Cyberspace Quotes

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.

We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must “log on” somewhere, and if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all. (264)

If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.

The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.

Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.

Where else but cyberspace does the introvert have the opportunity to start in our comfort zone of written communication and talk later?

[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." Yes? Why is that?" Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]

The internet is where some people go to show their true intelligence; others, their hidden stupidity.

We’ve got one huge advantage—people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute.

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains. Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.

Potential boyfriends could not smoke Merit cigarettes, own or wear a pair of cowboy boots, or eat anything labeled either lite or heart smart. Speech was important, and disqualifying phrases included “I can’t find my nipple ring” and “This one here was my first tattoo.” All street names had to be said in full, meaning no “Fifty-ninth and Lex,” and definitely no “Mad Ave.” They couldn’t drink more than I did, couldn’t write poetry in notebooks and read it out loud to an audience of strangers, and couldn’t use the words flick, freebie, cyberspace, progressive, or zeitgeist. . . . Age, race, weight were unimportant. In terms of mutual interests, I figured we could spend the rest of our lives discussing how much we hated the aforementioned characteristics.

Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.

As the world is increasingly interconnected, everyone shares the responsibility of securing cyberspace.

In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.

United Nations needs reform to connect with world community beyond the boundary of high-level bureaucrats and politicians through cyberspace and other means to put itself at the heart of worldwide public needs, hopes, and fears.

What you post online speaks VOLUME about who you really are. POST with intention. REPOST with caution.

Don't promote negativity online and expect people to treat you with positivity in person.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void... The Sprawl was a long, strange way home now over the Pacific, and he was no Console Man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

If you are in a position where you can reach people, then use your platform to stand up for a cause. HINT: social media is a platform.

See you on the other side of the screen, if you make it, earnest cyberspace cadet.

I've made a profound transformation. I've fashioned some cyber-underwear. I'm not scared of anything! Actually, I am scared of a few things. Cyber world is a world of adventure, a new galaxy. I'm big on adventure. But I don't assume that just because the word cyber is being used as a prefix, doesn't give it anymore value or credence. Cyber relationships have the illusion of intimacy, sometimes with the absence of intimacy. Is it better to have a conversation in a café or on the telephone?

If cyberspace can screw with you, it will.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.

People are lazy that’s why today’s technology is crazy.

If the good news from cyberspace is that we're writing more, the bad news is that most of us aren't very good at it. Our words don't do justice to our ideas.

That’s how it is online—there’s no time in cyberspace. It’s almost like everything physical evaporates, and it’s just your mind and the different sites floating in a void.

There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace . . . but I’ve already said this.

Our cyberworld and cyberspace are infested with so many cyberscoundrels, cybercriminals, cybersluts and cyberpunks - that is virtually impossible for the cybercops (cyberpolice) to catch or stop them using known cybertechniques and save the cyberphobia of millions of cybernauts, many of whom are cyberholics.

We know that power is shifting from brawn to brains, from north to south and west to east, from old corporate behemoths to agile start-ups, from entrenched dictators to people in town squares and cyberspace.

Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.

When technology is mobile, and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will do, governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.

The Matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said the voice-over, 'in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spatial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. 'Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

Cyber void is so full of amazing emptiness that makes us feel fulfilled.

The first million words are the hardest.

If Dylan and I had met by chatting on the Net in a room of cyberspace instead of face to face and I hadn't seen his lips or the way he moves his hips when he does that sexy dance and I hadn't had a chance to look into his eyes and be dazzled by their size and all that I had seen were his letters on my screen, then I might as well confess: I think I would have liked him less.

the failure of language.” “It’s a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.

Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives

In cyberspace, everyone can hear you scream.

Be careful because cyberspace is a two way street those that hunt and stalk and troll can also become the hunted by those that they harass and attack. Cyberspace has a definite dark side.

Sitting in a corner, I live like a toad Oh! How I love my room: my tiny abode! Here I wake up; and I sleep in here The world far away; yet virtually near Not that I'm jailed in this place of grace Just don't want to face another face

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

Economics has to be replaced by a global science whose characteristics and field of inquiry are still unknown: a science that would be able to study the processes that form cyberspace, the global network of signs-commodities.

All we need to release our inner God is a pulpit and an audience, both of which the Internet supplies in great abundance. Too bad that the corollaly to being in God mode in cyberspace is an explosion of narcissism and self-centeredness.

THIS REVOLUTION IS FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY.

A smiley face brightens cyber space. Smiling pics and emoticons are good netiquette. NetworkEtiquette.net

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

The suppression of ecstasy and condemnation of pleasure by patriarchal religion have left us in a deep, festering morass. The pleasures people seek in modern times are superficial, venal, and corrupt. This is deeply unfortunate, for it justifies the patriarchal condemnation of pleasure that rotted out our hedonistic capacities in the first place! Narcissism is rampant, having reached a truly global scale. It now appears to have entered the terminal phase known as “cocooning,” the ultimate state of isolation. Dissociation from the natural world verges on complete disembodiment, represented in Archontic ploys such as “transhumanism,” cloning, virtual reality, and the uploading of human consciousness into cyberspace. The computer looks due to replace the cross as the primary image of salvation. It is already the altar where millions worship daily. If the technocrats prevail, artificial intelligence and artificial life will soon overrule the natural order of the planet.

Think before you click. If people do not know you personally and if they cannot see you as you type, what you post online can be taken out of context if you are not careful in the way your message is delivered.

At the same time, it has also reinforced the mind-body dualism to the point of producing the illusion, so powerfully propagated in cyberspace, that human beings have freed themselves from their material circumstances to the point where they have become floating personalities “decoupled from a body.

[[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm.

In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others. It will not matter what most of the people on earth might think of your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair. In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.

Code will be a central tool in this analysis. It will present the greatest threat to both liberal and libertarian ideals, as well as their greatest promise. We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental. Or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground. There is no choice that does not include some kind of building. Code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us.

In almost every competitive area, including most of the world’s multitrillion-dollar investment activity, the migration of transactions into cyberspace will be driven by an almost hydraulic pressure—the impetus to avoid predatory taxation, including the tax that inflation places upon everyone who holds his wealth in a national currency.

