“For the moment, the collective intelligence we have assembled as free people through agencies such as the internet remains naive, impulsive, and easily compelled by frivolities, imagery, and advertising of various kinds. But slowly, we are learning to assemble something more like intelligence and insight.

We are learning how to check information thoroughly, how to discuss and argue, how to determine if a popular myth or meme is a lie, and how to assemble forms of cooperation that have never before existed. In short, we are learning, slowly, to magnify and develop our intelligence by forming and participating in distributed intelligences — together. It just so happens that we are evolutionarily adapted to excel at this activity.

Of course, a good portion of us are taken up in the wonderland effect and have lost contact with reality as such. Some will even be destroyed by exposure to these mediums, and they are not to blame. It is a new age. The process is slow, and there are casualties, but as pioneers we are learning, and some of us will use these new arenas to establish forms of relationships and modes of intelligence that actually live up to the names.

The future was upon us years ago, and we are engaged in a poorly organized game of catch-up. When we begin to get our sea legs, the entire field of play is going to change — radically, and fast. Those following the leading waves will see and become new kinds of human beings, with perceptions and abilities no one has ever had before.”

— an a i