occupy cyberia

7/30/2019 occupy cyberia

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History and utopia either stand together or fall together, since there can be no history without projects. And this is why we should

regard any dissolution of the Utopian tension as the sound of an alarm bell for humanity.

We live mythically and integrally... In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve in the

whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate ... in the consequences of our every action.

(1964: p.4)

Page

occupy cyberia.

amma birago

the global village is the new world,utopia a call to mourning

Brave New World:Imagined communities,the global village and the collective consciousness.

the Net was created initially to operate after the erasure of nations,

sovereigns, and territories by superpower thermonuclear exchanges, which were denominated

in the deadly codes of mutually assured destruction.

Nation-states will become museum pieces and as such digital neighborhoods function

as playgrounds for web-wise interconnected selves to assemble ideas and socialize all over the world.


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occupy cyberia.the global village is the new world,

utopia a call to mourningand cosmopolitan, the new indigenous.

Cyberia is the New World.

Golden Nowheres that defy Dystopia.

On Cyberia, Ultimate Utopia, imagined communities,

the New World and the Global village.

In a sense, classical Arcadia was never a Utopia,and its character is as complex and mysterious as the human psyche.

On the Arcadian Theme by Elsie Russell

With the Internet and the World Wide Web, this creation is not an anthropomorphic beingthat moves through accretive portions of space in time. It is instead, an emergent electronic beast

of such proportions that we can only imagine its qualities, its dimensions.

Can it be ourselves?

Excerpted from Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite by John Brockman

When we go online, where are we?

The global village, the collective consciousness,

the rites of passage to who and what we are becoming.

Brave New World:Imagined communities and the collective consciousness.

Occupy Cyberia.

"In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation:

it is an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) areimagined.

the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity

of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which

in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation.

Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities.




Key Thinkers on Space and PlacePhil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, Gill Valentine


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Andersons proposal, therefore, is constrained by its narrowness. What does it matter that a nation is an

imagined community? The issue must be to show the work needed to produce and maintain that imagination,

how this impacts on peoples lives and how power to enforce the national community that is imagined shapes

behaviours across time and space.

Rooting for Rootless cosmopolitans.Mourning the loss of country, citizenship and identity.

Brave New World:

The global village, Imagined communities,

and the collective consciousness.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body Nature is; Without number. Worlds

Lie in this bosom like children.

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology technopoly as a societyin which technology is deified, meaning the culture seeks its authorisation in technology,

finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman

Rushkoff on Cyberia.1994One potential new content with many commingled points of origin is the utopia of "Cyberia," or new

transnational imagined communities arising, out there in "cyberspace"--the territory or digital information.

This apparently boundless universe of data breaks all the rules of physical reality. People can interact

regardless of time and location. They can fax "paper" over phone lines, conduct twenty-party videotelephone

conversations with participants in different countries, and even "touch" one another from thousands of milesaway through new technologies such as virtual reality. All this and more can happen in cyberspace (Rushkoff,

1994: 2). Commingling bits with bits regardless of time and location, then, is creating new kinds of bits that

claim the life energies of people allegedly heedless of time and location.

Cyberia, 1994. Douglas Rushkoff.

Politics once was the polis enscribing its jurisdiction across the atoms of lands, peoples,

and their settlements. The bottom line of informationalization may be this deterritorialization; and, by

extension, its disembodiment, disinheritance, and dismemberment of terrestrialized social emplacements.

Running Flat Out on the Road Ahead: Nationality, Sovereignty and Territoriality in theWorld of the Informational Superhighway, by Timothy W. Luke

Matters of national sovereignty and security are pertinent here. But the matter does not stop there for asPoster (1994, p. 78) observed 'nation states are at a loss when faced by a global communications network'.

Their 'institutions, laws and habits' were developed for another media age. The Internet, for instance, pays no

attention to national boundaries and it is not subject to government regulations. The Information Superhighway and Post-modernity, by J. Kenway


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"Virtual geography and Digital domains: nation, state and virtual territory.Doug Stuart

Recent claims that the Internet marks an end of Geography are problematised.