It is a confounding and eerie sensation to feel social while alone, thronged with invisible entities whose presence is felt yet who appear wholly absent. These entities are our twenty-first-century ghosts, shorn from their corporeal shells and set loose to glide through cyberspace at lightning speed and with startling precision. We call to one another in the darkness of the Internet, reuniting with hosts of friends and followers, but the act is all theater. There is nothing there in the dark except the dead gaze of a copy.

Flirting has to be the original form of guerrilla marketing, from back before markets even existed.

Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What’s truer than that...

Emoticons as a new class of oversignifying precision grammar.

You can’t scrub everything,” says Lorenzo. “Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.

John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,

Freedom in cyberspace’d be fine and dandy if we happened to live there.

They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute.

In the age of cyberspace, Lenin lies in ruins.

We're all connected now, I think as I send it off into cyberspace. Everyone and everything.

Alice in Wonderland, Alice down the rabbit hole, Alice out in Cyberspace, flung along the lines of data, flying across fields of light, the night cities that live only behind her eyes.

This was the thing with the murky world of the Internet. You swam along through cyberspace, merrily picking up this and that, and next thing you knew you’d stumbled upon something unsavory and ugly.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . 

Liberty in cyberspace will not come from the absence of the state. Liberty there, as anywhere, will come from a state of a certain kind. We build a world where freedom can flourish not by removing from society any self-conscious control, but by setting it in a place where a particular kind of self-conscious control survives. We build liberty as our founders did, by setting society upon a certain constitution.

The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus had rendered him helpless. “Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: ‘Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.’ I threw my laptop across the room.”  . . . If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)  . . . “This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we have ever encountered. We just can’t imagine what kind of devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications,” said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for hours.

The literary establishment in England was stunned, shocked, and scandalized by an event of millennial significance when a major bookstore chain innocently polled English-speaking readers, asking them to choose the greatest book of the twentieth century. By a wide margin The Lord of the Rings won. Three times the poll was broadened: to a worldwide readership, into cyberspace via Amazon.com, and even to "the greatest book of the millennium". The same champion won each time. The critics retched and kvetched, wailed and flailed, gasped and grasped for explanations. One said that they had failed and wasted their work of "ed-u-ca-tion". "Why bother teaching them to read if they're going to read that?

CYBERSPACE, AS THE deck presented it, had no particular relationship with the deck’s physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority’s Aztec pyramid of data.

Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups.

For so long considered a second-rate category to other writing genres, Science Fiction should be allotted its true place in literature. The reason Science Fiction is so important is because SF authors create the future. They bring through ideas, technology, and new thought, put it all down in written and spoken word, and then send it out into mass consciousness. When enough people (a critical mass) think about and truly consider the plausibility of a concept, it becomes reality. Think William Gibson, who in 1982's "Burning Chrome" coined "cyberspace". Few grasped the concept at the time, but as the internet took hold in the 1990's, we not only had a word to describe our experience, we had a definition and an understanding, as well. Coincidence?

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity.

Cyberhuman minds will process information thousands of times faster, so if you have extended yourself in cyberspace so much so that you can be rightfully called a cyberhuman, your thinking has now accelerated to such an extent that one calendar day may last decades or even centuries of 'subjective time.' Imagine how this new generation of cyberhumans would perceive the unenhanced part of human population - the slower thinking creatures of the physical world would look almost static to them, perhaps like houseplants to us.

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It’s wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It’s automatic. It creates empathy.

This creates dis--ease in the body. Enjoy all of your senses. Tastes and smells especially, because these are your bridges into body awareness. When you eat, put all of your attention on taste. Slow down. Be present with your body. Don’t let your mind fly into cyberspace.

Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope.” He points at the images. “This doesn’t feel like hope.

Ethan had told the world, the world sympathized, and Sarah Lemon was now and forever (because wasn't cyberspace instantly forever?) someone you had to be 'nice' to, a pathetic girl who just didn't get it, the scourge of her generation, the lowest rung on the ladder, a loser.

Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are you done?” “Almost,” Harding said. “Hang on.” “And believe me, it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs—being complex creatures—might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction.

The Commander of U.S. Cyber Command has predicted that “the next war will begin in cyberspace.” It will not be possible to conceive of international order when the region through which states’ survival and progress are taking place remains without any international standards of conduct and is left to unilateral decisions.

She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point. And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up to cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless run-over gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR.

Buckminster Fuller said don’t try to change human behavior. It’s s a waste of time. Evolution doesn’t mess around; the patterns are too deep. Fuller said go after the tools. Better tools lead to better people. Arctic doesn’t develop products. We may cultivate them, occasionally, in our own particular way, but our business is change. Significant change.

Before you post online ask yourself two crucial questions: Does my content add to the space; or, is it just clouding the feed?

No one wants distortion, but choosing itself is the distortion.

I love the machines and I cannot allow them and the humans of Twinmortal to suffer.-Hanshin

Philosophy may be blind without science, but science can lack vision without philosophy.

what is genuine emotion and what is business strategy. The modern condition.

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code.

All you can do is your inch. We grab everyone we can carry, put each other onto our backs, and crawl toward the future. Inch by inch—it’s all we can do.

Perhaps you will live along some distant day into the answer

I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting with the weakest, drawing us in far enough to learn our True Names—and then destroying us.

Aren't you...Feeling Nosey???

Words are too recent an imprinting. Animals, though, are part of our ancient grammar, prehistorically embedded in the brain.

Although these actors and their views were part of the strategic landscape, our strategic planning still seldom factored them into the equation. Third, at an operational, even tactical level, the battlefield was now global. An enemy group could plot and plan on one side of the planet and execute on the other side in days, if not hours. In cyberspace, impact could be measured in seconds. If these emerging and converging factors were changing the nature of warfare, then what was the role of intelligence? How would we identify and discern these micro-actors with macro-impact bouncing around a global battlefield, burrowing into the human terrain and employing deception and denial tactics? Intelligence seemed to be getting harder even as it was becoming more important.

We are living, she has come to believe, in a culture where people are not “getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings,” and that is why we can’t put down our smartphones, or bear to log off. We tell ourselves that we live so much of our lives in cyberspace because when we are there, we are connected—we are plugged into a swirling party with billions of people.

