The future of the Internet as a
physical manifestation of the interconnected and subjective property of all
phenomena
The Internet user as cybernetic
magician
The
power of the individual to cause rapid change and transformation within society
has never been greater. The tools of authorship, audience and immediate
feedback that the Internet provides has allowed for cultural shift at
incredible rates. This is especially true regard to memetic subcultures in
which audience and authors are more often one in the same. We have reached a
golden age of cultural shift in which the tools of creation and communication
have never been more accessible to so many individuals. Soon every human on
earth can act as shamans of culture in this blistering communications feedback
loop as the number of devices connected
to IP networks will be twice as high as the global population in 2015. ( Cisco Vni ).
Every
Internet user is a shaman, an author actively shaping their own reality and
acting as "priests of the eternal imagination" ready to "transmute
the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life" (Joyce). This notion of
the 'eternal imagination' could be described as the metaphysical and
technological phenomena of our collective consciousness. Every action one
performs within the Internet rapidly dissolves and forms interference patterns
and turbulence through fields of culture and consciousness, changing both the
entire system and the user of the system in a feedback loop. The speed and
density of this communications feedback loop will soon approach the
unimaginable and transform human consciousness in wildly unpredictable ways.
Brain computer interfaces and global bandwidth limits will become greatly
sophisticated due to the accelerating returns of our technological culture and
dissolve the boundaries between our individual consciousnesses. This is a
system based on interdependence, co-authorship, and is structurally modular,
nodal and analogous to spiritual notions of oneness and interconnection.
Philosophical
and spiritual practitioners across time and cultures have understood the
flexible and interconnected nature of reality as it relates to our perception
and the power of such understanding. The Buddhist concept of emptiness or
Sunyata describes that "Everything is inter-related and mutually dependent— never wholly self-sufficient or
independent. All things are in a state of constant flux where energy and
information are forever flowing throughout the natural world giving rise to and
themselves undergoing major transformations with the passage of time." This rhizomatic model of perception dissolves an objective
reality much in the way that the Internet has dissolved top-down models of
authorship and authority across nearly every media, and has manifested the user
as a magician & master of ones reality.
But
what do I mean by ‘magician’ As Aleister Crowley states, “What is a Magical Operation? It may be defined as
any event in nature, which is brought to pass by Will."
And by that very definition Internet users are most certainly
practitioners of magic with each interaction, each 'like', each 'share' a
manifestation of the will of a user, an extension and expression of
consciousness. There is a great power in that knowledge of oneself as a
practitioner of magic, it enables one to act with intent and purpose, to
manifest ones consciousness and thus transform ones own perception, thereby
transforming all of reality. Cybernetic theory surprisingly offers a connection
between these systems of magic beliefs and the manifestation of will, spiritual
notions of interconnectedness and the Internet.
As Edward Shanken
describes:
1)phenomena
are fundamentally contingent
2)
the behavior of a system can be determined
3)
with regard to the transfer of information, animals and machines function in
quite similar ways, so a unified theory of this process can be articulated;
4)
by regulating the transfer of information, the behavior of humans and machines
can be automated and controlled.
"
This cybernetic
strategy suggests to be aware of the ways in which action and control can cause
change within systems, enter into a feedback loop with ones subject of inquiry
and enact rapid transformation within the system and within oneself.
Understanding ones participation in culture and the Internet as a magical act
and with a cybernetic model of thought has a history as well aligning itself
with shamanistic practices across "...several generations of nineteenth and twentieth
century artists [that have] affirmed the power of the world to call forth an
otherwise inaccessible reality and the ability of art to give shape and
significance to the chaos of the universe.” (Bynum)
I propose
as Humans, Internet users, shamans of culture and cybernetic magicians, we use
our tools for rapid transformation in an altruistic and humanistic way. To
occupy island Earth together and play Buckminster Fullers ‘World Game’ in which
the goal is to “Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest
possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or
the disadvantage of anyone.”