the world is becoming a machine: (3) google mystic
today, one of the fathers of the Arpanet (and then the Internet) was hired by Google to become its new 'Chief Internet Evangelist'.
Vinton Cerf jokes about his rather original new title, which "suggests [he] should go from three-piece suits to some sort of ecclesiastical robes", and now claims his religion is "orthodox geek".
although the whole stuff is both fun and exciting for the future, it actually gives some new clues to the question everybody's wondering about : what the fuck is google doing ?
let's bring the pieces together :
we have, in one hand, nerds communities around the world, who, through science-fiction culture in exemple, often have more or less mystical opinions about computers, programming, networks, and/or at least use to have rather existential questions, brought to their mind by new technology improvement, scienctific discoveries, and various other news grabbed on the Internet.
we have, in the other hand, a revolutionnary technology which only has less than 50 years, and will probably develop further and further until total omnipresence and omniscience. this technology is called internet, and actually consists in brand new techniques of coding, saving and sharing of knowledge.
we all feel that the more the internet will grow, the more those "techniques" will, like they already widely began to, definitely modify our way to code, save and share pieces of reality, which is, actually, to change the reality itself.
the comparison between the current rise of the Internet and the past rise of "discreet" alphabets is really interresting here : encrypting and recording the world, and easily sharing the whole result through time and space.
all this may explain a bit why forms of computer "mysticism" appear, and, by the way, show that they're not so futile: the rise of new technologies of knowledge, such as discreet alphabets and the internet, definitely brings new approaches of reality, and by the way, of spirituality.
and finally we have google. google attempts to bring some sense to the whole networked chaos, and it actually works. google offers tools to navigate and bring order to all this. google decrypts the chaos of this artificial parallel world, that is, the collection of pieces of reality encrypted and shared by billions of people around the world.
doesn't google actually want to become some kind of religion, which is not just based on Texts anymore but on something else?
the technology's here, and yet we can't figure out how the whole thing is going to evolve, where it's going, and in which ways it's rewriting reality. google may be trying to keep control, and to give perspectives, which may one day become the basis of our new way to just "be".
if Vinton Cerf is the Evangelist, then who's the 21st century Christ, or prophet ?
when will He come ? and to what kind of "crisis" will it lead ?
- - -
Vinton Cerf jokes about his rather original new title, which "suggests [he] should go from three-piece suits to some sort of ecclesiastical robes", and now claims his religion is "orthodox geek".
although the whole stuff is both fun and exciting for the future, it actually gives some new clues to the question everybody's wondering about : what the fuck is google doing ?
let's bring the pieces together :
we have, in one hand, nerds communities around the world, who, through science-fiction culture in exemple, often have more or less mystical opinions about computers, programming, networks, and/or at least use to have rather existential questions, brought to their mind by new technology improvement, scienctific discoveries, and various other news grabbed on the Internet.
we have, in the other hand, a revolutionnary technology which only has less than 50 years, and will probably develop further and further until total omnipresence and omniscience. this technology is called internet, and actually consists in brand new techniques of coding, saving and sharing of knowledge.
we all feel that the more the internet will grow, the more those "techniques" will, like they already widely began to, definitely modify our way to code, save and share pieces of reality, which is, actually, to change the reality itself.
the comparison between the current rise of the Internet and the past rise of "discreet" alphabets is really interresting here : encrypting and recording the world, and easily sharing the whole result through time and space.
all this may explain a bit why forms of computer "mysticism" appear, and, by the way, show that they're not so futile: the rise of new technologies of knowledge, such as discreet alphabets and the internet, definitely brings new approaches of reality, and by the way, of spirituality.
and finally we have google. google attempts to bring some sense to the whole networked chaos, and it actually works. google offers tools to navigate and bring order to all this. google decrypts the chaos of this artificial parallel world, that is, the collection of pieces of reality encrypted and shared by billions of people around the world.
doesn't google actually want to become some kind of religion, which is not just based on Texts anymore but on something else?
the technology's here, and yet we can't figure out how the whole thing is going to evolve, where it's going, and in which ways it's rewriting reality. google may be trying to keep control, and to give perspectives, which may one day become the basis of our new way to just "be".
if Vinton Cerf is the Evangelist, then who's the 21st century Christ, or prophet ?
when will He come ? and to what kind of "crisis" will it lead ?
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