by Erik Davis
Given the pivotal role that computers play in our understanding of chaos, complexity, and artificial life, it is hardly surprising that these sometimes rather speculative sciences have also turned around and started to influence how people think about the social, cultural, and economic dimension of computers. In Out of Control, a flagship volume of technological post-Darwinism, Wired founding executive Kevin Kelly argues that we are heading into a neobiological civilization defined by organic technologies, machinelike biologies, and the prevalence of networks and hive minds. In this Teilhardian world, evolution and engineering become two sides of the same out-of-control force of adaptive learning and holistic feedback loops. Amassing loads of research, Kelly attempts to convince the reader that the spontaneous, symbiotic, and self-organizing capacities of complex systems amount to nothing less than an “invisible hand” of evolution—one that he thinks should be allowed to run riot. Instead of musty old governments, outmoded humanist philosophies, and moribund social institutions, the creative novelty of the universe itself should guide technological development, economic networks, and human culture. Kelly would bridle at the label of metaphysician, but he closes his book with some neobiological rules of thumb, bumper-sticker slogans like “seek persistent disequilibrium” and “honor your errors” that he calls the “Nine Laws of God.” Though Kelly himself is a born-again Christian, his God is in many ways the polar opposite of the top-down lawgiver of traditional biblical faith. Instead, his Nine Laws recall the process theology that has quietly built up steam in some twentieth-century religious circles, a theology that supplants the transcendent one-shot Platonic Creator with a more Taoist and Heraclitan sense of creative evolution and constant becoming.
Like Kelly, Teilhard extended his evolutionary optimism to encompass the pell-mell march of twentieth-century technology. The Jesuit praised all those possessed by the “demon (or angel) of Research” because they recognized that the world is a “machine for progress—or rather, an organism that is progressing.” Anticipating the conceptual fusion (and confusion) of the made and the born that characterizes so many cyborganic thinkers today, Teilhard argued that technologies are now directly participating in their own evolution. Machines will continue to beget machines with the persistence of biblical patriarchs, and their interlinking progeny will eventually intertwine into “a single, vast, organized mechanism.” But unlike the materialist techno-Darwinians, Teilhard believed that the outward complexification of material form is always accompanied by the internal growth of consciousness. For Teilhard, then, technologies are not simply human tools, but vessels of the expanding noosphere, the body and nervous system of a world consciousness striving to be.
As we saw earlier, electric infotech has been considered a kind of “nervous system” since the days of the telegraph, and, not surprisingly, Teilhard emphasized the role that electronic media played in the development of his technological “brain of brains.” Writing in the early 1950s, he underscored the global reach of radio, cinema, and television, while also drawing attention to “the insidious growth of those astounding electronic computers.” In a sense, Teilhard recognized the emergent outlines of a worldwide electronic and computational brain at a time when few engineers were even thinking about the possibilities of networked computers. Or as Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg bluntly declared in Wired, “Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived.”6
Cobb later expanded her theological ideas about the sacred pulse of technological development in her book Cybergrace, but it is no accident that her thoughts first appeared in Wired. In the early years of its run, the magazine’s infectious and often absurdly gung ho enthusiasm for both the Internet and the global technoeconomy was informed with a kind of secularized Teilhardian fervor. Along with Kelly’s paeans to the coming neo-biological civilization, Wired regular John Perry Barlow was also a hard-core Teilhard fan, who announced in the magazine’s pages that “the point of all evolution up to this stage is the creation of a collective organization of Mind.”7 And in an online interview, the magazine’s cofounder Louis Rossetto tipped his hat to Teilhard and the Jesuit’s influence on Internet culture. “What seems to be evolving is a global consciousness formed out of the discussions and negotiations and feelings being shared by individuals connected to networks through brain appliances like computers. The more minds that connect, the more powerful this consciousness will be. For me, this is the real digital revolution—not computers, not networks, but brains connecting to brains.”8
