami has come far since where we left it. It’s grown deep
and interesting, creative and insightful. But now you want to enable it to do
what novels do: you want to share the model of Intraspace you developed with
other people.
Socialspace is the
cyberspace network held between users in a community, expressed through
interaction and conversation. It has some similarities with intraspace, and
some very big differences. For starters, nodes of data in intraspace were held
as elemental quantities in a formless abyss. In social space, nodes of data are
held as people.
Every user functions
individually as a percept*, and while it may have deeper concepts and
connections running through its Intraspace, the part that they share in
Socialspace is two-dimensionally summarized.
*From the perspective of another
user.
You aren’t going to
try and publish all the drafts of Chapter One that contributed to your novel.
You’re going to take out the redundant data and present a concise summary. Just
so, when you walk outside wearing a summer hat you don’t announce “This is a
hat I am wearing because the sunlight is directly above and I wish to avoid
sprouting melanomas.” You just wear the hat, and if that isn’t a clear summary
of your actions, you wait for people to ask.
The difficulty with
these percepts – these people – is the same as in meatspace and Intraspace. How
do you tell which are honestly based in concepts, and which are ‘hallucinatory’
percepts containing very little valuable data? You give the novel to your
mother, who reads it. She thinks it’s wonderful. But is that just because she
associates it with the percept that is ‘you’ which she nepotistically favors?
You decide it’s better to give the novel to an impartial stranger. That
stranger thinks it’s awful – but can you rely on the expertise of someone you
picked off the street to know good literature?
This specialized
function of telling good data from bad is facilitated by a Socialspace operator
known as a Maven. Mavens collate
sources of data in a social network and analyze them to determine the value of
specific sources of data within their field. Should the maven be optimal, they
then spread the certainty of their findings to others generously. Mavens aren’t
one strange, general profession aside from ordinary life, though in some ways
the Otaku fits that description – Mavens are integrated into the functions of
everyday society. There are fashion mavens, or coupon mavens, or software
mavens.
There are book mavens who read a lot and would probably be the best
choice of person to get an honest opinion about your novel. Quite often their
professional life reflects this passion for information, and they become motor
experts, or sports commentators, or editors. So this is the function mavens
serve to Intraspace innovators: to let them know they’ve made a good summary.
To let them know there’s integrity between what they can see in meatspace, and
the reams of data encoded into that Intraspace summary.
After finding the
right kind of maven, you’re left with the knowledge that your book is actually
very good – a literary masterpiece, actually. And while that makes you happy,
it hasn’t achieved the very best of what you set out to do. You want your
masterpiece to be widely experienced by others, and be considered for a place
as a memory beacon in their individual Intraspaces. But the maven can’t help
you there. The maven knows what people want – but doesn’t know how people
connect.
In Socialspace, intraspace
nodes are connected in overarching patterns simply referred to as social
networks. Within a social network there are very deeply ingrained paths, just
like there are in thought patterns in the mind. The enterprising pioneer (you,
the novelist) moves through Socialspace along these paths, trying to find a
junction between them. You could ask your friend Arthur to read your book –
Arthur is a chatterbox and you know he’ll mention your book to just about
anyone he meets in the street. But while Arthur likes spreading information, he
doesn’t exactly have many people who consider him a friend, and value his
vocalized opinions. However Arthur speaks with a certain reverence about
Hildegard, a well-known member of his social network. Hildegard is one of those
people who everyone knows and everyone likes – not just in your own social network,
but in groups of people you’d never dream of talking to. She is an experienced
hiker, and is very active at her community church. And the strange thing about
Hildegard that separates her from Arthur is that she’s everyone’s best friend.
They are all desperate to get closer to her by sharing experiences with her,
like watching a TV series she’s seen or reading a book that she’s read.
Hildegard is what is
called a Supersocial, a person adept
at forming data node patterns and then filtering data through that network. It’s
estimated that the number of close, intimate relationships an average person
can have at any one time is 12. For someone like Hildegard, that number is more
in the region of 20. This means that on top of that there are hundreds if not
thousands of people in Hildegard’s social network, many of whom are bound to be
supersocials themselves.
Often when meeting
these kinds of people, you get the sense that you’re an extra, and they are the
protagonist. Even though most of the time you assume that because you are the
all-seeing narrator of your own life, that makes you the protagonist by
default. But in a way this is due to a perspective shift. Sharing your novel
through Socialspace isn’t about restructuring your own mind at all – that was Writing
It, the process of intraspace. Sharing a novel is about society’s mind, and society’s
cyberspace. On that level you really are an extra – a blip of Id data on
the extending map of human evolution. The mistake many people make is to
attempt to be the conscious center of Socialspace and Intraspace. They believe that to get their novel known they
have to be a Supersocial, making dozens of friends, learning to manipulate
people they don’t like and get favors from those they do. All this wasted energy
just means they have less time to operate on the Intra- level, and the only
things they have to seed at the end of the exercise are inferior ideas.
