Image taken on 2009-02-09 02:30:46 by ekai.
Internet
Timothy Leary on LSD, Dying, Church, Internet, Etc.
Timothy Leary was interviewed by Paul Krassner in 1995, the year before he died. In this free wheeling interview, Leary talks about LSD, Death & Dying, the Catholic Church, the Internet, Ram Dass, G. Gordon Liddy, the Weather Underground, and more. This is an edited version excerpted from the 8 part series in Nancy Cain’s video archives.
Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism
I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What’s uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, or does it reach a threshold where something, well, different happens?
So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.
My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with its own emergent behaviors.
