River of Protest

From Iran, a river of protest in their Green revolution. I find this so moving, not the least because of the role that social media has taken in bringing this momentous piece of history to the world. Following this river of protest is an ocean of support coming from all over the world, streaming through twitter feeds, blogs comments, and every other facet of the internet. Comments like "You all take my breath away and make me appreciate what we have here so much more. Don't let up - the world is with you!" are streaming in from all over the world.

Angry Mother Owl

For me, the apocalypse happened pretty much on schedule. Almost a decade later, the war is still on, apparently. I'm not always the angry mother owl though. Dispassion comes with experience.

I wrote this on New Year's Eve, 2000, at the Studio...

Inside me

an angry mother owl

rears

at least 40 feet high

my boys within her wing.

I can see at night

and pierce the darkness with my cries.

I can heal and

can destroy

My eyes never blink

and my head turns all the way around

Heroin and Cocaine have left

all I loved smouldering ruins

I am going to take them back

One by One

from hell.

How can this hate rise so strong

against something so ambiguous

as addiction?

How can this love rise so strong?

My nostrils flare into a beak

and my shoulders become winged

and fierce.

Battle cries rend the air

Smoke obscures the ruins

One by one, my enemies

are reclaimed under my wing

safe from the war

by my side.

and then the flowers wilt

The sunbeam is gone, but I'm still here, enjoying final golden light across the green, cascading as it does from wysteria to rhubarb from magnificent fern to the sand at my feet. I'm still here, watching the flowers as they wilt; their pollen, spent; their wild, colourful flirtations suddenly irrelavent as they swell with fruit.

Recent events within my community remind me of the resiliency of what we have built. It seems that those who can, do. And there is usually someone who can, and it is not only me.

I love my friends.

Intelligent Design

I've been thinking about social bugs again. Ants and termites, bees and wasps... The more I find out about these amazing creatures, the more I question my own species - our supposed technological dominance, our economies and cultures, even our very individuality!

Why do humans separate ourselves from animals? We have this idea that humans are the pinnacle of God's Creation, so we are hardly surprised that we have this technology that allows us to take dominion over the earth. But if technology is evidence of divine favour, then there are God's fingerprints elsewhere in the clay of the universe.

Human engineering pales next to the marvels of 15 foot tall termite mounds in West Africa. These Gothic wonders regulate temperature, humidity, and air quality with humbling precision. They have to, they have farms in those mounds where they cultivate a fungus which will die if the temperature varies by 2 degrees!

And Termites aren't the only social insects with fungus gardens. Leaf cutter ants have had agricultural systems for 50 million years, kept pest free by utilizing a bacteria stew containing half of all the antibiotics used in human medicine. We've had antibiotics for about 60 years...

Somehow within these insect societies, technologies have developed that we are only now just beginning to fathom. We still have no idea how they communicate between individuals - or even if the colony can be rightly said to even consist of individuals, or are better thought of as a super-organism. Technology, insect, fungus, bacteria - all part of one being. After all, we humans are also super-organisms. We are carrying around an entire microbiome, which includes thousands of species, many of them necessary for our survival. We have 1,000 times as many microbial genes as human genes.” Are we not also colonies?

And what about our societies? Over the last very short while (in evolutionary terms) we have suddenly began acting very much like social insects. We developed agriculture, and domestication of other species, we embarked on vast engineering projects called urban centres, and are swarming to them at an accelerating pace, and now we are growing our nervous system, the network that communicates to the parts of the whole - the mediascape, the information highway, cyberspace. Social insects seem to communicate by sending pheromone signals. Humans use electrical signals. But what intelligence is directing the show? Is the same hand behind the technologies of the ants and the technologies of mankind? Is there a choreographer?

I came across this interview with William Gibson, that prophet of cyberspace.

Gibson about withdrawing cash from an ATM in a foreign country "just for a minute it struck me as miraculous and kind of spooky. I had that feeling, that post geographical feeling."

Yes! Exactly!

Gibson goes on...

"I think we've been growing a sort of prosthetic extended nervous system for the past 100 years. It's really starting to take, it's really, really starting to grow now. You are dealing with something that has penetrated every corner of the human universe now."

And there's the crux of it. It is as if there is a bigger organism forming around us - a built macro-organism, a cultural construct that is reshaping our species. This organizing principle is manifesting in technologies, in symbiotic relationships with other species, and in the compulsion to swarm. The communications technology that forms this macro-organism's nervous system is just now forming as we watch. The hive is coalescing! Like Gibson said ... kind of spooky, but miraculous too

Yep... forming as we watch...

That fantastic new prosthetic nervous system has evolved within a few generations from a postal system, to a network that collapses time and space - allowing instant communications and transactions across space, language, and culture. At the cutting edge are the leaps forward; iphone, twitter, facebook, google wave, all geared towards making the network more intense, and more immediate.

"Epic" is my favourite piece of science fiction written this decade. Written in 2004, it called the way the mediascape would evolve with astonishing perception. Five years later, we are watching it come true.

The next leap forward... Google Wave... As I watched the developer preview my jaw was on the floor. More immediate, and more intense - oh yes that nicely describes Google Wave, and the future of media.

Of course, now I find that none of my thoughts are original - a fellow named Joel de Rosnay is talking about this same macro-organism, made up of our species, its culture, and its technology. His book on the subject, "The Macroscope" is available online, and is next on my reading list. I found it when I came across the following quote while surfing...

"On Joel de Rosnay’s postulation of man’s future as cybiont, or an amalgamation of humanity, technology and nature as one synergistic organism: "It’s one of the more inspiring visions. Life keeps finding ways to cooperate in larger symbiotic wholes. It’s like we’re creating a new cell at the scale of a planet. That seems to me an inspiring vision that many people can understand both theologically and religiously. There’s an illustration in my book — more complex forms of life going up a staircase. The neanderthal’s standing behind a guy in a suit, saying ‘I was wondering when you were going to notice that there were more steps.’"