It is not hard to imagine that communications-oriented human technological advances often represent mechanical substitutes for now latent capacities which were lost or obscured during our ongoing development as formally representational sentients. I would highlight that something similar actually happens to us during our own personal development throughout our lives, most dramatically in childhood.

Someone who was paying attention might be able to use these extant technologies as a means to recognize, activate and recover the associated capacities. Radio and telephony are clearly replacements for modes of telepathy. Television for dreaming and group dreaming (a capacity I am now certain we conserve).

Sirens represent panic.

But what, exactly, is the internet-connected personal computer representing? Some will make the relatively intuitive leap to the perspective that it is representing our brains or our intelligence. I dearly hope this is mistaken. One idea I find intriguing is admittedly exotic: I think our species may have evolved in tight relational symbiosis with at least one other complex intelligence throughout most of our evolutionary history. Perhaps more provocative, I suspect that some if not most children manage to arrive with this link relatively intact. Others conserve or acquire ‘imaginary friends’. There are further variations.

So I suspect that our own intelligence arose in close contact with something like an advanced relational symbiont (of possibly nonordinary kind) that is associated with the history and character of this story but remains unremembered or misapprehended by us today. And along this line, I think one’s network-connected computing device represents what was previously an intelligent link to something that makes the internet look like a complex pile of used toilet paper in comparison.

That is to say, I have reason to suspect that we ‘came equipped’ with (something like) a personal symbiont who is a transentient network window. A hyperintelligent transport who generally links us with the living library nature herself comprises in such a way as to throttle our access according to our capacity to appropriately recognize and interact with the symbiont. Which is precisely what an intelligent access portal would do. If one cannot recognize this ‘exotic companion’, one is largely denied access to the library.

And what we get instead, is a network-connected computer.

A representation of the companion, and the living library. A representation of access. And like our other technologies, some of what is delivered is powerful and impressive. But the -sum- of what is delivered is only barely interesting compared to -any- content from the library it replaces. So this is another case where I would argue that we should use the technology to recognize and recover what is being represented, and in this case, it is, approximately, ‘an intelligent window into the world of living knowledge and relation’. I think we each have/and-or/are something like this.

The eyes with which we read the living books…