We are moving beyond our technological present into a different world. The interesting thing is that we are creating that world as we are living it. Science tells us that life is simply chemistry which gives rise to information. So in the pursuit of rationalism and systematic truth, scientists often think they must curb their imaginations to arrive at their objective. This is a mirage of comprehension. There are three critical areas to understanding our future:
We need to realize that the 6-7 billion human beings now alive on the earth create a burden which is far beyond the carrying capacity for our beleaguered world. It is only when we understand the paradox that individual wisdom must go beyond our individual survival for us to come to the ultimate comprehension of our future.
I’m not a great fan of postmodernism, but I have to think that Baudrillard was on to something when he said:
Everything is destined to reappear as simulation…Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.
The Web and its cultural correlatives and by-products, most notably YouTube, have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and complete, injudicious “self-expression” into confessional art. But even as we are being told that these are forces for democracy and individuality, we are daily giving up more of our privacy and personal freedom. The boundary between corporate interests, individual rights and liberties and government montoring are dissolving, leaving us alone to struggle to regain the personal autonomy we have lost.
I’ve been researching the changes the Internet makes on human culture. Yes, it’s a big subject, but I think it is one every person who is engaged in any way with the world wide web should give thought to . A new book by Lee Siegel, Against the Machine, presents a jeremiad of the myriad of woes that the phenomenon of so many people sitting in isolation and interacting only with a computer scene can exact on our collective of life. My problem with the book, and with much of the other culture commentary on this subject, is that it doesn’t really address the deep underlying social changes which are occurring as a result of these changes.