In today’s society, we cosset and care for our children on the one hand and then think nothing of allowing them out into the wide-open spaces of the internet from the privacy of their bedrooms, with little control, or supervision. Our children are ill equipped – because they’re not ready for it – to deal with the predators that stalk the pages of cyberspace, dressed up like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, hiding behind fake photographs and false identities. If we allow the media and other entities to continue to encourage our children to grow up too soon, we’ll be taking part in an experiment the likes of which...’ He looked down at the ledge behind the lectern, picked up the water jug and topped his glass up, before continuing, ‘the likes of which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.

a site is a creation, not a discovery, and it eludes the visible, cumbersome materiality of objects that embody space. it denatures the landscape of visual perception and implicated another pun: site as citation, the quotation of a constantly deferred real (substantive) place. cyberspace images are themselves citations, visual quotations of particulars, representatives of codes that cannot be visualized.

The next major technological platform for creative expansion of the mind will be cyberspace, or more specifically the Metaverse, a functional successor to today’s 2D Internet, with virtual places instead of Webpages. The Internet and smartphones have enabled the rapid and cheap sharing of information, immersive computing will be able to provide the same for experiences. That means that just as we can read, listen to, and watch videos of anything we want today, soon we’ll be able to experience stunning lifelike simulations in virtual reality indistinguishable from our physical world. We’ll be walking and actively interacting in the Metaverse, not slavishly staring at the flat screens. We would be able to turn our minds inside out and show our dreams to each other in this ecstadelic matrix of our own making.

My son Rafi is enchanted with cyberspace. But we are not disembodied mind or spirit, we are our bodies - cruising the Internet won't teach us that. It may even trick us into thinking that having a body and a place is not important. Gardening teaches us differently. I do not mean industrial mechanized farming, I mean the kind of gardening that any one of us can do with his hands and feet and the simplest tools.

If you’re a novice in Cyberspace, you may think that buying a computer is a scary and confusing process. But the truth is that if you take a little time to learn a few basic principles and some of the technical lingo, buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth. So let’s get started!

To be sure, there will always be evil in the world, there will always be criminality, there will always be swindlers who use the fruits of technological progress or the freedom of cyberspace to cheat the community or their neighbor or a stranger. To talk about how to better govern such realms is always, at best, to talk about increasing the odds of restraining more bad behaviors than not—because they will never be eliminated. The

There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print. Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day.

We have become fools who reject the walls, wearing a cap with bells and tagging judgments just so that others can hear our crying out for attention. ‘We have become its jester.’ We have grown into hermits to the screen's lights, we are seeking the answers alone in the dark. Even so, the soft light is no comfortable, why? Because it needs to come from the sun and its hope, and we must learn to shine in the absence of the light of the lit walls of cyberspace, to become lovers to one another, and the world.

Humans have bodies. During the last century technology has been distancing us from our bodies. We have been losing our ability to pay attention to what we smell and taste. Instead we are absorbed in our smart phones and computers. We are more interested in what is happening in cyberspace then what is happening down the street. It is easier than effort to talk to my cousin in Switzerland, but it is harder to talk to my husband over breakfast, because he constantly looks at his smart phone instead of me. - Lisa Eadicicco

The early researchers described em-tracking as a hardware upgrade for the nervous system, maybe the result of a genetic shift, possibly a fast adaptation, Studies revealed an assortment of cognitive improvements: acute perceptual sensitivity, rapid data acquisition, high speed pattern recognition. The biggest change was in future prediction. Normally, the human brain is a selfish prognosticator, built to trace an individual’s path into the future. The em-tracker’s brain offers a wider oracle, capable of following a whole culture’s path into the future.

His em-tracking machinery is driven by words more than images, but that’s only his make and model. Empathy is related to intuition, and intuition is individually customized, tuned to dominant talents. Chefs need tastes, painters images. His experience is biblical: It starts with logos.

In the postbiblical world we understand that from the first day of the world, God trusted man to make choices, when He entrusted Adam to make the right decision about which fruit to eat in the Garden of Eden. We are responsible for making God’s presence manifest by what we do, by the choices we make. And the reason this issue is most acute in cyberspace is that no one else is in charge there. There is no place in today’s world where you encounter the freedom to choose that God gave man more than in cyberspace. Cyberspace is where we are all connected and no one is in charge. So,

Lion was the one who pointed out that naming hotels after Millennial values -- the Truth, the Purpose, the Community -- now that his generation had reached the age where the luxury of billboard ethics had been derailed by the verities of life, might be lucrative. "Aspirational nostalgia," he dubbed it.

This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are

By tracing the early history of USCYBERCOM it is possible to understand some of the reasons why the military has focused almost completely on network defense and cyber attack while being unaware of the need to address the vulnerabilities in systems that could be exploited in future conflicts against technologically capable adversaries. It is a problem mirrored in most organizations. The network security staff are separate from the endpoint security staff who manage desktops through patch and vulnerability management tools and ensure that software and anti-virus signatures are up to date. Meanwhile, the development teams that create new applications, web services, and digital business ventures, work completely on their own with little concern for security. The analogous behavior observed in the military is the creation of new weapons systems, ISR platforms, precision targeting, and C2 capabilities without ensuring that they are resistant to the types of attacks that USCYBERCOM and the NSA have been researching and deploying. USCYBERCOM had its genesis in NCW thinking. First the military worked to participate in the information revolution by joining their networks together. Then it recognized the need for protecting those networks, now deemed cyberspace. The concept that a strong defense requires a strong offense, carried over from missile defense and Cold War strategies, led to a focus on network attack and less emphasis on improving resiliency of computing platforms and weapons systems.

