Wholeness and Virtual Communities

A world where the Neurosphere is instantiated via a combination of RFID and nanotechnology. Some quotes:

“Orphids are to bar codes as velociraptors were to trilobites.

Orphids will cover the Earth’s surface, yes, but only down to one or two orphids per square millimeter…You’ll see a few million of them on your skin, and maybe ten sexteillion orphids on Earth’s whole surface. From then on, they only reproduce enough to maintain that same density.

Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural language; and they’re networked via quantum entanglement.

Jeez, you’re picking up my subvocal mutters. This orphidnet link is like telepathy almost.

With orphids blanketing the world, it was like your eyes were everywhere.

The orphids are the interface. Nobody needs hardware anymore. We’re putting people first and building Gaia’s minds.”

At the end of the book, the next phase:

“Not only would an unfurled eighth dimension have provided endless memory for all, it would have brought about telepathy for every object in the world.”

That last quote describes the premise for Rucker’s next book, Hylozoic. I am halfway through it and it’s more about alien visitors who also come from hylozoic worlds, rather than speculation about how hylozoism might look in our world.

Coming to a town near you – wait, this is my town! Thirty years ago, I spent three years trying to sell energy conservation and renewables to a populace of ranchers and farmers.

“The next-generation electricity grid will allow our company to better meet growing demands, address environmental challenges, maximize available resources and optimize the entire energy system. Ultimately, a “smarter” grid helps us serve our customers by creating more options for managing personal energy use, habits and costs.”

There’s actually a method and approach for getting to this recurring dream from the way things are now, affiliated with Ken Wilber’s Integral philosophy and Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics.

“A Declaration of the Value of Global Governance

The Declaration below is an on-line petition to the leaders of society to recognize the value of establishing a democratic world federation guided by the enlarged understanding of history and culture provided by the integral worldview.”

http://www.integralworldgovernment.org/

The Zigbee guys are part of this.

“The Grid-Interop Forum … will inform and engage public and private electric systems stakeholders in the integration issues associated with the increasingly complex, distributed automation systems that will be involved in system operations, as well as the interface standards and codes needed to enable a more efficient, reliable, and resilient electric system.

Grid-Interop is being organized by the GridWise Architecture Council, whose mission is to enable all elements of the electric system to interact.”

http://www.grid-interop.com/2007/content/overview.asp?tabvar=a

Global movement meets global movement.

http://de.indymedia.org/en/

I think this is useful questioning. My response is to ask, when one is on the cell phone at the beach, can one be mindful of both places at the same time. My concern with various forms of meditation is that they have equal possibilities of withdrawing from other people, from connectedness in that sense.

“With our mobile phones and wireless palm devices, we are now able to be so connected that we can be in touch with anyone and everyone at any time, and do business anywhere. But have you noticed that, in the process, we run the risk of never being in touch with ourselves?”

http://www.resurgence.org/2007/Zinn241.htm

Smart Grid – the phrase itself is a condensation of the ideas of Teilhard – a conscious net.

“GridWeek provides the opportunity for organizations focused on grid modernization to hold meetings and participate in collaborative sessions that include leading speakers on smart grid and grid modernization.”

www.gridweek.com

Try the Grid!
“For a brief introductory walkthrough of the grid, try the GILDA Grid Demonstrator (opens in a new window), accept the certificate and follow the steps as described in the EGEE Grid Walkthrough below. The GILDA Grid Demonstrator is a secure area on the GILDA Testbed which is used for training purposes.”

http://www.eu-egee.org/try-the-grid

News on Grid Computing from Europe’s CoreGrid initiative.

“The Grid promise is starting to materialize today: large-scale multi-site infrastructures have grown to assist the work of scientists from all around the world. In only ten years, production Grid environments have grown from a few hundred to several tens of thousands of resources, and from few to hundreds of users.”

http://www.coregrid.net/mambo/

Tools for the grid.

“The Globus Alliance is a community of organizations and individuals developing fundamental technologies behind the “Grid,” which lets people share computing power, databases, instruments, and other on-line tools securely across corporate, institutional, and geographic boundaries without sacrificing local autonomy.”

http://www.globus.org/

http://www.clusterresources.com/pages/products/moab-grid-suite.php

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/condorg/

Global Voices
“A growing number of bloggers around the world are emerging as “bridge bloggers:” people who are talking about their country or region to a global audience. Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations, information, and ideas appearing around the world on various forms of participatory media such as blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs.”

http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/

Sacred World Foundation

“The Sacred World Foundation is a state of the art research and design think tank whose projects are exploring innovation created by building bridges between techno and traditional cultures.”

http://www.sacredworld.com/

Reporters Without Borders

“On 27 February 2006, 119 journalists and 57 cyberdissidents were still imprisoned simply for wanting to provide us with information.”

http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=20

www.internet.rsf.org

Fighting a war on ourselves requires finding the enemy within. The technology and information systems to monitor the behavior of each of us within the collective of a Neurosphere continues to evolve, and billions of dollars have gone to improve the technology. The impact on the non-warfighting side seems to me difficult to understate; tools toward the anthropology of the collective consciousness.

“Congress supposedly killed Total Information Awareness, Darpa’s far-flung effort to comb databases in search of terrorists. But that doesn’t mean the authorities are finished sorting through the records of Americans to expose evildoers. Many analysts think bits of TIA still exist on the covert, “black” side of the Pentagon’s ledger.

NORA (Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness)

Acumen (Adaptive Concept Understanding From Modeled Enterprise Networks)

NIMD (Novel Intelligence From Massive Data)”

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000752.html

There are questionable uses that go to the definition of who our enemies really are.

“With practice, you can recognize the video spies in the city of Washington, DC. To a casual observer, they resemble lampposts. Some of the cameras have a 360 degree view and magnify by a factor of 10-17. Some are equipped with night vision and can zoom in on a target well enough to read text on a written page or look into a building. Most are placed at locations that would not come to mind as primary terrorist targets: Smithsonian Castle, the U.S. Department of Labor, Dupont Circle, Union Station, Wisconsin Avenue, the Old Post Office, and the Banana Republic in Georgetown. Though the targets they view may not stand out as particularly vulnerable to terrorism, the cameras are placed strategically for the purpose of monitoring demonstrations and protests. One of the first occasions for their use was a demonstration in April 2000 against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).”

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Jan2005/kalukin0105.html

There are business drivers for technology development as well; the Mohomine Classifier

“Organising and maintaining vast amounts of content inside corporations is an ever more costly and daunting task as the volumes of unstructured content grow. This data must be classified, whether in support of a custom built application or an enterprise application targeted at CRM, Supply Chain, Marketing, Document Management, or any other specific business problem. Further, as the amount of data those applications handle increases dramatically and alters in nature, the performance and flexibility required to support taxonomy changes becomes key to the overall success of the application.”

Or this.

“Systems Research & Development’s NORA technology can take information from disparate sources about people and their activities and find obscure, nonobvious relationships. For example, it might discover that an applicant for a job at a casino shares a telephone number with a known criminal and issue an alert to the hiring manager.”

http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/story/0,10801,70041,00.html