Hildegard is the
answer to this. You don’t want to approach Hildegard directly, because just
having her blindly promoting your book won’t be an honest projection of
enthusiasm – it’ll be reluctant, a favour. Instead, you study the 20 closest
people in her network. These are the people you want to give the novel to –
especially if one of those people is a maven. How it gets to them doesn’t
really matter.
Shove it in their mailboxes, claim to be doing market research,
or just honestly say you’re trying everything you can to get the book off the
ground. If the novel is good – which the mavens say it is – then there’s a very
high probability it’ll reach Hildegard. And if it does, and she likes it so
much she wants to share the experience with others – the novel diffuses through
society. Suddenly people have Read That. Which was the point of the whole
exercise.
So that’s Socialspace:
You, the pioneering data node, set out with the
intention of changing Cyberspace.
The Maven acts as Socialspace’s relevancy feed,
presenting valuable percept data to Socialspace’s Ego.
The Supersocial is that Ego, a person
capable of directing user consciousness. They process the percept and funnel it
into a Social Network, the
conceptual Superego of society.
Once your data has
been passed through the social network – you’re golden. You’re a part of the
thinking process of society. You’ve transcended a platform.
Internet
[Inter (Out, Inclusive)
+ Net (Network: An arrangement of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines)]
A grid embodying the relation between
dimensional points.
The Interspace – which
I refer to as Internet because otherwise at a glance it could be
confused for intraspace – is a growing innovation in the 21st
century linking Socialspace to Intraspace on a digital platform. When we talk
of cyberspace generally, we’re referring to the internet. You’ve probably heard
of it.
The genius of the
internet is in that in using it we become distinctly aware of what is meant by
patterns - how easy it is for data to
move in some ways (and for some kinds of data to move) and very difficult for
it to move in others. We’ve built artificial constructs that mimic the function
of Socialspace user-nodes; Sites like Facebook and MySpace are artificial
Supersocials, focused on the automation of the way data spreads within trusted
networks and extended interest groups. Sites like Reddit and Tumblr are maven
sites, where regular accounts plug choice information. Sites like Youtube,
Deviant Art and Wordpress are User sites, designed to exhibit the creations of
individual users across a variety of formats. These sites aren’t intended to
exist in isolation, but to connect with one another and function in a way that
sorts data, exactly as we select information in Intraspace and Socialspace. In
a way it can be seen as the next evolutionary step of abstract thinking – a
mind the size of a whole planet, each contributing to the focus of our
awareness and actions.
Let’s say Hildegard loves your novel. She loves it so much,
she finds you and asks you if she can share it with her friends. You give her
the nod – the whole point of putting the book out there was to get as many readers
as possible. In the bad old days, Hildegard would be forced to traffic the book
manually through her Socialspace. But with the internet it’s much easier.
Hildegarde has roughly two-thousand friends and nine-hundred followers. So she
broadcasts in a single message that she likes your book. Quite a few people
pick it up and start reading, hoping to stay relevant to Hildegard through
their emotional attachment to her. Then they
re-whatever their own review.
By chance you also
pick up a Fan. Fans are people who
are so in love with a work they are highly motivated to keep it alive in their
day-to-day existence. In this regard, you’ve hooked Alice, who likes to make
GIF-sets for her Tumblr account. She assembles a group of images that roughly
portray the characters and world in your book. In a single collage, she’s
depicted a kind of visual ‘blurb’ for your book that’s going to draw in more
interest. People who are attracted to visual data more than pure text (let’s
face it... that’s practically all of
us) are now more inclined to associate your book with sympathetic themes. It’s
like having an abstract cover placed over the ideas held within, and put on a
bookshelf for people to see it clearly.
Then some mavens in
Hildegard’s extended network hear about the book. One of them is an editor, and
thinks it has serious publishing potential. The public approval you’ve garnered
in the local network proves it. At last, you’ve climbed from simply scrawling
the word ‘knife’ to a point of
complexity that will affect thousands if not millions of minds, serving as a
formal concept in their own ideas and inventions.
The internet managed
this by its own lateral and vertical agencies within the server structure.
Vertically the book has been promoted by Likes and Shares, which is to say by
way of Affirmation. This means that
it has a greater presence within a user base. However, that user base itself
may be quite small, which accounts for why very good ideas will often get
‘cult’ followings. Even though Hildegarde operates in several different social
settings, there are literally thousands of cultures to reach which are beyond
the ability of one Supersocial to tap – even a Supersocial like Facebook, which
keeps thinking up new ways to get people to communicate across cultural
barriers.
The lateral axis of
the Internet is seen in an idea’s fan base, and the ways it examines, comments
or enriches the experience of an idea. What was originally a small culture can
extend into an enormous one by branching off into movies, TV shows, fanfiction,
soundtracks – just about any other medium, and its own interpretation of that
idea. Lateral generation surrounding a dominant idea and its crucial factors
not only extends an idea across the user population, but allows an idea to
realize its most effective medium. You wrote a book, but as it turns out
Suzie’s life is actually much better understood through the multimedia of a TV
series. This doesn’t mean you were wrong to write the book – the series
wouldn’t even exist if you hadn’t made the approach. Data has to undergo a
process of weakening and strengthening to find its most effective format, just
as data’s form in argumentation is teased to eke out sound reason.