It was the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, he reminded himself. He had heard many people say that on TV and on the outré video clips floating in cyberspace, which added a further, new-technology depth to his addiction. There were no rules any more. And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen. Old friends could become new enemies and traditional enemies could be your new besties or even lovers. It was no longer possible to predict the weather, or the likelihood of war, or the outcome of elections. A woman might fall in love with a piglet, or a man start living with an owl. A beauty might fall asleep and, when kissed, wake up speaking a different language and in that new language reveal a completely altered character. A flood might drown your city. A tornado might carry your house to a faraway land where, upon landing, it would squash a witch. Criminals could become kings and kings be unmasked as criminals. A man might discover that the woman he lived with was his father’s illegitimate child. A whole nation might jump off a cliff like swarming lemmings. Men who played presidents on TV could become presidents. The water might run out. A woman might bear a baby who was found to be a revenant god. Words could lose their meanings and acquire new ones. The world might end, as at least one prominent scientist- entrepreneur had begun repeatedly to predict. An evil scent would hang over the ending. And a TV star might miraculously return the love of a foolish old coot, giving him an unlikely romantic triumph which would redeem a long, small life, bestowing upon it, at the last, the radiance of majesty.

During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

Eventually, we may reach a point when it will be impossible to disconnect from this all-knowing network even for a moment. Disconnection will mean death. If medical hopes are realised, future people will incorporate into their bodies a host of biometric devices, bionic organs and nano-robots, which will monitor our health and defend us from infections, illnesses and damage. Yet these devices will have to be online 24/7, both in order to be updated with the latest medical news, and in order to protect them from the new plagues of cyberspace. Just as my home computer is constantly attacked by viruses, worms and Trojan horses, so will be my pacemaker, my hearing aid and my nanotech immune system. If I don’t update my body’s anti-virus program regularly, I will wake up one day to discover that the millions of nano-robots coursing through my veins are now controlled by a North Korean hacker.

We ache for this feeling, but it’s everywhere. Booze, drugs, sex, sport, art, prayer, music, meditation, virtual reality. Kids, hyperventilating, spinning in circles, feel oneness. Why William James called it the basic lesson of expanded consciousness—just tweak a few knobs and levers in the brain and bam. So the drop, the comedown, it’s not that we miss oneness once it’s gone; it’s that we suddenly can’t feel what we actually know is there. Phantom limb syndrome for the soul.

Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point. During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

Is that what we do? We pitch our tents, do our little clown shows, and then take off up the road to the next town ahead? Leaving our science-fictional debris on the blasted dirt to poison the minds of future generations, like the alien litter in STALKER and ROADSIDE PICNIC. Flying cars rusting out like Saturn Five rockets propped up as roadkill talismans at Kennedy, leaking toxins into the soil. Jetpacks oozing fuel from cracks in their tanks and poisoning the grass. Three-ring moonbases crumbling in the solar wind. Birdshit on the time machines. Big fat rats scavenging broken packs of food capsules, Best Before Date of 1971. A Westinghouse Robot Smoking Companion, vintage of 1931, slumped up against a tree, tin fingers still twitching for a cigarette. Vines growing through a busted cyberspace deck. The shreds of inflatable furniture designed for the space hospitals of 1955. Lizards perched atop a weather control cannon. Atomic batteries mouldering inside the grips of laser pistols abandoned in the weeds.

Israel has an extremely vibrant hi-tech sector, and a cutting-edge cyber-security industry. At the same time it is also locked into a deadly conflict with the Palestinians, and at least some of its leaders, generals and citizens might well be happy to create a total surveillance regime in the West Bank as soon as they have the necessary technology. Already today whenever Palestinians make a phone call, post something on Facebook or travel from one city to another they are likely to be monitored by Israeli microphones, cameras, drones or spy software. The gathered data is then analysed with the aid of Big Data algorithms. This helps the Israeli security forces to pinpoint and neutralise potential threats without having to place too many boots on the ground. The Palestinians may administer some towns and villages in the West Bank, but the Israelis control the sky, the airwaves and cyberspace. It therefore takes surprisingly few Israeli soldiers to effectively control about 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

He’d uncovered one of the early subcult melds, the first internet generation to carve their identity from a global menu of counterculture. Style-wise, they borrowed saggy hip-hop gear from West Coast rappers, cartoonish Gyaru makeup from the Japanese cosplay scene, and angular Emo hairstyles from the Washington, DC, post-hard-core crowd. Their attitudes crossed anything-goes California bisexuality with edgy Brit-punk sneer, a combination that led to a completely novel form of rebellion: wet-kissing strangers on the street.

I’m talking about all the order in the natural world,” Malcolm said. “And how perhaps it can emerge fast, through crystallization. Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh,

As we close out the second decade of the twenty-first century, we can draw some conclusions about the post–Cold War era. This has been a period in which new information and communication technologies have burst onto the world scene in forms that have made them widely available. There have also been great advances in development, including in medicine and life expectancy. Economic growth has been considerable and widespread. Wars between countries have become rare. But this has also been an era in which the advance of democracy has slowed or even reversed. Inequality has increased significantly. The number of civil wars has increased, as has the number of displaced persons and refugees. Terrorism has become a global threat. Climate change has advanced with dire implications for both the near and the distant futures. The world has stood by amid genocide and has shown itself unable to agree on rules for cyberspace and unable to prevent the reemergence of great-power rivalry. Those who maintain that things have never been better are biased by what they are focusing on and underestimate trends that could put existing progress at risk.

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons. To think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories. Of course, historians don’t ignore objective factors such as climate changes and genetic mutations, but they give much greater importance to the stories people invent and believe. North Korea and South Korea are so different from one another not because people in Pyongyang have different genes to people in Seoul, or because the north is colder and more mountainous. It’s because the north is dominated by very different fictions. Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point. During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

But the psychological change accompanying these technologies is more subtle, and perhaps more important. Consciously and unconsciously, we have gradually grown accustomed to experiencing the world through disembodied machines and instruments. As I stood in line to board an airplane recently, the young woman in front of me was primping in her mirror—straightening her hair, putting on lipstick, patting her checks with blush—a female ritual that has been repeated for several thousand years. In this case, however, her “mirror” was an iPhone in video mode, pointed at herself, and she was reacting to a digitized image of herself. I take walks in a federally protected wildlife preserve near my home in Massachusetts. A dirt trail winds for a mile around a lake teeming with beavers and fish, wild ducks and geese, aquatic frogs. Bulrushes and cattails wrap the perimeter of the pond, water lilies float here and there, rippling when a fish goes by. In the winter, the air is crisp and sharp, in the summer soft and aromatic. And a thick silence lies across the park, broken only by the honking of geese and the croaking of frogs. It is a place to smell, to see, to feel, to quietly let one’s mind wander where it wants. More and more commonly, I see people here talking on their cell phones as they walk around the trail. Their attention is focused not on the scene in front of them, but on a disembodied voice coming from a small box. And they are disembodied themselves. Where are their minds and bodies? Certainly not present in the park. Nor can they be located in the electromagnetic waves and digital signals flowing through cyberspace. Only their voices can be found at the other end of their conversations, in the offices and boardrooms and homes of the people they are talking to. They are attempting to be several places at once, like quantum waves. But I would argue that they are nowhere.