Even nippier scenarios emerge from the brain of Mark Pesce, the VRML wizard we met in chapter 7. For Pesce, the astounding growth of the Net over the last decade can mean only one thing: Teilhard’s noosphere is striving to know itself. In the capstone address before a VRML World Movers conference, Pesce explained that the noosphere, having saturated the electrical communication technologies of the pre-digital age, has begun to turn inward, ingesting “all human knowledge and all human experience.” Using complexity-theory lingo, Pesce explained that, sometime in the early 1990s, the networked noosphere began an irreversible process of self-organization. “The first of its emergent properties was the World Wide Web, for it first needed to make itself comprehensible—that is, indexible—to itself.” For proof of this rather mystical concrescence, Pesce pointed to the astronomical growth rate of the Web: “How else to explain a process that magically began everywhere, all at once, across the length and breadth of the Internet?” He called this phenomenon “the Web that ate the Net,” and predicted that a similar transformation lies in the near future, when the Web will unfold into a three-dimensional cyberspace, courtesy of VRML or some other 3-D Net protocol. “VRML is the porthole cut into the noosphere, the mirror which lets the seer see our self.”9
Clearly, the notion that computer networks are booting up the mind of the planet is not a technoscientific scenario at all, however much the language of complex systems or artificial intelligence may help us get a handle on the Internet’s explosive, out-of-control growth or its possible mind-like properties. The leap from the global brain to the Gaian mind remains an essentially metaphysical move—which doesn’t mean that the leap isn’t worth hazarding. For whether or not we take Pesce literally, his vision of the online noosphere gives voice to a growing if inchoate intuition that computer networks and virtual technologies have opened up what amounts to a new category of knowing and being, a unique and unparalleled global space of intelligence, experience, terror, and communion. On the other hand, even if we accept the outlandish supposition that Gaia is indeed waking up and rubbing her satellite eyes, we cannot assume that this electronic consciousness will be unified to itself, let alone achieve a state of mystical perfection. This is the lesson of Gibson’s Neuromancer myth: the cyberspace AI that achieves technological godhead at the end of his first novel cannot maintain its omniscient totality, and it fragments into the crafty polytheistic subroutines of Haitian Vodou. Or as Rossetto put it, the emergence of a single global mind is no more likely than the discovery that a single human mind lurks within our own skulls: “We actually have a bunch of different ‘minds,’ which negotiate with each other.”10
Rossetto’s quip reminds us that the Gaian mind is really a story about our minds. In particular, it is about what is happening to those minds as we intertwine them through computer networks and global media flows, through social networks, satellites, GPS systems, and mobile phones, through emerging electric structures of work, education, and play. And from this perspective—a neuron’s eye view of the global brain, so to speak—the noosphere does not begin with a state of mystical absorption, but with an identity crisis. Nowadays, it no longer seems as if we own our own minds. From cognitive science to postmodern psychology, it seems that the self has lost its bearings; the subject deconstructs itself and the society of mind devolves into a rabble.
Technology plays a privileged role in this identity meltdown, as the massive influx of media and information overwhelms the containers of consciousness, p
articularly, it seems, on the Internet. As the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle argues in Life on the Screen, a savvy ethnography of early online society, the virtual self is fragmented, fluid, and always under construction. Many computer users play with the malleable qualities of online identity: inhabiting different characters, histories, and genders; multiplying the self into a host of handles and log-ons; engineering autonomous digital doppelgängers. Turkle suggests that the multiplicity of online identity may actually enhance our ability to creatively explore and develop our personalities and relationships at a time of profound social dislocation; less generous observers might characterize the Internet as one cause of that dislocation, a false and fractured infinity that encourages people to avoid or postpone the ethical decisions, internal reflections, and acceptance of limitations that frame a life and give it shape and depth.
