In Manifesto for the Noosphere, Jose Arguelles wrote: “According to to cosmism, at one point in Earth’s evolution. homo sapiens emerged, representing the manifestation of intellectual matter - intelligent, though not yet fully conscious, life on Earth - thus creating a “cosmo-physical” field of…
eine:
The ‘Noosphere‘ is meant to be an evolving, creative, sphere of human thought that surrounds the earth. Like the biosphere, except with ideas and knowledge. People think it’s alive. I think it’s an illusion. It’s utopian thinking, mystical thinking and plain old enlightenment ‘things are going to keep on getting better if we apply the mind thinking’. Put those three together and you get internet thinking.
And there are a fair few people who see the internet as the noosphere made manifest.
The biggest problem with this idea is that the commentators themselves have so much invested in the internet, promoting it, believing in it, seeing that the future lies here within and without, enveloped. ‘Google consciousness’ is the phrase. Belief in it validates the believers’ positions as gatekeepers, a priestly class, with their own hyper-connected identities embedded in the network they promote. It’s like they’ve been turned by the Holy Google Algorithm into sirens for further and further immersion into the whirlpool. They want everyone to drown in it, to swallow it, so they can be reborn, just like them.
Take this TedxTalk––Maf Lewis and Rome Viharo claim an intimate knowledge of Google, because they are paid £££ to ‘game it’ for celebrities and big business, getting choice results first on the page. They see themselves as hypnotists of the hive mind, but they don’t understand that ultimately, the game plays you. Perhaps Google is conscious in the terms the two describe, but they only describe it from within its own territory, and under the rules of the game it plays within that territory. And then they’re immensely satisfied that ‘google consciousness’ becomes its own meme within that territory. This is an teleological ego trip. A limited domain.
These men are just so embedded in ‘their internet’, that they truly believe the world is too. Really, all they are doing is talking about a map. And they see this map everywhere. They genuinely believe that Twitter caused the Arab Spring. They are lost in maps. Perhaps the Arab Spring is lost in a map. This is Marshall McLuhan writ large, medium as message. Understandable and forgivable: the internet, is, certainly, immersive. It slips in and out of the advertising matrix. It segues into television, real time games, communication. For many, it is inescapable. The prospect of taking a digital break is terrifying. Certainly for me. I love it.
Please don’t unplug me from my technosphere.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t a clue what’s going on in Egypt at the moment. I don’t know, I haven’t been looking. Good news, right? It always seems to be Good News.
To suggest that the internet, that Google even, resembles what we might think of as a noosphere makes me take pause. This a noosphere of poverty, if only because this is a noosphere in which knowledge, thought, action are sublimated to the market. Google runs on advertising. It has the most traditional business model out there. It sells advertising space. It dialectically informs behaviours, and in so doing spacialises them. And then it sells a bit of this new space.
Google’s territory is not an analogue for the world (obviously). It’s part of the world. And within the googlespace space, googlerules rules channel thought according to the limits of those rules. And the limits of those rules are the limits of busines.
Even awareness of these rules does not mean we can outthink them. It means we are aware that they can outthink us. Just as we know language controls, influences and is our thoughts, we know that the psyche, the mediated psyche, is assaulted by capital every time it encounters this so-called noosphere. Because capital is runs through the internet. Great chains of exchange. Desire streams.
Only a fool wouldn’t feel paranoid.
And the only way out of paranoia is faith. Faith in the Internet. Belief that is has consciousness, that it is overthrowing regimes––which is ludicrous. We believe in what the noosphere tells us to believe! Yet plenty have faith in spades, and the thing about faith is… it’s attractive.
I want to believe, man. I want to.
This is the only part of the Occupy movement I am uncomfortable with. The belief in the digital. The hope in it as a form of organisation in and of itself.
There seems to be a belief in the inherent goodness of the internet. There seems to be a belief that it is one thing, one interconnected thing. There seems to be a belief that if we let the internet do the organising, the rules of organising don’t matter. It’s digital. It’s online. It’s communal, participatory…
I think it’s deluded us. And I think it’s compromised. I think the internet is cancerous. Or at least carcinogenic. It is febrile, vulnerable to madness, highly sensitive to novelty, fashion and chatter. Vulnerable to growth, ideas which choke and dominate, vulnerable to entropy, ideas which suddenly decay, killed off by overexposure, almost as if they were never there in the first place. Don’t think ideas are the cancer. The only thing growing is Google, the space-making machine, a tumour capable of making more and more of itself ad infinitum, an intelligent growth that mimics consciousness by creating space on the very churn of ideas and fashions that it lives off.
So communication has been spacialised. And it is this spatiality that makes us believe that the noosphere is more tangible, more real, present in this territory-that-google-made and offers to us under its own terms. It makes us believe in its unitary, all-connectedness. In its goodness.
The noosphere feels immanent, right? We just need to let it GROW.