In our 'society of the spectacle', in which what we experience as everyday reality more and more takes the form of the lie made real, Freud's insights show their true value. Consider the interactive computer games some of us play compulsively, games which enable a neurotic weakling to adopt the screen persona of a macho aggressor, beating up other men and violently enjoying women. It's all too easy to assume that this weakling takes refuge in cyberspace in order to escape from a dull, impotent reality. But perhaps the games are more telling than that. What if, in playing them, I articulate the perverse core of my personality which, because of ethico-social constraints, I am not able to act out in real life? Isn't my virtual persona in a way 'more real than reality'? Isn't it precisely because I am aware that this is 'just a game' that in it I can do what I would never be able to in the real world? In this precise sense, as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded. Therein resides the ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.

Code for Humanity (The Sonnet) There is no such thing as ethical hacking, If it were ethical they wouldn't be teaching it. Because like it or not ethics is bad for business, They teach hacking so they could use it for profit. With the right sequence of zeros and ones we could, Equalize all bank accounts of planet earth tomorrow. Forget about what glass house gargoyles do with tech, How will you the human use tech to eliminate sorrow? In a world full of greedy edisons, be a humble Tesla, Time remembers no oligarch kindly no matter the status. Only innovators who get engraved in people's heart, Are the ones who innovate with a humane purpose. Innovate to bridge the gap, not exploit and cater to disparities. In a world run by algorithms of greed write a code that helps 'n heals.

I rap for the trees...for the trees have no tongues.

When someone, almost anyone, is asked to describe paradise, he or she tends to imagine natural settings--waves lapping gently upon a white-sand beach, birds singing softly, or imagines him or herself lying in a meadow of wild flowers and tall grasses, walking through an ancient forest, sitting on a rolling green hillside, or looking out over a vast ocean. They do not generally imagine AI-powered machines ruling their lives. They do not think of drones flying drones flying to and fro, filling the sky like so many menacing, swarming insects. They do not call to mind the sound of screeching bus brakes, crowded elevators, people walking around wearing masks, or driverless vehicles failing to stop for them at a crosswalk. The world being quickly shaped and imagined for us is what the average human would consider to be a dystopian nightmare--not a paradise. Why are we letting our world be turned into a cold, heartless cyberspace fit only for robots and cyborgs and not instead, creating a paradise for ourselves?

Nessuno sa tutto, ognuno sa qualcosa, la totalità del sapere risiede nell'umanità.

It seems to me that it’s still an open question whether computers and networks will help or hurt human freedom—but this is one place where the extreme scenarios are also the most plausible. I think we could easily go in the direction Tim May indicates, perhaps ending up with a world very like the one in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. On the other hand, there are the “Four Horsemen” that Tim, Alan, and Lenny remark upon. All four Horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the “Terrorist Horseman” is the one that could shift our whole society toward strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It’s not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century. But there are worse nightmares: Imagine a government that mandated control of some part of each communicating microchip. In that case, the computing power of the Internet could be used for much tighter control than George Orwell described.

I cannot help but feel ambivalent at the prospect of this brave new world, in which I will be a small part of a symbiotic organism that I can barely comprehend. But then, I am a product of another kind of society, one that celebrates the individual. My sense of identity, my very sense of survival, is based on a resistance to becoming something else. Just as one of my hunting-gathering ancestors would surely reject my modern city life, so do I feel myself rebelling at this metamorphosis. This is natural. I imagine that caterpillars are skeptical of butterflies.

As frightened as I am by the prospect of this change, I am also thrilled by it. I love what we are, yet I cannot help but hope that we are capable of turning into something better. We humans can be selfish, foolish, shortsighted, even cruel. Just as I can imagine these weaknesses as vestiges of our (almost) discarded animal past, I can imagine our best traits—our kindness, our creativity, our capacity to love—as hints of our future. This is the basis for my hope. I know I am a relic. I am a presymbiotic kind of person, born during the time of our transition. Yet, I feel lucky to have been given a glimpse of our promise. I am overwhelmed when I think of it … by the sweet sad love of what we were, and by the frightening beauty of what we might become. True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy Timothy C.

In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!” Now, more than a century later, we can see the signs of his vision.

Notch joined the game. God joined the game. : I can create worlds. : So can I. : I can create animals. : So can I. : I can create circles. Notch left the game.

Shifting social networks now often preempt family networks. We have robots that function as companions for our elderly, and virtual playmates that replace human friends. Games in cyberspace keep kids in rooms by themselves instead of engaging in face-to-face interactions with their peers. And this all has happened so fast that few of us even realize what these changes are doing to our social lives, skills, and spirits. In fact, we are being tossed like twigs in a stiff breeze, unable to get our bearings as we unwittingly lose sight of what matters and who matters to us. We still have the wiring for connection within us, but the more time and attention we lavish on racing to be current, the greater the risk we run that our innate social systems will falter and fail us due to neglect.

But detaching from technology is more difficult if we use it as an emotional escape, to avoid sadness, conflict, disappointment—and the hard, deep work of relationship. Instead of meeting in person to talk about misunderstandings or find shared solutions to real problems, we can just slip into cyberspace and spend hours among “friends” who won’t ask the hard questions. It is an easier path—but one that ultimately leads to more loneliness.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . .

Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points. Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough.

But, seriously, when in history did fear of death ever come between a man and his drugs?