The argument is advanced that we need an approach which maps social, economic and

historical forces to provide a "virtual geography".

Utopia, the City and the Machine. Lewis Mumford.But the city was, from the beginning, related to the newly perceived cosmic order: the sun, the moon, the

planets, the lightning, the storm wind. In short, as Fustel de Coulanges and Bachofen pointed out a century

ago, the city was primarily a religious phenomenon: it was the home of a god, and even the city wall points to

this super-human origin;

Net in Arcadia:The Virtual Museum of Contemporary Classicism

Who are they? Who are the Arcadians who had their land

before the birth of Jove and whose race it is said is older than the moon?

It may indeed be the place where the clear and rational Olympians banished

those untamed and unnamable qualities, far from the ordered hierarchies needed by a dynasty

of tyrannical sky-gods. Arcadia is then the anarchist state inhabited by uncontrollable misfits where Pan

keeps vigil over his domain, scaring away rational beings with his unearthly howls and screeches.

The perfect society or the ideal state that exists (as yet) nowhere.A Citty upon a Hill.Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth and

the New Island of Utopia (1516).

Mircea Eliades perspective on the fundamental mythsthat created another culture and another country America.

Discovering America - Projecting A Myth.Mircea Eliade's Perspective On The Birth Of A New World

In his essay Paradise and Utopia: Mythical Geography and Eschatology published in The Quest.

History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969) Mircea Eliade deals with several

interpretations of the New World as they took shape and consolidated in the mediaeval time, putting forward

that the colonization of America began in a prophetic context, namely the revival of the Christian world

through a return to the Earthly Paradise or through the reiteration of the sacred history:
http://www.parnasse.com/net.in.arcadia.htmlhttp://www.parnasse.com/net.in.arcadia.htmlhttp://www.parnasse.com/net.in.arcadia.htmlhttp://www.parnasse.com/net.in.arcadia.html


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The colonization of the two Americas began under an eschatological sign: people believed that thetime had come to renew the Christian world, and the true renewal was the return to the Earthly Paradise or,

at the very least, the beginning again of sacred history, the reiteration of the prodigious events spoken of in

the Bible. (91)

"In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation:

it is an imagined political community - - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.

In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are

imagined. Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities, 1983.

On Virtual geography.Digital domains: nation, state and virtual territory.Doug Stuart


The argument is advanced that we need an approach which maps social, economic andhistorical forces to provide a "virtual geography".

Cyberia appears to stand for an embodiment of post-modern malaise. As a technology it disembodies and

fragments identity and leaves cultural meaning rootless and capable of any kind of assembly or bricolage into

new meanings. But does the Internet really do all of this and do it all the time? I use the Internet to check train

times but I would soon stop doing so if there was no relationship between the knowledge it gives me and

reality. (The alternative possibility that the trains are running at times set by the web page is too silly to bear

serious discussion.) In this sense the Internet is very like a hammer.

Even less post-modern writers suggest the Internet is eroding geography, and clearly this has implications

same place" and as a result,

Communities of communication can therefore be expected to form around common interests and not around

common physical location: Ideography replaces geography. (1998: 35-36)

However at one level the displacing of geography in the formation of community is surely a feature of

industrial societies. The Internet may mark an even greater displacement but it is not anything new. Neither

is it very clear what is meant by geography other than in a common-sense use to designate natural spaces.

Geography like history is important because it marks sites (as history marks periods) of social struggle. In

geography we can trace the exercise of social power, the operations of class and the other constraints that

govern peoples lives.

Cyberspaces could be understood as the latest manifestation of Nature's anthropogenic pluralization. Human

beings always have reshaped their biophysical environmental settings, or a terrestrial "first nature," through

purposive-rational action, as illustrated traditionally by the territorialized "second nature" of technological

artifacts fabricated as part and parcel of human industrial and agricultural activity in the vast arcologies of

post-Neolithic civilization (Lukcs, 1971). Informationalization goes one more iteration beyond these

technical artifices of second nature, creating the ultimate imagined community (Anderson, 1991) from the

hyperreal domains of the digitalized "third nature" generated within cybernetic telemetricalities.

