Today's world has
something the
human world has never had before: computers. Computers in the
hands of the ordinary people of the world.
This is an incredible event.
An event that had to wait its time: science, technology, trade,
literacy, all had to be right.
It is probably the most significant event yet in the history of the
peoples of the earth.
It is the event that has brought the people together for the first time.
It is the event that has given them an individual voice and a
collective voice, for the first time.
It is the event that has given rise to the possibility of the people
governing themselves.
Governing their own planet.
Governing their own lives.
Instant opinion.
Instant information.
Instant polling.
Instant consensus.
It gives a voice to planet earth.
It give an instant readout of the state of mind of planet earth.
We can see what we currently are.
What occupies our minds.
What does not.
We can see ourselves.
We can meet each other.
No longer at the mercy of those who profess to know, profess to have
the right to lead, to show the way, to direct.
The self styled 'wise', self styled 'knowledgeable', self styled
'translators', self styled 'leaders' , self styled 'sanctified'
Hereditary monarchs, hereditary gods, hereditary riches.
Hereditary injustice.
Now all can be seen. All can be revealed.
The people are the possessors of all knowledge, all skill, all wisdom,
all rights. No one else. There is no one else. There are only those who
seek to separate themselves off in order to adopt privileged positions
from which they impose injustices.
The power of the personal computer with its calculating ability, the
power of the mass storage devices with the mass of data they can keep,
the power of the connectivity of the internet, all of this creates
something that has never, ever existed before.
It is one machine. Connected computers make one computer.
The most super computer ever. It is and always will
be. There is one machine with something like one billion
terminals. There are currently something like one billion
pc's in use in the world. Of course they are not all
connected to the internet and therefore not all connected to each
other. But they soon could be. With China and India absorbing
pc's as quickly as they can and those pc's going onto the net as
quickly as they can it is convenient and not too far wrong to say we've
got a world wide computer with one billion terminals.
We could put computational task to this billion computers, to this
massive super computer, and that one billion computers could be
organised to work on that task and compute a solution. That's a super
computer and the possibility of computations never possible before.
But each of those computers is not only a machine, it is also a person.
Each one has a person behind it, directing it, watching it, using it.
We could put a human question to that machine and it would be
simultaneously considered by one billion people and their reaction
instantly appearing back on the web, the writing paper of the super
computer, the output media of the super computer, the interface between
the sentient planet and the outside.
That planet is the computer conscious community. A
community conscious of itself in interactive realtime by
virtue of the personal computer. This is the new planet
earth, just coming into being, just awakening to itself, just beginning
to cohere, to become self-aware, to begin to grow, to begin to pick
direction, to begin to self-educate... just about to begin..
But will it be allowed to continue?
There are many forces at work trying to limit or even stop the free
growth of the internet.
Many of those 'many forces' are 'normal' business-oriented,
greed-oriented so called 'market forces' and they can be the most
dangerous of all. Because they can be used to curtail all freedoms and
apparently with the will of the people, for the good of the people.
In exactly the same way that people's freedoms have been totally
curtailed and circumscribed via the 'terrorist' hysteria - enabling the
introduction of legislation that literally enslaves the population in
the name of protecting it, and nominally with the informed consent of
the population.
This route is the preferred route for the power brokers, for those
intent on keeping the world down, the people as unconscious subject
masses, because it hides their own identity, their own agenda.
Turn the people agains the people has always been the way.
These are such early days that everyone is still struggling
to grasp what exactly is the nature of this new phenomenon.
Good and bad alike.
It is very probably that the 'bad' are ahead in their understanding.
If we include in 'bad' what we might call the
'innately
potentially bad' meaning those organisations that exist to create power
over others. Though they almost always do this with an avowed
intention of protecting the masses the power they have is always
corrupted to some extent and all too often gets corrupted to the most
extreme extent.
Our spy agencies. Our security agencies. Our police forces. Any such
organisation is open to this sort of abuse by its very nature - power
over others.
These agencies then, if included in the category 'bad' because of their
possible horrific threat, are almost certainly ahead of the rest of us
in the their understanding of the implications of the web and in their
utilisation of it for their own ends.
This is a known reality in fact. It is known that there is a
programme to monitor every email, every web communication, every
telephone communication. This staggering operation is in fact feasible
given enough money and enough computers. This operation is in
operation. It is happening.
This operation is an exercise in spying on the community on the one
hand. This is bad enough. The community at large is
ignorant of it. Helpless before it because in ignorance, oblivious to
it. The masses do this. They allow themselves to be
raped,
beaten, robbed, cheated, oppressed to incredible lengths before
reacting. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance said
Thomas
Jefferson and it is very true as is demonstrated anew each passing
year. But do the people practice 'eternal vigilance' ?
No.
So this aspect - the immediate, obvious, upfront aspect - is bad enough
but there's an even worse one behind it. Behind it is the fact that it
is an exercise in controlling the web. If you can monitor
every
IP packet on the web then you can control the web.