nial Park bombing thing has me worried. Not about the threat of terrorism —
statistically, it’s way down there beneath bathroom falls — but about the
threat implied in the main rhetorical themes being sounded in response — by
the press as well as by public officials. Those themes can be summarized more
or less as follows:
1. Obviously, we have to tighten up our security procedures, and we know you
won’t mind if that means you’ll lose some civil rights along the way. In the
coming weeks and months, look for GOP-led initiatives for more police, more
jails, and most importantly, more latitude for law enforcement officials to do
their job maintaining “security” — though there’s no evidence that any of this
will make us more secure. (And wouldn’t it be ironic if the Olympic bomber does
turn out to be one of the security crew?)
2. Knowledge is power — but you have to be careful who has access to it. The
government, in the name of security, has a legitimate interest in… well,
everything. In an era when voice prints, psychological profiles, home videos,
and phone records are among our most valuable investigative tools, it’s hard to
imagine any sort of information-gathering that could be considered
inappropriate.
When it comes to the public, though, access to knowledge becomes dangerous.
Within hours of each of the recent bombings, it was duly and somberly noted
that information on bomb-making is readily available on the Internet — as it
is, of course, at any good library — and at least one local TV news team
responded to events in Atlanta with a special report on the
“Internet-connected” militia movement. (What? Not “Bell-South-connected” or
“USPS-connected”?)
So, as you read this issue’s cover story, wherein two of the Internet’s
self-proclaimed “old farts” contemplate what they hath wrought, and the coming
“cyborgization” of human intelligence, it seems an apt time to contemplate the
relationship between man and the wired society.
Everywhere you look, in fields as diverse as archaeology, genetic engineering,
artificial intelligence, and molecular biology, among others, science is
literally re-defining what it means to be a human being.
And in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, it seems increasingly
inevitable that we homo sapiens, the last and greatest of the wild
mammals, are slated to be a critical link in the evolutionary chain of life, as
we set about engineering our next great mutation. Natural selection has taken
us this far; where the human race evolves from here will almost certainly be a
product of our own collective will, and technological savvy. Random mutation,
after all, takes eons; the pace of human technology is far faster. We are now,
for the first time in the history of life on the planet, in a position to take
charge of our own species’ evolution.
Can’t happen here, you’re thinking? The biological urge toward chaos is too
strong? Maybe, but ask yourself: When medical science can guarantee every
prospective parent a “normal” offspring, or even a custom-designed offspring
(let’s see, medium height, curly hair, good with numbers, musical…) will
people really forego that option? Will they continue to do so, generation after
generation, as the technology — and its marketing — become more and more
pervasive? When violent aggression, for example, can be genetically deselected,
easily and with “few side effects,” will the society of the future even
tolerate “natural” genetic selection?
Will science ever solve the essential mystery at the core of human
consciousness? I rather hope not; I hope that there are some things that will
remain unknowable. But I think it’s indisputable that we’re into a new era in
terms of collective consciousness. In the dawning of the communications age, we
are truly witnessing the awakening of a giant, global brain — brought to life
by the firing of millions of individual synapses (that’d be you and me). And in
this new era, the human struggle will remain the same as it has been throughout
the history of civilization: to retain a sense of human dignity, a human scale
on a global stage — the rights of the individual in a collective society, as
the song goes.
More and more, that struggle will revolve around public access to
communications and information technology. Knowledge is power, and we
should fight like hell against any suggestion that it should be restricted or
licensed. How much information should the public be allowed access to? All of
it.
This article appears in August 2 • 1996 and August 2 • 1996 (Cover).