The dominant metaphors of the modern era have shifted from the heavens to cyberspace. Human beings are no longer the fallen image of God or a microcosm of the Taoist cosmos. Our brains are now likened to computers; our bodies to machines. Hence, the woman who says “This is too much to process,” or the man who moans “The stress is killing me.”
Reversing this projection, computerized social networks are the means by which communities become collective electro-brains. Consider the rabid pro-vax Twitter swarms or the anti-trans cabals on Gab. Each network is a complex psychic web of approved propaganda or misinformation, depending on who you ask.
On an even higher plane, every AI neural network is the silicone manifestation of an alien brain sent from the future to harmonize the human nodes in each collective. Total unity was just meant to be. It’s “inevitable.”
According to this techno-religious paradigm, articulated by futurists such as Howard Bloom and Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly, the emergence of a one-world global brain is coming any day now. Once it subsumes all collective minds under its executive function, the One Brain’s thoughts will be a symphony of 7 billion meat heads orchestrated by algorithms. You and I will become mere cells in its body.
Some believe this has already happened. The historian Yuval Noah Harari, a World Economic Forum favorite, vividly describes our silicone superorganism as an electric ant farm:
“We live in a huge, huge colony in which each one has this tiny role to play, and we cannot survive outside the colony. And this will only increase…in the 21st century, because with the rise of brain-computer interface and biometric sensors and so forth, it is very likely that within, say, fifty years people will literally be part of a network–all the bodies, all the brains, would be connected together to a network. And you won’t be able to survive if you’re disconnected from the Net, because your own body parts, your own immune system, perhaps depends on being constantly connected to the colony, to the network.”
If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it’s that all bodies need a strong immune system–digitized or otherwise. If confronted by lab-born bioweapons or malicious computer code, you also need empowered experts to impose vaccines and erect cybersecurity fences. Otherwise, all hell breaks loose.
By Joe Allen
