James Nathan Post

Is The Internet Divine Vision?

“The computer is a mirror in which I can see through the eyes of Thoth.”
Alex St. Luc, Enosar Emeritus
The Scribes Of Osiris

We take it for granted already. To know everything, anything, anywhere, now. That was only for God to know. There was a time only a few years ago in my own lifetime when most of the information in the world was printed on paper and available in catalogued libraries. That might sound like a terrible restriction today, but in its time it was a revolution. Before Gutenberg, there were few books, and only a few had access to read them. Most of what everyone knew of the world, they had only heard. After Gutenberg, all of the established institutions began to change as larger numbers of people knew more and more about the world. The changes were not predictable at the time. It was only after a generation had grown up with that information that they developed not just new ways of doing things, but new ways of organizing themselves and relating to each other.

If the invention of writing is the First Literary Revolution, and the Printing Press the Second, then the Third Literary Revolution is the Internet, the great commonly-shared data cloud of access to all of the information in the world, instantly. I can “invoke” the content of every book in thousands of libraries, in every language, and thousands of films, and daily newspapers across the world. I have access to cameras, maps, and even pictures from outer space, anywhere on earth, right now. All the information anyone knows, or has ever known, is now available instantly, to everyone, anywhere. Only a few years ago, such access to knowledge could only belong to God. Only Thoth, the Ibis-headed scribe who represents the Egyptian “intellect of God” could know all things at all times. Now we all have that. We are become as Gods. Though some of our science fiction writers have been exploring the idea for a century or so, this is going to change the nature of being human in ways we cannot yet predict.

The generations of people raised on the Internet and its Siamese-cousin the TV, living in that omnipresent data cloud (it knows who we are and where), and all connected to each other by social networks of varying exclusivity, will not think and feel much like the more individualized lives we live today. The Latterday-19th Century Teaparty type still trying to remember the Alamo for Jesus on election day would look to those people like a blind old fool who wandered in from the desert, and has never even seen an encephalo-metagram projection. “He wants to disband the Terran Sodality and the National Consensus and let everybody vote for two guys who will make all the rules… and they get to decide how much we pay them! Haw haw haw! When did you find your way out of the cave, Gramps?”

James Nathan Post

The Scribes Of Osiris