At parties, I’ll scan the people: “not interesting, not interesting.” Which is awful – sort of looking over their shoulders for the next person who might add value. It’s a terrible, terrible thing to do … There’s a lack of depth and context and continuity in a lot of my face-to-face relationships. I think the whole quality of human interaction is changing.
The hype about the Internet is driving the commercial online services to change prices and offer more user-friendly interfaces … With this, you’re getting down to the level of the average person.
I’ve just got to believe that it’s in the nature of the Net and self-publishing to encourage a proliferation of ideas – may 10,000 intelligent agents bloom. There’s going to be a lot more points of view than in today’s media.
Personifying the agent – I think we’re going to see a lot of that. It’s an interesting idea: Whose filter do you want to view the Net through?
My real dream would be a Netwide, completely up-to-date, hierarchically arranged subject-indexing capability that is as sophisticated as what you find in the commercial databases. I’m not holding my breath for that.
I’ve gone in five years from being seen as slightly retrograde to being seen as positively a crank. Five years from now, if I’m still not online it’s going to be seen as grandstanding … If I have a mission in talking about this, it is to bring the question out, bring it forward. The last words in my book are “Refuse it.” I sound like I’m speaking for the world. But I’m speaking only for myself. I don’t tell anyone else to refuse it, only to think about it.
There is something in us, possibly our own DNA, that recalls animistic ritual – the fear of night, of the gods who come back in different form on the big screen. If somebody comes along who’s a persuasive demagogue and really commands the wires, commands the codes, and is an irresistible presence, I can imagine some dangerous scenarios. I can also imagine a spiritual leader tapping in and turning those same desires in the other direction. So it’s a gamble. Electronic Church or electronic Reich? It could be either.
Pretty soon, every household will be a centered unit that pulls all its elements together into one great communicating pipe organ. At the same time, there has to be a flattening of the human. It’s essential to the hive life, which challenges the old terms of what it means to form a life. As everything else in our society becomes streamlined, it becomes harder to resist the trend. Over the generations, people will have increasingly similar lives.
There’s a steady, inevitable overcoming of human provincialism. We’re becoming schooled to larger perspectives. Though it’s not always easy to believe, we’re going to be more tolerant of diversity and difference. We will grasp a sense of global living in a way we never could before.
In 10 years, I’ll probably be walking around in a pelt, with a beard, barefoot and screaming, and they’ll lock me away and that will be the end of it … There’s a fine line between understanding ourselves as coded and fiddling with the code. When we begin messing around with it too much we eventually exceed some threshold and wind up in an environment where we understand nothing. Having demythified all our myths and demystified all our mysteries, we’re going to find the spiritual residue of ourselves in grave condition.