In the Internet’s Ego,
the important nodes that create a field of awareness are webpages, typically
ones on which a user has an account. This builds up an identity profile which
when effectively used acts as a conceptual representation of all aspects of
their identity they deem functionally important. These can break off into
3-Dimensional facets, where multiple identities exist for the same user, a
construction known as an ‘alter-ego’.
The SuperEgo of the
internet is entirely more concrete and traceable than anything visible in
cyberspace to date. It’s a combination of what you Like, but just as
importantly what you Ignore. I say
‘ignore’ because ‘disliking’ something still patterns an association with it –
a negative association, but one which will persist in the structure of an
online profile. Ignoring is subtly different because it effectively excludes
information from a user’s existence, marking it as irrelevant, and inaccurate.
The SuperEgo we lay
down on the internet isn’t an active part of our profiles, but like the stencil
spinning top it traces where we’ve gone in virtual space and how we’ve interacted
with nodes along the way. Like Socialspace, this pattern is used to make up
something that can be seen not as a user node’s ego, but the Internet’s ego. If
the internet has a consciousness, some point of focused thought, it is the
point to which the most nodes have trafficked their attention. The most likes,
the most views, the most shares. It’s easiest to experience this after
something newsworthy, when the same thought is affirmed across dozens of nodes
on the network. It downloads to Intraspace, and we can’t help but think about
it and its place according to our own identities.
*****
Hopefully
understanding the way these three platforms connect will help people realize
the importance of all three, and how to move between them if at any point they
feel stuck. We know that this is how cyberspace operates, but not necessarily why it operates in this way. From the
perspective of one Intra- node, why should the Inter- Ego matter? Why do people
crave attention, be it from friends or strangers or even from their own mind?
I think that
ultimately we have a strong conceptual awareness that observation premeditates
control. We struggle for our ideas to be known not for the virtue of being known, but for the virtue of being
used. When the precursor ran home
with an abstraction of a wildcat inside to share the experience with the tribe,
it was with the knowledge that it could enrich the lives of those updated. It
was not done with the intention of controlling the actions of the tribe, but
done so that members of the tribe could more readily control their own lives.
That to me is what cyberspace is all about; providing a guidance map for others
to realize there is more in the world than the one path they have walked
throughout their lives. To provide that for something as reaching as the
Internet seems to me to be a very positive trait. To want to inform oneself
through contact with nodes of cyberspace – an entirely freeing, life-giving
experience.
Inspirational Reading:
Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point
For understanding Socialspace and how ideas take off. Very good read, very diverse selection of experiences to draw from. Contains some gorgeous math on epidemics.
Edward De Bono's Lateral Thinking
A revolutionary novel in terms of understanding Intraspace according to vertical (selective) and lateral (generative) thought. Very short, as it mainly contains exercises.
Doing some impressive yo-yo science, The
Doctor determines that the alien ‘monsters’ who attacked the moon-miners are
macro-organic bacterial spiders living in the shell of a giant space egg, which
has actually been orbiting Earth as its moon for millions of years: and the
recent gravity f*** up was due to it being in the process of hatching. Physics
fans will probably be writing to the BBC about this one for years.
Courtney
Woods is a high school student, at a very young age
to adequately deal with having a baby. Proceeding with a pregnancy would mean
sacrificing her future, losing her own childhood in the process. She has been
put in the place of performing her first serious decision, and is
understandably terrified. It’s entirely natural in this position to see
abortion as a safe choice, putting everything back the way it was. As it is,
Courtney is mostly paralyzed by the gravity of the situation. Which is higher
than normal.
Captain
Lundvik is at the opposite side of the spectrum,
likely on her last eggs and entirely wearied by the thought of starting the
next phase of her life. It would be easy to simply go on living the same life
she always had, actively discouraging change and promoting a kind of stagnation
reserved for a person who sees the important part of their life as over,
looking back on it from golden years in which she is ready to die. Lundvik in
this episode embodies the zeitgeist of Earth at 2049, closed off to the terror
of space and unwilling to start a long and painful adventure.
We are presented with the responses of
these three archetypes, and given something of a spirit of the moment. Courtney
hesitates, wanting someone else to make the decision. Lundvik says no. The
Earth, once polled, returns a unanimous ‘no’. Only Clara considers it as
anything approaching an option. If I were to guess, I’d say this is an
indication that it’s never the perfect time to have a baby – look for reasons
not to, and you’ll find them. Change is scary. It’s something of a novelty to
our 21st century that abortions are as widely available and as safe
as they’ve ever been, that when we are scared we actually have the option of
backing out. Our ancestors had little option of backing out, were forced to be
courageous. No-one is forcing the 21st century to be courageous. We
have to be courageous by choice – and f*** me if that isn’t the scariest kind
of courage there is.
