While still in bed, I had reached across to my bedside table and wakened a tablet to read the blog of a friend who teaches history in North Carolina and who has similar interests to mine, but who also has more discipline, since he blogs every day. Often I find them a nice way to get my brain and body adjusted from what may be dreaming to what may be the real world. Then I opened GMail to see if the USPS had made any progress on delivering an EBay order which they have been holding hostage for more than two weeks. It was beginning its sixth day in Chicago.
I then asked my Google Home Hub, which I call Toshiro because that's the name of the space pirate Harlock's sidekick, and who is the literal brains of the Arcadia, to play some music while I made coffee and poured a bowl of raisin bran flakes.
But while I ate my cornflakes, I turned again to my tablet to watch videos about architecture, specifically spaces nearly as small as my tin can.
As I chewed and sipped, my mind wandered from the images of a kit house in Sussex to my next YouTube video. The missing package is schedule to be the star of next Tuesday's release.
Having completed my potentially messy activities, I reconnected the keyboard to my tablet to write my morning journal entry. As always, I looked through my recently downloaded or photographed images to see what I might want to include in today's journal entry, and it was then I realized where I was, where I am.
I am, like the spider, suspended in a web, the web of noosphere, a concept made famous mostly by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a vision of the future that has become my present.
Looking back in my journals from four years ago, I found myself moving from Port Townsend, where the tin can is settled in the cedars and firs, to the Ozarks, where I would be surrounded by maples and loblolly pines. (I am going to post this photo of my next door neighbors when I lived in Eureka Springs because I like the sound of loblolly pines so much:)
What happened, that I am back in a tin can amongst the firs and ferns?
Well, several things, of course. I lived for about eight weeks in a beautiful yellow tent that I called the Versailles, under a maple tree, in the back yard of some friends in Fayetteville while I looked for the perfect place to resettle.
The tent had a fan, and lots of windows, but it was just too damn hot for a fat old man who rides a bicycle. I took a bus to a train, and the train to a ferry, and I came back to Port Townsend, where it was cool. But the real reason, I suspect, is that I had subconsciously realized that I lived more on the world wide web, as a minor ganglion in the nervous system of he noosphere, than I did in either Arkansas or Washington. Before climbing out of bed, I received and reacted to information from another human in North Carolina, and traded information with another human in Spain and one in Texas.
The noosphere is actually, if T de C is at all correct, a really new deal, although it is just also just a continuation of the sort of the evolution of how data is organized that has gone on since the big bang of the creation of universe. It is easy to notice the glitches, fake news on Facebook and shit-posting on Twitter, for instance, without noticing how huge the change that is taking place will be and has already been. To take those glitches as representing the noosphere as a whole is like condemning the biosphere if one stubs one's toe on a tree route.
I am a fat old man, who has no or at least few illusions about the innate goodness of us humans, but who is nevertheless optimistic, at least about the possibilities. I am acutely aware of how different my 'golden years' are from those of my grandparents, but I am also acutely aware of how much that difference is still unevenly distributed, as William Gibson noted. Along the way to writing this rather lengthy and rambly blog post, I found this essay that I thought might be worth sharing. Among other things, the authors show us how far we still have to go before Teilhard's vision is realized. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying having lived long enough to have at least a glimpse of it. My router takes me places, and brings places to me, that trains, planes, and automobiles can't.
