Escape Velocity (7 page)

The psychedelic experience ("a psychopharmacological virtual reality") likewise leads cyberians to conclude that they "have the ability to reshape the experience of reality and thus-if observer and observed are one-the reality itself" Underground chemists creating illicit designer drugs "decide what they'd like reality to be like, then-in a submolecular shamanic visionquest-compose a chemical that will alter their observations about reality in a specific way. . . . The world changes because it is observed differently."'''

Citing chaos theory's premise that order can spring from seemingly random phenomena, Rushkoff asserts that "[ejvery chaotic system appears to be adhering to an underlying order," then rushes in where angels (and chaos theorists) fear to tread:

This means that our world is entirely more interdependent than we have previously understood. What goes on inside any one person's head is reflected, in some manner, on every other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback and iteration, has the ability to redesign reality at large.^-^

By this logic, we arrive at an implausible cyber-reality where the "omnipotence of thoughts" prevails. Rushkoff uses the Gaia hypothesis as a springboard for his speculation that the planet may become self-aware once it passes through "the galactic time wave of history" (whatever that is). Formulated by the English scientist James Lovelock in 1974, the Gaia hypothesis (after the Greek Earth goddess) proposes that the Earth is a homeostatic system. Lovelock theorizes that the global ecosystem's attempts to maintain its equilibrium may be causing it to shift into a state unfavorable to human life as humanity becomes an ever greater threat to life on this planet. Global warming can be seen as an example of this process. In New Age circles, variations on Lovelock's thesis are used to justify claims for a planetary consciousness.

Rushkoff s belief that the planet is becoming sentient has its roots in the futurist Jerome Clayton Glenn's contention that the Earth will soon have as many human inhabitants as there are neurons in the human brain. At this juncture, he speculates, humanity will somehow form a collective consciousness, causing the planet to "wake up." Overlaying this notion with a New Age McLuhanism, Rushkoff sees the wiring of the world, through digital communications networks, as "the final stage in the development ofGaia."^^

Precisely how the fiber-optic interconnection of the number of humans equivalent to the number of neurons in the human brain will give birth to a planetary consciousness is left to the reader's imagination. Perhaps it has something to do with the chaos theory Rushkoff often uses as an anchor for his airier musings. Manuel De Landa, a postmodern philosopher whose ruminations have taken him to the far fringes of chaos theory and computer science, has observed that what chaos theorists call singularities-the transition points "where order spontaneously emerges out of chaos"-catalyze curiously lifelike behavior in nonliving matter: so-called "chemical clocks," in which billions of molecules oscillate in synchrony, or amoeba colonies, in which cells "cooperate" to form an organism.^"^

Extrapolating from these natural processes, in which "previously disconnected elements" reach a critical point where they suddenly " 'cooperate' to form a higher-level entity," De Landa conjectures that the out-of-control growth of the decentralized, nonlinear Internet could result in the emergence of a global artificial intelligence.^^ "Past a certain threshold of connectivity," he writes, "the membrane which computer networks are creating over the surface of the planet begins to 'corrte to life.' Independent software [programs] will soon begin to constitute even more complex computational societies in which [programs] trade with one another, bid and compete for resources, seed and spawn processes spontaneously, and so on."^^ Singularities have given rise to processes of self-organization in the biosphere, he reasons; why not in the computational ecosystem of the Internet? Quoting the computer scientists M. S. Miller and K. Eric Drexler, he concludes, "These systems 'can encourage the development of intelligent [software programs], but there is also a sense in which the systems themselves will become intelligent.' "^^

Indebted though it is to ideas of recent vintage such as chaos theory or the Gaia hypothesis, the techno-transcendentahsm of RushkoflPs cyberians owes much to sixties counterculture-specifically, to the scientific humanism mythologized by SF writers such as Arthur C. Clarke.

