Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind.
Interpretation
The Internet connects people and ideas globally, creating a collective consciousness.
In this quote, Terence McKenna expresses how the Internet acts as a catalyst for global communication and shared knowledge, likening it to a collective mind where individuals can connect, share, and collaborate across vast distances. This interconnectedness fosters a sense of unity and collective intelligence that was previously unimaginable, transforming the way humanity interacts and thinks.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of digital communication, one might quote McKenna to emphasize the impact of the Internet.
We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.
LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.
There were a lot of naysayers over the years. People would say, 'Why are we spending all of this money? Are you sure this cellular thing will turn out to be something?'
My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy
People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.
If we don't take an approach that looks holistically at the form a video-game platform should take in the future, then we're not able to sustain Nintendo 10 years down the road.
If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.
Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.