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We are the connected not the collected
Collectives are part of the machinery of the previous era.
They assume the priority of the group over the individual
and a joint identity that’s shared by all its members.
Hierarchies thrive in collectives.
But an entirely different kind of logic is emerging in our networked culture …In a connective, it’s the selfish yet common goals of individuals that allow a distributed network to self-organize around a common task. Identity in a connective is in a process of continuous renewal, emerging from each individual’s immediate ability to contribute to the common task.
Connectives co-operate.
Collectives collaborate … co-labor.
Wikipedia is a collective (hence the brutal hierarchies).
Delicious is a connective.
A connective is neither the group
nor the individual
but a transcending
that encompasses (and denies) both simultaneously.We are Me.
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cross
Science begins with a subject and an object.
Religion begins with a creator and the created.
The illusion is the same.
There is dogma in any.thing that claims to contain every.thing.
God is a verb
not some omnipotent ruler looking down on all of this.
And if there was a big bang,
you and I aren’t something at the end of the process;
You and I are the big bang …
The original force of the universe.
We are the creator and the created
Inseparable from the creating.
-x—x-x—-x-x-x-x-x—x-x—x—x-
Yet the conflict between science and religion drags on … while …
on the streets, the Beatles are still more popular than Jesus Christ,
quantum physics reads like a zen riddle,
and techno teenagers rely on rhythm and rhyme,
- not reason -
to make sense of living at the speed of light. -
umbilical cord
Bits or bankers, wars or wall street, ecology, equality, energy or education … All of the crucial struggles of our time are at their core a single struggle: A battle between the 19th and 21st centuries.
Radical, new social and perceptive systems are emerging from the net that undermine all of the power structures of the previous era. The few that profited the most when information was scarce, slow, and centralized know that their authority is severely threatened in our networked culture.
Something is very wrong – 21st century connectivity has run smack dab into the needs of 19th century telegraphy. - Bob Frankston
What looks like countless unrelated struggles is in fact a single conflict: a newborn baby being strangled by its own umbilical cord.
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The future of storytelling
not an author and a reader … a collision of co-creators
not reading or watching … playing and procreating
not a product … a process
not a tidy straight line … a mosaic in constant motion
… a pattern that you can view from any perspective
not a beginning and an end … the end of the beginning, middle and end
not a frozen narrative … a connective imagination
… a dream of a dream that we dream together
not fiction but not fact … the elastic middle where real and not real meet
not a work of art that you pause your life to take in
… a stream within a stream of your own lifestream. -
the present is a gift
… that we’re wrapping in the real time web.
Our relationship to the Now touches the core of what it means to be alive and ultimately defines how we relate to everything in our world including ourselves. Strip away the religion from the teachings and Presence is what everyone from the Buddha to Jesus is preaching. Enlightenment, salvation, awakening … these are all just labels for being fully in touch with the present moment.
Our literate culture detached us from the present by tearing our body and mind away from the world and burying them in the printed page. Our senses were “short-circuited” severing our participation with the here and now.
“The most important, the primordial relationship in your life is your relationship with the Now … If your relationship with the Now is dysfunctional, that dysfunction will be reflected in every relationship and every situation you encounter.” E. Tolle.
As we began to wrap the globe in an electric web of instant information, we felt a shared urgency to shift our awareness back to the present moment. Unconsciously we recognized that our lack of presence was incompatible with the “all-at-onceness” of our new electric environment.
The counter cultures of the 20th century were all experiments in realigning ourselves with this new electric Now. We found old paths to the present in meditation, yoga, eastern religion and drugs - all tools for retuning our awareness towards the Now.
The satellite surround that turned us on in the sixties was still in its infancy. It’s one-way broadcast never fully penetrated our consciousness. But the real time web that is emerging today is ready to burrow into the very essence of our being.
The real time web is our new awareness. We live inside it. We are inseparable from its flux and flow.
The meaning of Now is changing. The next generation of tools that we build to hook us into the real time web will fundamentally alter our understanding of presence. We are, without knowing it, laying the foundation for a new kind of spirituality.
Who should we get to build this new Now? Programmers? preachers? Drop outs? Drug heads? Artists? Architects? Maybe we should get some kids on the job. Little children have an effortless way of touching the present that most of us lose as we get older.
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language of ecology
cyberspace is not a space
but the end of space
a placeless place
where anywhere is here
and anytime is now.“We have reached the limits of our language.”
- HeisenbergIt’s been over a century since our mechanical assumptions about space, time and reality were shattered by Einstein’s daydreams of riding on a beam of light and Picasso’s desire to see and paint like a child. Today we are submerged in a cubist web of instant information that stretches over the entire planet. We live at the speed of light. And yet we still don’t have the vocabulary to make sense of our new environment.
kk says:a “network is more a process than a thing. In the logic of the net there is a shift from nouns to verbs. … It’s not what something is, it’s what it is connected to, what it does.”
We try to find words to make sense of our inter-dependence but English is a language of nouns … objects pulled from the flux and flow, captured and pinned down like butterflies in a case.“Every human language secretes a kind of perceptual boundary that hovers, like a translucent veil, between those who speak that language and the sensuous terrain that they inhabit.” - David Abram
For 2000 years we’ve conquered the world
by breaking it up into p i e c e s
and every step of that journey
is embedded in our language.
English encourages us to imagine our world
of relationship and process
as a collection of fragmented bits
suspended in isolation.
But there is no me without you
no us without them
We are defined by the invisible boundaries
of what we are not.
We are nothing … but relationship.
Buckminster Fuller says:
“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process —an integral function of the universe.
God is a verb.
Our brittle language cracks
and crumbles at the thought.
(Is atheism a revolt against God,
or the unwitting protest against
god being turned into a noun?)“The principle verb in the Navajo language is the verb “to go” and not the verb “to be,” which is the principle verb in so many other languages but is of relatively minor importance in Navajo. This seems to indicate a cosmos composed of processes and events, as opposed to a cosmos composed of facts and things.” - Gary Witherspoon
We are re-imagining our world in the image of an electric circuit:
an endless now withnobeginningmiddleorend
We are nodes in a network
and in the logic of the net
“It’s not what something is, it’s what it is connected to, what it does.”The Internet is the new kind of awareness. It’s not something that you look at. It is the way or means through which you look at things. - Eric McLuhan
The network is lifting our perceptual veil
and revealing a universe of relationship.
Our obsession with individualism and independence
can not survive the logic of the net.
The network is urging us to embrace a new kind of awareness, like that of the Navajo and other Native Americans, who “instead of trying to emphasize their individuality and independence, … find identity and fulfillment in their vast system of interdependence and social bonds.”
This is the beginning of an intimate dance.
Our culture, our language and our technology are the dancers
and our shifting awareness
is the dancing.
