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2011-03-24

The internet is the teleological object at the end of time

The internet is the teleological object at the end of time that casts a shadow back over history.  The task of all humans throughout history has been to create this object.  This object influences us across time and space and itself exists in a kind of singularity where all information is condensed to a single point and simultaneously sends information waves that we perceive and are inspired to manifest.
We have been preparing for the creation of this object since at least the beginning of agriculture, agriculture being necessary to create the conditions from which this object could emerge.  We have been developing the information to comprise it and the technology to contain it for thousands of years and finally in the last few decades we have manifested it as a tangible reality.  We have seen over the last century an acceleration in the condensation of information from paper to film to tape to digital technologies of exponentially increasing density.  Having created the appropriate conditions, developed the necessary technology and spread access to the technology around the planet we are now in a mad rush to upload all information into an ever-smaller space.  The goal seems to be to upload all information into a technology that is non-local and takes up no space.

There is also the possibility of uploading information into an organic technology that reproduces and decays.  It has been suggested that the presence of certain anomalous life-forms on this planet is the technology itself.  Unusual life-forms that also contain high densities of information, such as human beings and psilocybin mushrooms, have been striving, and working symbiotically, to manifest their true forms; pure information.  There have been many experiential verifications of existing in environments of pure information in various dream states or in collaboration with specific plants or fungi such as the aforementioned psilocybin mushroom.  In these states it is possible to achieve a high level of consciousness that reveals our ability to access, assess and manifest realities from a far wider range of information than we usually perceive.

Through the use of these plants and fungi of high information density or through a simple honest observation of contemporary 21st century culture, it is possible to notice the apparent extraterrestrial influence on human civilisation, especially the chaotic anomaly of pop culture and its increasing obsession with aesthetics of the artificial such as plastic surgery and electronic music.  The strangest of these 21st century cultural forms are of course artificial environments created on the internet.

Imaginations limited by a physical time-bound four-dimensional paradigm may conceive of aliens from space influencing our behaviour towards the goal of creating this object.  It has also been proposed that the internet is indeed the teleological object that has been influencing us towards its own creation.  Why are we creating this object that is simultaneously encompassing more and refining and reducing itself on a seemingly unstoppable trajectory to some sort of singularity?  Who are we creating this object for?  Terence McKenna describes this process as the interiorisation of the human body and the exteriorisation of the human soul.

My idea of a more pertinent question as I look around at my fellow humans and our civilisation is, Why are we pretending nothing is happening?  Why are we politely ignoring the fact that we are in the presence of the teleological object?  We are all consciously observing the beginning of the end, but not the beginning of the end of everything, rather the beginning of the end of the beginning.  The future beyond the completion of the internet being inconceivable.  Or can we conceive of the perpetuity of the world wide web, the perpetuity of exponential growth, in a world where nothing is permanent?

Will the skills we have developed as employees and consumers be sufficient for survival in a world none of us can imagine, or even in a world closer to the non-physical, non-local, non-linear world of the internet than anything else we can see?  It is likely that skills involving the ability to perceive and process as much information from our environment as possible and the ability to respond with responsibility and respect to our environment will be more valuable.

Will the increasing strangeness of our environment be sufficient impetus to instigate more sustainable behaviour or do we require some sort of cathartic catastrophe?  I am sure the ocean can provide more tsunamis if we continue to pray for them with our denial.

1 comment:

Ya-Wen said...

This is so awesome I'm going to add it to my 'research' pile for studio. Thanks Chris! YW :)