A long time (over 25 years) ago I envisioned something I felt was missing from our common experience of living in communities together, and in a distributed way, as a nation.

A public place where people, known to each other and unknown, met and discussed topics, ideas, or ways of learning or seeing in small groups, all together, somehow, in a vast place. Not necessarily in debate, and not necessarily in ways that were entirely casual, although I imagined there could be a great diversity in form and content, and that streams of new skills for speaking, orienting and pathfinding might emerge in such a vital, dynamic context. The idea seemed at once maddeningly close at hand and also strangely distant.

And I don’t think I realized that social networking was becoming that, because we never really made this kind of use of it; after all, most of us probably didn’t envision or expect a context like the one I described. At least, until I began to explore Google circles, and I realized that this was an example of one electronic implementation what I had been on about, available in a sense to anyone with a machine and a connection… throughout not only every location, but the world.

And so my strange dream was at least partly oracular, except, perhaps, that what dominates the electronic version of it is not the same kind of thing that might arise or flourish in meeting face to face, with people we actually live near, who share contexts and concerns that are at once those of our nation (in so much as something like that is reasonably understood to still exist) and our communities.

Of course, we got the prosthesis, so to speak, without the education. Before we knew how to use or what to do with the ability to communicate in such broad ways, it was thrust upon us by various commercial concerns. This seems a bit bizarre, but I suspect that if we decide to, we can make enough use of it to change the world. Or we can keep posting cat pictures and taking part in debates that moderately intelligent young children would scoff at the absurdity of.

We can yell at the shadows, copy the famous, invoke divine fantasies of strange metaphysical polyverses without end… we can remain wrapped in the zombie-spell of our critiques and oppositions, our grudges and fears … or we can invent entirely new ways of being humans and being collectives together. Right now. With and for each other and our world and in defiance of every inhuman, inhumane, insulting and ridiculous travesty of our birthrights that we have too long suffered in their stead.

The difference between slavery to a prosthesis and prosperity delivered by its function is simple: it’s what you do with it. This prosthesis has the power to change the world in a week if we use it adeptly. If we don’t, the same result accrues. The difference is that instead of the world changing toward something more like living beings, we become more like our machines. That’s a developmental path with an extremely limited lifetime. It’s that, or flight.

Let’s fly.