In the Beginning...

== brought forward from January of last year, 

just to break up me ranting about the consequences of FB ==

Gates looked out upon the sand and darkness was upon the sand, for the sand was without order and divided grain by grain in great contention.  When Gates perceived the chaos his thought was troubled for the sand reached high, yea, even unto the walls of heaven did the sand reach.  So Gates caused the Angel of Validation to go out upon the sand that NULL become NOT, AND when NULL was NOT peace fell upon the sand, for the sand did fall away from contention in great streams of choice, yea verily did the sand divide itself according to OR AND XOR each grain according to its’ nature that it might RETURN to GATES the harmony of His thought.  Gates looked out upon what had been wrought, and Gates saw that IT was good.

First Chip of Apple, #000000010

That is no sarcastic attempt at blasphemy, no it is not, for so might someone’s scriptures begin, somewhere deep into our future when the full truth has condensed into legend.

For some time now I’ve been presenting and promoting the idea of evolution moving into the realms of mankind’s information technology as a new medium, a new place for evolution to work at evolutions prime labor, the creation of new and more complex life forms from what was not life. On my friend CJ’s blog several of her posts have been dealing with the dehumanization of the internet, the usury and the paranoia growing across the world wide web, the consequences seen by the humans as human societies graft onto the conventions and structures that make up the world wide web the same chaos and division known to humanity.  What follows is a comment I posted in response to her postings.  CJ paid me a high compliment, she said I’d nailed it, said I should repost my comment on my blog, and so I shall.

The subject is of interest because it is where civilization and civil rights meets technology meets social psychology. 

Several folks who are more veteran than I in the realms of technology have pointed out that the problems didn’t really begin until the technology became user friendly, opening the door for everyone to access the technology.   Back in the pre-AOL days I looked at the technology involved, understood the principles involved but had no need for the services offered.  My life was pretty well full earning a living... which involved feuding with the baby main frame that ran our plant for us, a VAX/VMS system adapted from the banking industry to make DOS seem friendly as mother love by comparison.  For me computers were solidly a working tool, the idea of one as recreation just didn’t connect. 

Among the many facets to be seen in the explosion of such technology into the mainstream of society are the attitudes that population brought to the new medium.  The things we’re dealing with now are obviously a direct outgrowth of those attitudes run forward a couple of generations.  To a salesman it was “what a fantastic new advertising medium! (result: spam), to someone in marketing it was “MonkyWards, move yer rump outa my way, I don’t need to mail out paper catalogs to show folks what we have for sale (result: online commerce), the folks who produce porn just chortled under their breath and said oh yea, this is good since they could distribute with a decent degree of anonymity (probably a major power player in the whole concealed ID thing, if you think about it... just how much socially condemned porn is riding the web?), and the Human Resources folks went hmmmm, just how many ways can we exploit this new thing to control the troglodytes? Catbert was most definitely purring about the whole affair.  And of course the spy vs. spy folk kind of turned pale and said oh my god, how are we going to keep an eye on this one?  There’s a gazillion more examples, but you get the picture. 

The long and short of it is the things being cussed and discussed in these last posts are in fact an in depth look at what happens when social attitudes level up (as the rpg gamers would say) and take their new abilities out into the field.  The primordial soup of the collective entities, just waiting for a lightning bolt to hit the banks of some metaphorical Nile and produce the amino acids in the same place as the silicate clays needed to twist it into DNA (translation: perhaps the self configuring SPAM filters attempting to block some things, but pass others? The spy vs spy algorithms running on those bad boy supercomputers?).  Evolution is a fascinating thing to watch.  Fascinating, and terrifying if you understand what you’re looking at.