At the same time, the very multiplicity and fluidity of online identity opens up the possibility of new forms of human communion. On social networks, MMORPGs, and chat boards, our thoughts and personalities are woven into communities of virtual intelligence, where we are defined as much by the links and networks we bring with us as by the peculiar discursive fingerprints we leave on information space. Online, we colonize each other’s brains, or at least the texts and images that flow through and shape those brains, and this mutual infestation breeds what Rheingold calls “grass-roots group minds”: new computer-mediated modes of collaboration, education, art, and decision making that may amplify and synthesize individual intelligence and creativity. In this sense, the Gaian mind is simply a mythic metaphor for a process that has begun much closer to home: the construction of networked environments and virtual spaces that knit our minds into transpersonal spaces of knowledge and experience potentially greater than the sum of their parts.
The cyberphilosopher Pierre Lévy calls this process the emergence of “collective intelligence.” In an optimistic and incisive book of the same name, Lévy argues that computer networks, virtual environments, and multimedia tools will not simply amplify our individual cognitive powers, but will give rise “to a qualitatively different form of intelligence, which is added to personal intelligences, forming a kind of collective brain, or hypercortex.”11 This hypercortex is not just a new machinery of thought, but an environment, “an invisible space of understanding, knowledge, and intellectual power, within which new qualities of being and new ways of fashioning a society will flourish and mutate.”12 This “knowledge space” signifies nothing less than a new chapter of the human story, following on the heels of a number of anthropological spaces that humans have explored over the millennia: the nomadic earth of hunter-gatherers, the bounded territorial spaces of agricultural societies and the state, and the “deterritorialized” spaces of global flows of commodities and information introduced by capitalism. Lévy does not believe the knowledge space will erase these earlier environs, but he does hope that the digital terra incognita will allow us to overcome their limitations. Virtual interfaces and other forms of visualization will transform the collective networks of information into a navigable and nomadic “cosmopedia,” a constantly unfolding space that will enable us to rise above the worlds of consumerism, political parochialism, and the mass media, and to develop the kind of radically democratic and transpersonal smarts we will need to confront the enormous difficulties that lie just around the bend.
Lévy is a philosopher, and he does not invoke the sorts of mystical forces that animate the thought of Teilhard and other Gaian mind visionaries. On the other hand, he recognizes that the peculiar qualities of information space and virtual reality resurrect metaphysical concerns and the spiritual imagination alike. In his chapter “Choreography of Angelic Bodies,” Lévy resuscitates medieval Islamic theology in order to apply Neoplatonic conceptions of the angel to the development of collective intelligence. As we saw in earlier chapters, Neoplatonist philosophers and mystics imagined the cosmos as a multistoried high-rise. The closer a level stands to the transcendent godhead, the more perfection and unity it has. As you might expect, our world is in the basement, a carnal ball of multiplicity and confusion where the transcendental call of the divine intellect must battle the chaos of fragmentation, ignorance, and wayward human passions. As Lévy explains, angels act as mediators and transformers within this hierarchy of spiritual reality; they collect the divine sparks of the level below them, including our world, and they fuse and direct these sparks toward the more synthetic planes of divine intelligence.
For Lévy, the Angel that medieval thinkers glimpsed hovering above our world returns today as the archetypal image of the collective intelligence that technologies are now creating. Theology becomes technology once again. But in a crucial theoretical move, Lévy turns the metaphysical architecture of the Neoplatonic cosmos on its head, transforming transcendence into immanence and redirecting divine intelligence back toward the embodied human world we actually inhabit. Once the Angel is recognized as virtual rather than divine, it no longer lures us onto the Platonic space shuttle of world-loathing transcendence, but instead reflects our own active and angelic intelligence back onto the earth. “The angels of the living unite to perpetually form and re-form the Angel of the collective, the moving and radiant body of human knowledge. The Angel does not speak. It is itself the aggregate voice or choral chant that rises from an acting and thinking humanity.”13 The Angel is not a tyrannical hive-mind. Our own angelic natures, our own active powers of intelligence, are amplified but not swallowed up by the “inverse cathedral” of the digital knowledge space.