Although it was published in 1953, Clarke's SF classic Childhood's End was a reference point for sixties counterculture, as evidenced in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Noting the novel among the "strange, prophetic books on Kesey's shelf," Wolfe links the conviction shared by Kesey and his Merry Pranksters-that they were hurtling toward "that scary void beyond catastrophe, where all, supposedly, will be possible"-to Clarke's evocation of "the Total Breakthrough generation" that becomes "part of the Over-mind . . . leaving the last remnants of matter behind."^^

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose screenplay was cowritten by Clarke and the director Stanley Kubrick, takes up the theme of posthuman apotheosis. At once a psychedelic and a technological epiphany, the film evoked a journey to the center of the mind even as it realized the cosmic promise inherent in John F. Kennedy's proclamation that America would head for the "New Frontier," space. Passing through the hallucinogenic, light-streaked "Stargate Corridor" of the "voyage beyond the infinite" at the movie's end, the astronaut protagonist arrives at the place where odysseys into inner and outer space meet-the realm of the numinous, where he transcends humanity altogether, metamorphosing into a godlike "Star-Child."

Childhood's End and, after it, 2001 presage the cyberdelic posthuman-ism that crops up in Cyberia, where the magic mushroom-gobbling philosopher Terence McKenna asserts that evolution is poised to break free of "the chrysalis of matter . . . and then look back on a cast-off mode of being as it rises into a higher dimension."^^

More profoundly, the cyberians' visions of escape velocity derive from the teleologies of two thinkers whose ideas percolated into sixties counterculture: Marshall McLuhan and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin's contributions to the emerging mythos of techno-transcendentalism were, at points, strikingly congruent. McLuhan's concept of a "global village" borne of communications technologies evolved, over time, into a vision of the "[pjsychic communal integration" of all humankind, "made possible at last by the electronic media."^^ This global

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cosmic consciousness is not unlike the evolutionary epiphany foretold by Teilhard de Chardin, who proclaimed the coming of an "ultra-humanity" destined to converge in an "Omega Point"-a "cosmic Christ" w^ho is the "consummation of the evolutionary process."^' McLuhan, a devout Roman Catholic, once observed that the psychic convergence facilitated by electronic media

could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man. ... I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will. . . himself. . . become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey.*^

Likewise, Teilhard de Chardin, a theologian and paleontologist who predicted the reintegration of science and religion, maintained that

[w]e are today witnessing a truly explosive growth of technology and research, bringing an increasing mastery, both theoretical and practical, of the secrets and sources of cosmic energy at every level and in every form; and, correlative with this, the rapid heightening of what I have called the psychic temperature of the Earth. . . . We see a human tide bearing us upward with all the force of a contracting star; not a spreading tide, as we might suppose, but one that is rising: the ineluctable growth on our horizon of a true state of "ultra-humanity."^^

The McLuhan quote is from his 1969 Playboy interview and the Teilhard de Chardin excerpt is from an essay written in 1950, but their refrains resound throughout cyberdelia. According to the New York Times Magazine, Louis Rossetto, the editor and publisher of Wired, believes that

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"society is organized by a 'hive-mind consensus' that allows humanity to evolve into ever higher forms, perhaps even fulfilling McLuhan's prophecy to 'make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness.' "^"^ Wired's executive editor, Kevin Kelly, vs^ho has described his first visit to the Internet as "a religious experience," calls the net and systems like it "exo-nervous systems, things that connect us up beyond-literally, phys-ically-beyond our bodies."^^ He believes that w^hen "enough of us get together this w^ay, w^e vs^ill have created a new life form. It's evolutionary; it's what the human mind was destined to do."^^

Similarly, Jody Radzik, identified in a Rolling Stone feature on smart drugs and rave culture as "one of the [rave] crowd's resident gurus," believes that " '[t]he planet is waking up. . . . Humans are the brain cells. The axons of the nerve cells are the telephone lines.' "^^ R. U. Sirius hitches Radzik's ideas to McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin's rhetoric of transcendental liftoff. "I think we're going through a process of information linkup toward the building of a global nervous system, a global brain," he says, "which many people have seen as the inevitable first step toward getting off the planet."