Even if it can be described at a physiochemical level, our understanding of what “physiochemical” means will transform as we get more sophisticated in our attempts to understand consciousness. Even if it is an entirely reducible phenomena, ideas still inhabit us like personalities, and they inhabit us as a collective like personalities as well. You can think of the entire Internet as a place where ideas embodied in cyberspace are having a war, and it’s not much different than the war of Gods in heaven, which has been taking place since there’s been human beings. If you think of individuals as neurons in a web, you can think of Gods as entities that inhabit that web. They’re embodied ideas that persist across long periods of time, and they do go to war; that’s how polytheism turns into monotheism across time. Sometimes these wars are real, they aren’t just conceptual; people actually die to determine which God is going to rule. So there’s a hyperspace consisting of networked minds in which these archetypal ideas exist, at the same time that they exist in each person. You’re a mirror of the broader social reality. You’re a node in it, but you’re a mirror of it as well.

Naked neon tubes twenty feet overhead bathed the cement floor in stark light.

When the poop flies into the spinning stuff, it’s often better to make any decision than sit still and get hit.

A scaled-down version of the clash between the real and the virtual and its fantastic consequences at the planetary level: the dissociation between a very high-frequency virtual space and a zero-frequency real space. The two no longer have anything in common, nor is there any communication between them: the unconditional extension of the virtual (which includes not just the new images or remote simulation, but the whole cyberspace of geo-finance, the space of multimedia and the information superhighways) brings with it an unprecedented desertification of real space and of all that surrounds us. The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyperspace is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. The two worlds, though literally cut off from each other, are equally exponential. But the discrepancy between them does not create any new political situation or genuine crisis, for memory fades at the same time as does the real. The discrepancy is only virtually catastrophic.

Their attitudes crossed anything-goes California bi-sexuality with edgy Brit-punk sneer, a combination that led to a completely novel form of rebellion: Wet-kissing strangers on the street.

The flavor is surprisingly poly-tribe, which is new slang for the global mash-up, the hybridization of signs, styles, and meanings that is somehow now: Liberty International Airport, Newark, New Jersey.

Lots of people believe consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like space and time. If that's the case, then it is turtles all the way down. We'll have this debate about our microbiome. About rocks and atoms and quarks. Until we have Gaia consciousness, there will always be an us-them divide, always a next frontier for empathy.

So I'm heading for Truth or Consequences." "Aren't we all," says Lorenzo, "aren't we all.

The seedy edges of the web were the most interesting, but also the most dangerous.

A criminal is a criminal,” Chuck replied, his eyes straight ahead. “A criminal,” Terek said, closing his laptop, “is whoever the state decides is a criminal.

Terek and Irena stood awkwardly to one side in the polished marble foyer, their hair soaked and their clothing leaving drips on the floor. It was pouring cats and dogs and chickens and every other animal out there.

Her look of incredulity momentarily eclipsed the growing roar of the hurricane. “You’re with Chuck and you don’t have a gun?

Product that I Like." By Aron Micko H.B Arena, the most intense place; Belittle doers doing old space. Aroma smell now is embrace; Believable inspiration does race. Behavior no show cyberspace; Aurora lights direction to trace. Bottle available I thought vase; Athena the woman no replace. Area of insects fly every place; Breakable walls, now staircase. Aurora of an old do showcase; Bumble yellow shirt suitcase. Beatle seeing nope workplace; Armilla thing shines misplace. Bicycle rides the commonplace; Antenna sales I avail outpace.

The intercom crackled. “Ah, folks, we’re lowering our altitude to conserve fuel,

Damon and Terek had their laptops wired together again. The two of them were almost glued at the hip, like conjoined hackers.

I turned to follow Damon. “What’s happening up there?” He pointed at the blue sky. “You mean the satellites?” “I don’t mean the pope.

Ukrainian?” the officer asked. “Isn’t that like Russian?

A HOWLING BASS rhythm propelled me through the saloon doors, the music a living thing that flowed around me on a beer-and-sweat-soaked eddy of air.

It felt a little bit eerie, and struck me with more than a little déjà vu. At least this time it wasn’t freezing cold.

Hold on a second.” Luke looked up from the iPad and scrunched his nose upward. “So, you’re telling me that because we don’t have time signals coming from satellites up there a thousand miles away, our cell phones don’t work? And I can’t watch videos?” “That’s right,” Damon said. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Luke returned to his game.

Kessler syndrome

He wrote down equations. Force equals mass times acceleration. Position is a half of acceleration multiplied by the time in seconds squared.

An obsession is a pleasure that has attained the status of an idea.” I believe that to lend a book is an incitement to theft. Superstition and the art of libraries are tightly entwined. The search for others—to text, to email, to Skype, or to play with—establishes our own identities. We are, or we become, because someone acknowledges our presence. Perhaps all intercourse—with pictures, with books, with people, with the virtual inhabitants of cyberspace—breeds sadness because it reminds us that, in the end, we are alone. Because my childhood was largely nomadic, I liked to read about settled lives running their ordinary course. And yet, I was aware that without disruption there would be no adventure. “The gods weave misfortunes for men,” King Alcinous says in the Odyssey, “so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Don Quixote has attained the state of perfect readership, knowing his books by heart in the strictest sense of the word. Loss helps you remember, and loss of a library helps you remember who you truly are. “We must be grateful that we don’t know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we’d be inconsolable.” Losing things is not so bad because you learn to enjoy not what you have but what you remember. You should grow accustomed to loss. Buenos Aires has always been a city of books, ever since its foundation. I remember the curious pride I felt when our history teacher told us that Buenos Aires had been founded with a library.

Gentry was convinced that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form . . . Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape? If it had a shape then there was something around it for it to have a shape in, wasn't there? And if that something was something, then wasn't that part of the universe, too? . . . But Slick didn't think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data. . . . Big companies had copyrights on how their stuff looked. So how could you figure the whole matrix had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?

To dial up was like watching a rocket launch: first the top light was on, then the second . . . then came the sound of the modem talking to whatever it was talking to . . . sounding like an Atari game’s parody of birdsong or of a clarinet solo, pinging and ponging as more and more of the little lights came on, blinking and then steady, orange and then green . . . the sound building to a crescendo that recalled the noise of TV static, as machines confided who-knows-what secret binary handshakes between them while I listened. Then came a key change. Then the pitch of the static pulse tweaked, now higher, now lower, and then, gloriously, the final light went to green and I was online, in orbit: cyberspace.

Knight wasn’t lying,” whispered Wexler. “You can type inside a Google search bar, and download files, but can’t send anything else through cyberspace, including passwords.