Lévy suffers from a typically Gallic love of abstraction, and the more you try to imagine how his luminous vision of collective intelligence might actually unfold within the clamorous and anxious conditions of our workaday lives and technologies, the more difficult it is to hold on to. Contemplating such utopian and metaphysical possibilities in the light of today’s political realities is like listening to the “Sanctus” of Bach’s B-minor Mass on a cheap home stereo system: you feel swallowed up within a shimmering mathematical cathedral of the collective human voice, only to hear the glorious chorus fade into speaker buzz and the noise of car alarms outside. But Lévy’s attempt to imagine the new space of information through the Angel of the collective remains compelling. Lévy acknowledges that spiritual and transpersonal possibilities continue to beckon the human mind, and that these possibilities have been triggered anew by our technologies—or rather, by what our technologies are doing to our minds. At the same time, Lévy resists the temptations of transcendence, of the fallacy that technology or metaphysical truths will deliver us to the level above human. If a postmodern World Soul is indeed emerging from the electronic hypercortex of information networks, then we must make sure that soul keeps its feet on the ground.
In this sense, it’s important to see the myth of the Gaian mind, not in the virtual light of collective intelligence, but in the shadows of a more urgent and pressing condition: globalization. The telecommunication and computer networks that envelop the earth are only the most hardwired expression of what amounts, in the end, to a single planetary system blanketing Terra’s multiple cultures and nations. Capitalism and communications have been shrinking the world for centuries, of course, but this new global space intertwines us as never before with its increasingly dynamic flows of capital, goods, immigrants, pollution, software, refugees, pop culture, viruses, weapons, ideas, and drugs. It is a world where warming trends spurred by industrial nations swallow islands in Polynesia, where governments pay more attention to CNN than to ambassadors, where a single bank clerk in Singapore can bring down a financial institution on the other side of the planet.
For Teilhard, Pesce, and other Gaian minders, the fact that the world is now wired into a collective web of interconnections suggests that evolutionary or even mystical forces are leading us into something like a global village. But as any anthropologist would tell you, villages can be pretty backbiting, oppressive, and paranoid places. Even Marshall McLuhan recogni
zed the frightening claustrophobia of the global village he first described. As early as 1962, McLuhan argued that as the modern individual slips into the intensely participatory echo chamber of global electronic culture, we risk an eruption of violence, mental breakdowns, and society-wide pathologies. “As our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside,” he claimed, warning that unless we remain aware of this dynamic, “we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.”14 Mystical reports to the contrary, it seems that the realization that “everything affects everything all the time” is not always such a happy insight. For many global citizens anyway, the perception of total interdependence brings with it a dark and paralyzing fear, at the root of which lies the awareness that there is no escape. That’s why so many of our panic terrors today cluster around the threat of contagion: Ebola plagues, AIDS, computer viruses, soul-rotting media memes, deadly E. coli outbreaks, even the infectious financial downturns of 1997’s “Asian flu.”
Most ominous of all is the possibility that total interdependence will mean new forms of totalitarian control. Though thinkers like Teilhard and Lévy go out of their way to avoid the suggestion that the global mind would transform the world into a high-tech military anthill, such implications are unavoidable. The book jacket of Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control, which is meant to reassure us that networking is definitely the way to go, pictures a swarm of half-virtual bees flitting about a honeycomb of MultiHyve computer monitors. Even the angels that Lévy hopes will help save us from this fate have something of the Stasi to them. In Islamic lore, for example, the winged guardians operate as holy spy-cams, invisible witnesses that hover about us during our daily trials, recording all our actions in a file to be sealed unto Judgment Day. Now we have digitized these recording angels, who are now fit to track, reconstruct, and issue judgment on our identities and actions as we move through an infosphere of databases, electronic transactions, demographic tracking software, and surveillance cameras.