The only limits to what might be accomplished in such an organization, while the myth of divine kingship

remained in working order, were those of the human imagination. Up to this time, the human community had

been widely dispersed in hamlets, villages, country towns: isolated, earthbound, illiterate, tied to ancestral


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ways. But the city was, from the beginning, related to the newly perceived cosmic order: the sun, the moon,

the planets, the lightning, the storm wind. In short, as Fustel de Coulanges and Bachofen pointed out a century

ago, the city was primarily a religious phenomenon: it was the home of a god, and even the city wall points to

this super-human origin;

On Virtual geography.Digital domains: nation, state and virtual territory.Doug Stuart


The argument is advanced that we need an approach which maps social, economic and

historical forces to provide a "virtual geography".

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology technopoly as a society

in which technology is deified, meaning the culture seeks its authorisation in technology,

finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman

The digerati tells us that a new world order, or "the digital nation,"is being born in cyberspace, and it will bring an end to politics as we know it.

A new kind of community, not a culture, is coming. The difference between a culture and a community is that

a culture is one-way you can absorb it by reading it, by watching it but you have to invest back in a

community. Absent this return investment, it's not really a community. People will be investing in sharing

content and sending messages to each other, in spending time together, and, in part, that's what builds these

communities.

The Pattern-Recognizer. Esther Dyson

Digerati by J. Brockman. Prologue. 1966McLuhan had pointed out that by inventing electric technology, we had externalized our central nervous

systems; that is, our minds. Cage went further to say that we now had to presume that "there's only one mind,

the one we all share." Cage pointed out that we had to go beyond private and personal mind-sets and

understand how radically things had changed. Mind had become socialized. "We can't change our minds

without changing the world," he said. Mind as a man-made extension became our environment, which he

characterized as "the collective consciousness," which we could tap into by creating "a global utilities

network."

"The Modern Utopia must not be static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state

but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages"A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells.

It is said to be a period in human history in which electronic informationcomes to dominate earlier ways of living that were based upon land, physical resources,

and heavy machinery. Esther Dyson. The Pattern-Recognizer

As Tuathail asserts,geography is about power. Although often assumed to be innocent,


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the geography of the world is not a product of nature but a product of histories of struggle between

competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy, and administer space" (1996: 11 1).

They maintain that Andersons geographical imagination . . . permits him to link themes of space, mobilityand the nation, butcomment that he fails to fully acknowledge or develop the implications of this within his

work (Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996: 118).

The New World and the American ideology of techno-utopianism. the American Dream is resurrected, phoenix-like, in the promised embodiment of a postindustrial,

information-driven, 'next generation' form. In doing this, they refurbish the powerful and recurrent American

ideology of techno-utopianism.

Evocations of Empire in A Transnational Corporate Age:Tracking the Sign of Saturn. Dion Dennis

The perfect society or the ideal state that exists (as yet) nowhere.A Citty upon a Hill.Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth andthe New Island of Utopia (1516).

... Perhaps, in western civilization, it was the circumnavigation of the world that first planted the seeds of a

global community, for a flat world has margins whereas the model of a globe suggests that there are no edges

and that we are all connected by its very geometry. Benjamin Symes. Marshall McLuhans Global Village.



If we consider the initial myths projected upon America such as the City upon a Hill, the City on aMountain, El Dorado, Arcadia and others underlining the idea of manifest destiny it becomes clear that theEnglish colonists thought of America as a realm chosen by Providence to be exploited and built upon

spiritually in order to serve as an example of the true Reformation for all Europe.

Even after its discovery, America was situated in the future as a re-creation of the mythical past, of

primordial times. America is the place of nostalgia, a utopian attempt to represent and embody theunrememberedpast.


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and that we are all connected by its very geometry. There is a sense then that we have always wanted theworld to be a global village and that McLuhan is working within this ideal of community himself. 'The

electronic age' has sealed 'the entire human family into a single global tribe (1962: p.8). Benjamin Symes. Marshall McLuhans Global Village.