But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.

Florid

Our great ancestors adapted when faced with new landscapes. For them it was adapt or die. We have entered cyberspace–an entirely new information landscape. It is no different for us. The cost of investing in the future of high, but the cost of not investing is higher, in terms of opportunities for understanding lost and fake news spread.

Cyberspace is a big country. You can do just about anything anywhere.

We’ve lost a lot of privacy already. There are cameras everywhere, and everyone is a narcissist. Our generation grew up thinking that everyone wants us to Tweet them our every thought. We can’t wait to post pictures of a date on Facebook, before the date is even over. Or go on reality television and expose every facet of our lives. Or sext each other naked pictures which end up in cyberspace for all eternity. The privacy that our parents knew is long gone. “But at least we still have some control,” continued Hall. “We can still hide our thoughts. We can choose what to post on Facebook. So while we’ve gone a long way toward eliminating our own privacy, the mind is the last bastion of privacy we have.

As the bandwidth revolution unfolds, it will draw people more and more into the borderless virtual world of online communities and cybercommerce, a world with enough graphic density to become the “metaverse,” the kind of alternative, cyberspace reality imagined by the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s “metaverse” is a virtual community with its own laws, princes, and villains.41 As ever more economic activity is drawn into cyberspace, the value of the state’s monopoly power within borders will shrink, giving states a growing incentive to franchise and fragment their sovereignty. Just

The Internet is in cyberspace, but we”—he paused for effect—“are in meatspace, get it?

If anything, Firestone puts the techno-theorizing of the late twentieth century into sharp relief, revealing the shamefully apolitical and escapist nature of such projects, which cannot help but exclude the majority of the world’s women and lack any serious claim about the link between technology and emancipation. Rather than do away with sexual difference in the playground of a virtual world, Firestone reminds us through her vulgar materialism that to even have a choice about contraception is perhaps a more pressing need for real, nonvirtual women than the opportunity to perform ambiguity in cyberspace.

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.30 And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting,31 it kind of broke my heart.

Tech is the heart and soul of the American economy,” wrote James Cramer, “the chief driver of its prosperity, the keeper of its newfound world dominance, and the place where its biggest profits are.” If you wanted to pay for college and retire in a place that did more than change your bedpan, you had to invest in Tech. Awash in money, mutual fund managers shoved money at Tech, watched it grow, and then plowed their profits into even more Tech. Wall Street had finally Gotten It. The prospect of Java’s landing in 1996, for instance, sent Sun’s stock price up 157%, which sounded to the unconvinced like proof of tulip mania, but Java would soon bring all those static websites to life with movement and sound, ending Stacy Horn’s cyberspace built of words.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. .

And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space, a space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoder - you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ecstasy of communication. There is no 'Other' out there and no final destination. It's any old destination - and any old interactor will do. And so the system goes on, without end and without finality, and its only possibility is that of infinite involution. Hence the comfortable vertige of this electronic, computer interaction, which acts like a drug. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuit interactivity.

Different regions evoke different images in the minds of high school students, often depending on where they grew up. In the age of cyberspace, college is still synonymous with a quaint New England town featuring the traditional red brick, white columns, and ivy all around. That enduring mental picture combines with the seemingly inborn cultural snobbery of the East Coast to produce millions of students who think that civilization ends at the western edge of Pennsylvania—if not the Hudson River. For Midwesterners, the situation is just the opposite: a century-old cultural inferiority complex. Many applicants from those states will do anything to get the heck out, even though there are more good colleges per capita in states like Iowa, Minnesota, and Ohio than anywhere else in the nation. The West Coast fades in and out as a trendy place for college, depending on earthquakes, the regional economy, and the overcrowding and tuition increases that plague the University of California system. Among those seeking warmer weather, the South has become a popular place, especially since Southerners themselves are more likely to stay close to home. Collective perceptions of the various regions have some practical consequences. First, most of the elite schools in the Northeast are more selective than ever. In addition, a lot of mediocre schools in the Northeast, notably Boston, are being deluged with applicants simply because they are lucky enough to be in a hot location. In the Midwest, many equally good or superior schools are much less difficult to get into, especially the fine liberal arts colleges in Ohio. In the South, the booming popularity of some schools is out of proportion to their quality. The weather may be nice and the football top-notch, but students who come from far away should be prepared for culture shock.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and founder of Rootstrikers, a network of activists leading the fight against government corruption. He has authored numerous books, including Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Our Congress—and a Plan to Stop It, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Free Culture, and Remix.

It’s getting-up time,” Alessandro declares. “Today is the day.” “What day?” “The release date.” “What are we talking about?” “Daa-add. The new XBOX game. Hunting Old Sammie.” Armand opens his eyes. He looks at his son looking at him. The boy’s eyes are only inches away. “You’re kidding.” “It’s the newest best game. You hunt down terrorists and kill them.” Lifting his voice, “‘Deploy teams of Black Berets into the ancient mountains of Tora Bora. Track implacable terrorists to their cavernous lairs. Rain withering fire down on the homicidal masterminds who planned the horror of September eleven, two-thousand-and-one.’” The kid’s memory is canny. Armand lifts Alex off his chest and sits up. “Who invented it?” “I’m telling you, dad. It’s an XBOX game.” “We can get it today?” “No,” Leah says. “Absolutely not. The last thing he needs is another violent video game.” “Mahhuum!” “How bad can it be?” says Armand. “How would you know? A minute ago you hadn’t heard of it.” “And you had?” “I saw a promo. Helicopter gunships with giant machine guns. Soldiers with flamethrowers, turning bearded men into candles.” “Sounds great.” “Armand, really. How old are you?” “I don’t see what my age has to do with it.” “Dad, it’s totally cool. ‘Uncover mountain strongholds with thermal imaging technology. Call in air-strikes by F-16s. Destroy terrorist cells with laser weaponry. Wage pitched battles against mujahideen. Capture bin Laden alive or kill him on the spot. March down Fifth Avenue with jihadists’ heads on pikes. Make the world safe for democracy.’” Safe for Dick Cheney’s profits, Armand thinks, knowing all about it from his former life, but says nothing. It’s pretty much impossible to explain the complexity of how things work within the greater systemic dysfunction. Instead, he asks the one question that matters. “How much does it cost?” Alessandro’s mouth minces sideways. He holds up fingers, then realizes he needs more than two hands. Armand can see the kid doesn’t want to say. “C’mon. ’Fess up.” Alex sighs. “A one with two zeros.” “One hundred dollars.” Alex’s eyes slide away. Rapid nods, face averted. “Yeah.” “For a video game, Alex.” “Yhep.” “No way.” “Daa-add! It’s the greatest game ever!” The boy is beginning to whine. “Don’t whine,” Armand tells him. “On TV it’s awesome. The army guys are flaming a cave and when the terror guys try to escape, they shoot them.” “Neat.” “Their turbans are on fire.” “Even better.” “Armand,” Leah says. “Dad,” says Alessandro. He will not admit it but Armand is hooked. It would be deeply satisfying in the second-most intimate way imaginable to kill al Qaida terrorists holed up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—something the actual U.S. military cannot or will not completely do. But a hundred bucks. It isn’t really the money, although living on interest income Armand has become more frugal. He can boost the C-note but what message would it send? Hunting virtual terrorists in cyberspace is all well and good. But plunking down $100 for a toy seems irresponsible and possibly wrong in a country where tens of thousands are homeless and millions have no health insurance and children continue, incredibly, to go hungry. Fifty million Americans live in poverty and he’s looking to play games.