It seems only fitting that John Perry Barlow embraces this all-pervasive paradigm. Barlow stands squarely at the junction, in cyberdelic culture, of the sixties and the nineties: A former "poet and SDS mischief-maker" who according to the New York Times "helped lead the psychedelic revolution at Wesleyan University," he is a Grateful Dead lyricist, frequent Mondo 2000 contributor, and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned with the civil liberties of computer users.^^ A self-described "techno-crank," he is also, like Rushkofif, Sirius, and Radzik, an unrepentant techno-transcendentalist.

"I'll cut right to the chase with you," he told me, in a phone interview. "I think that we-humanity-are engaged in a great work which is and has been, since that moment when we started abstracting reality into information and put cave paintings up in Lascaux, hardwiring collective consciousness. Not the collective unconscious, which is presumably pretty well wired already, but creating the collective organism of the human mind in one coherent simultaneous thing. I don't know why we want to do that but it seems to me that everything we're up to points in that direction. I think about Teilhard de Chardin a lot, [who] used to

talk about something called the noosphere, which was the combined field of all [human consciousness], and how that became stronger and stronger as civilization progressed and how what God wanted was to have someone to talk to on its own level and that was what humanity was in the process of creating. That comes as close as I can to describing what I think is going on.

"Have you ever read [the anthropologist and New Age philosopher] Gregory Bateson? A fruitful way of looking at this is the Batesonian model of mind, which simply stated says that you can't tell me where my mind leaves off and yours takes up. There's simply no boundary condition anywhere and there never has been. There's a coterminous nature of human minds to begin with; it's just a matter of making the tacit connections explicit."

In Cyberia, ideas related to Barlow's are accompanied by es-chatological visions of humankind being drawn inexorably toward "the chaos attractor at the end of time," a teleological endpoint whose arrival wall catalyze "the coming hyperdimensional shift into a timeless, nonper-sonalized reality." Although much of RushkofFs cosmic curtain closer is borrowed from the millenarian musings of Terence McKenna, variations on this myth are all around us in SF movies and pop songs about technologically superior alien saviors {The Day the Earth Stood Still, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Byrds' "Mr. Spaceman," David Bowie's "Starman"). As the critic Hugh Ruppersberg points out, many of these fables rest "on the premise that advanced technology breeds not only miraculous wonders but moral redemption as well."^*^

In like fashion, RushkofF relocates the Spiritual in the realm of the technological. He accepts on faith the notion that technologies such as psychedelic drugs "are part of the continuing evolution of the human species toward greater intelligence, empathy, and awareness."^^ Conceding the new, digital mysticism's unfortunate "inability to tackle everyday, real-world strife," he is nonetheless confident that its upgrade of sixties beliefs is preparing the way for humankind's "great leap into hyperspace."^'

This is techno-transcendentalism's version of born-again Christianity's "rapture," in which true believers are lifted out of the mundane, into the parting clouds. Like so many other millenarian prophecies before it, the

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cyberdelic vision of a techno-mystical apotheosis in the there and then diverts pubhc discourse from the pohtical and socioeconomic inequities of the here and now^.

Cyberia provides ample evidence of this dynamic. Rushkoff thrills to cyberian video art in which Gulf War bombing runs are merely another special effect, collaged together w^ith "virtual reality scenes, and even old sitcoms." A Mondo groupie v^^ho drops acid before undergoing an abortion is applauded for her "unflinching commitment to experiencing and understanding her passage through time." Homeless "mole people" alleged to dw^ell in the "forgotten tunnels of New York's subway system" are romanticized as an example of the "cyberian ideal" of insurgent subcultures hidden in the cracks of the power structure. And a homeless man dragging a cardboard box isn't foraging for shelter, he's engaged in "social hacking."^^