Information Overload
cyberedward@ICDC.COM
Tue, 28 Jan 1997 21:04:40 -0500
Extropians! I have lurked on the Extropian list and then took a hiatus
and am back lurking again. I am just coming off a SAVE THE WORLD
mailing list devoted to the works of Daniel Quinn who wrote ISHMAEL,
STORY OF B etc. Daniel Quinn has a theory that the human race went
wrong about 10,000 years ago when it turned to totalitarian agriculture.
Totalitarian agriculture eliminates all biological competitors in the
production of human food. Now Quinn views the Salvationist religions
which developed out of this agricultural revolution as being a major
part of the ecological crisis. He sees humanity overpopulating the
earth and destroying the biological community of which it is a part and
cannot exist without. He talks about the Great Forgetting of 3 million
years of human existence living in tribes on this planet. Daniel Quinn
wants humanity to have a new mythology to enact which would allow the
biological community to continue to evolve and exist. It is not clear
to me if the Extropians have this perception of an ecological crisis or
the view that man must exist within a biological community. In
INFO-PSYCHOLOGY Dr. Timothy Leary wrote that "Ecology is the seductive
dinosaur science that will lead most of the post-human species to
conform to terrestrial conditions, become reasonably comfortable,
passive, robot-conditioned cyborg innsectoids directed by centralized
broadcasting systems. " He goes on talking about adapting to a cyborg
existence. Elsewhere, Tim Leary wrote that planet Earth is not suitable
for an ever expanding technological civilization and Industry must
migrate to the asteroids and other planets citing G. Harry Stine's book
THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. Daniel Quinn views this outmigration
of humans as sorcery, thinking that humans cannot exist outside of the
biological community. The current Industrial Society is rapidly
changing the face of the Earth. I just got a report from a friend in
Germany on how the Autobahn is adding additional lanes and in his words
"das ganze Land wird zur Strasse" the whole countryside is being paved
over with highways. Hearing the refrain from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow
Taxi song " They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, you don't
know what you got till it's gone, took all the trees and put them in a
tree musuem, and charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see
them". That song seems more and more relevant. Putting all my Internet
exposure and voracious reading together gives me an information overload
that is hard to deal with. The Extropians seem to me to be like the
futuristic intellectual province envisioned in Hermann Hesse's GLASS
BEAD GAME of the 24th century. Lurker Ed Maciocha