white male consumer

This is my part of a larger collaborative project for my senior seminar writing class. I’ll link up the full project when it goes live.

Don’t bother remembering facts and figures, historical events and persons. The pedagogical norm of our school systems – the regurgitation of facts in multiple-choice or short answer form – is a disservice to the next generation. Today the collective memory of a thousand or ten thousand can be safely stored in a pocket, or held in the palm of a hand. A $50 flash drive contains more knowledge than Einstein could have ever possibly dreamt of. Individualism has been America’s chief religion and ideology, but today we find ourselves moving closer and closer to a collective consciousness via technology and the internet. Today, it is not what you know that is important, but how well you can google.

Reality today is much stranger than fiction.

This technological collective consciousness is the result of technology which brings all together, to share and learn and feed off of one another in a symbiotic (albeit perhaps cold, impersonal) relationship. Today’s wiki is an exact example of this, but all of the internet can be included.

The internet was born out of a need to communicate better so that we could war better. This technology grew exponentially throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, in both scale and accessibility (and use and potential). From black and green DOS terminals to colorful point-and-click GUIs. From a token few researchers at certain technical institutions and the Pentagon to soccer-moms and their five-year-olds everywhere.

It has been said that Wisdom is the ability to understand others; it is the understanding of yourself that is Enlightenment.

Intelligence has, in the past, been measured by how much information one can retain. The pursuit of information, of knowledge. And then, following this, what one does with it – the pursuit of understanding. With the internet and its (our) collective consciousness, infinite knowledge (for the purposes of an individual) is readily available and at our fingertips. It is unnecessary to remember because we can easily google for the fact or information in question. Long-term memory is superfluous, and should things continue as they are, evolution will reflect this.

Today, the pursuit of wisdom or enlightenment can (ought to) take center stage. Intelligence today can be measured in understanding. The ability to think critically trumps the ability to be a good Jeopardy contestant. Emphasis shifts.

Toward this end, society evolves: constantly, slowly. Today’s children navigate the collective consciousness with ease. The elderly, less so. As humanity ambles along, it becomes adjusted to the new realities. The people change first; structures (libraries, the schooling system, the media) follow. Whether humanity begets the reality or vice-versa is irrelevant (unanswerable). Change happens; it is.

If you submit to us now, we will train you to be free tomorrow.

Those without the means of logging on (technological, economic and even geographical barriers still exist) are left behind and outside. Outside, one has two options: to continue as before, spending time and grey matter harvesting knowledge through traditional (deteriorating) channels; or to amalgamate with the collective consciousness. The pursuit of knowledge is inefficient; amalgamation is self-destructive (the loss of individualism). But at least a choice is presented. For those born into the machine, no true choice is allowed. All of the structures we surround ourselves with today are hegemonic; they disallow deviance or alternatives.

Some attempt to control the madness, but there is no method here. Censorship or regulation has failed, or will fail. This pursuit is as futile as controlling an individual’s thoughts or dreams. The consciousness is anarchistic.

The creation of a collective consciousness is also inevitable. It is the product of millennia of technological progress, culminating in a sort of “final solution.” Humanity’s thirst for knowledge has given rise to a system that allows everyone to know everything. And this is as close to nirvana as humanity can hope to achieve.