What modern parents need to keep in mind is that they are competing with the social media. A phenomenon where having small conversations with people is at your fingertips. Hearing advice and affirmation is as easy as taking out their smart phone from their pocket and writing a tweet. Sometimes our children tell the world of cyberspace more information about their lives than they do the people who see them everyday, AND the people who care the most about them.

Whether “cyberspace” is a real place or not, our experience of electronic space is a “real” experience. By distinguishing the constitution of being as an activity of interface, phenomenology suggests that the status of being is not an absolute condition, but one that changes relative to changes in the experience of the real.

Janet Murray’s book Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace is a spirited and unrelentingly optimistic defense of new styles of interactive storytelling made popular in the wake of the PC revolution of the early 1990s. Most of the appeal of Murray’s book lies in her lively and engaging descriptions of her own experiences with stories written

He was like a kid who’d grown up beside an ocean, taking it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing nothing of currents, shipping routes, or the ins and outs of weather. He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline.

As men of the priesthood, we have an essential role to play in society, at home, and in the Church. But we must be men that women can trust, that children can trust, and that God can trust. In the Church and kingdom of God in these latter days, we cannot afford to have boys and men who are drifting. We cannot afford young men who lack self-discipline and live only to be entertained. … We cannot afford to have those who exercise the Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God, waste their strength in pornography or spend their lives in cyberspace (ironically being of the world, while not being in the world). … “Of the many places you are needed, one of the very most important is your priesthood quorum. We need quorums that provide spiritual nourishment to members on Sunday and that also serve. We need leaders of quorums who focus on doing the Lord’s work and on supporting quorum members and their families.

I was able to bring the souls from the past back to life.-Amaranth

There are only a few planets with life. It is an oddity. It is really difficult to have the necessary conditions not only to support life but also to maintain the life inside a planet.-Loto

I am a more modern female vampire since I came just when our world was disappearing due to the intromission of this future.-Enyo

You know what it is like to wake up in the middle of a bunch of corpses with a little girl in your arms scared to death?-Enyo

My experiment has demonstrated that people from the past can be artificially reincarnated. The purpose is so people from Twinmortal do not commit the same error that we did.-Amaranth

Nothing gives your average bored Sunni bigot surfing the web more instant gratification than zooming in on sigeh to condemn the Shia as debauched heretics, but there could be few more vulnerable moral high grounds where he might pitch his flag of religious superiority than this particular spot in cyberspace. The Sunnis, after all, have their own versions of this arrangement, called in Saudi Arabia a misyar (or visitor’s marriage) and in Egypt an urfi (or customary marriage). It is true that both misyar and urfi differ from sigeh, primarily in that they are not supposed to last for a predetermined period of time (which in most cases they nevertheless do);35 and, again unlike sigeh, they are theoretically required to satisfy all four main conditions for marriage of the Sunni canon: mutual consent, two male witnesses (or two female and one male), some form of public announcement, and the payment of a dowry (although the latter can be symbolic and thus

so obvious on large sections of the cyber-atheist community. Cyber-Atheism is the veritable North Korea of the internet, and if you intend to interfere in any way shape or form with the minds of their people, you can expect a reaction.  And a new atheist reaction is something to behold indeed.  Any shard of religious identity you would dare express shall be ripped asunder, sections of your brain will be ridiculed beyond reason, well-rehearsed choruses from the sacred scriptures of Hitchens and Harris will be recited verbatim in your general direction, you will be laden with the burdens of every remotely god-believing human being for the last two thousand years, reviled as an advocator of terrorism, genital mutilation and human sacrifice, but most incongruously and insultingly of all- you will be called irrational and oppressive.  And I am to believe that all this is some rather eccentric attempt at courteous discourse?  But do not assume for one moment that atheism has kept to itself.  Oh no.  The level of dedication to the atheist cause has permeated through every single major public gathering in cyberspace; video sharing websites, social networking, wiki-sites, blogs, forums, you name it.  There is no mass internet-based domain wherein the territory of new atheism has not been asserted.  Videos are created, posted, shared, rated and promoted, hundreds of venerated blogs and websites consistently updated with surveys, statistical analyses, all the latest updates of religious scandal and hopeful omens of the decline of faith all woven across a large, intricate and efficient social network with totalitarian tenacity.  New atheism is a well-oiled digital

AI will begin as Artificial Idiocy. Who cares if a computer can play chess or take control of cyberspace? Can it trash Tokyo, huh, huh?

Turning the “dumb mob” into the ”smart mob” is one of the key challenges of good governance in the age of social media. Bringing deliberative processes to cyberspace, augmenting the ability of ad hoc groups to gather information, analyze it, organize proposals and arguments, model outcomes, compare alternative approaches, and negotiate hybrid “positive sum” solutions –- all of these together might help forge the smart mob (millions of them) out of the dumb mobs that we’ve known until now.