Marion Bride's Computer Conscious Community



                                                                                                             A portal

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.