Authority &Utopia: Utopianism in Political ThoughtNot surprisingly this has led to pessimism about the ability of the human race to achieve a better society, and

the dystopia, warning that things could get even worse, became the dominant utopian form.33 Can we make

correct choices? Are we condemned to failure? These are the questions raised by the dystopians. Some

dystopias are deeply pessimistic and can be seen as a continuation of the idea of original sin. Ejected from the

Garden of Eden, unable to return and unable to achieve a securalized version of it, the human race is

incapable of utopia. But many dystopias are self-consciously warnings.

Authority &Utopia: Utopianism in Political Thought, by Lyman Tower Sargent

the large egg-shaped glob of theworldout of which a man fromNorth Americais struggling to hatch. Thereis blood running out of the crack in the egg and the new man's hand has England firmly in its grasp. In the

foreground two figures are watching; one an adult the other a small child. pointing at the new man beingbirthed, which is seen[by whom?] asSouth Caucasus.

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man.A 1943 painting bySalvador Dal

Perhaps, in western civilization, it was the circumnavigation of the world that first planted

the seeds of a global community, for a flat world has margins whereas the model of a globe suggests that

there are no edges and that we are all connected by its very geometry. Benjamin Symes. Marshall McLuhans Global Village.

First and foremost, of course, is an optimistic embrace of technological determinism, one specifically focused

on the arrival of digital technologies of the late-twentieth century. A standard benchmark here is Alvin

Toffler's simplistic, openly deterministic wave theory of history. Having traversed the first wave of

agricultural revolution and a second wave of industrial revolution, humankind is now in the midst of third

wave upheavals produced by advanced computing telecommunications. It is said to be a period in human

history in which electronic information comes to dominate earlier ways of living that were based upon land,

physical resources, and heavy machinery. "As it emerges, it shapes new codes of behavior that move each

organism and institution-family, neighborhood, church group, company, government, nation -- inexorably

beyond standardization and centralization"

(Dyson et al., 1994).The Pattern-Recognizer. Esther Dyson



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Americahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Americahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Americahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_wordshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_wordshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_wordshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Caucasushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Caucasushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Caucasushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%ADhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%ADhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%ADhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%ADhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Caucasushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_wordshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Americahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World


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Hear it (also) for the Rootless Cosmopolitans Peter WatermanAnderson, Benedict. 1991 (1983)Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,

It certainly appeals to me in thinking about internationalism in the past and the new global solidarity inthe future. More than the nation as natural to most of its citizens as a football club to its supporters, thestock exchange to its members does the international have to be imagined.

. Whilst the most radical of the 19th century Left were often exiled or otherwise uprooted cosmopolitans,and had The International as their imagined community (Anderson 1983),[2]this was before the nation-state actually the state-defined nation - had really appealed to and sunk roots amongst the masses. I do not

believe that even the Marxists ever theorized internationalism. They might have preached it and even

practiced it - if in ever more specific, temporary, pragmatic or ambiguous ways. But what they endlessly

wrote about and energetically theorised was nationalism.[3]

[2]Imagined Community, addressed to nationalism, is not only one of the most brilliant but of the mostpopular of contemporary sociological concepts, certainly surviving the numerous critiques of the Benedict

Anderson book (e.g. Davidson 2007). The concept gets some 2,000,000 hits on Google. It certainly appeals to

me in thinking about internationalism in the past and the new global solidarity in the future. More than thenation as natural to most of its citizens as a football club to its supporters, the stock exchange to its

members does the international have to be imagined.

The result was Imagined Communities Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (1983, 1991) in

which Anderson proposed the theory of imagined communities. Major theoretical approaches, Andersonmaintained, had largely ignored nationalism, merely accepting it as the way things are: Nation, nationality,

nationalism all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone analyse. In contrast to the immense

influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously

meagre. Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities.





Andersons proposal, therefore, is constrained by its narrowness. What does it matter that a nation is animagined community? The issue must be to show the work needed to produce and maintain that imagination,

how this impacts on peoples lives and how power to enforce the national community that is imagined shapes

behaviours across time and space.
http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn2http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn2http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn2http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn3http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn3http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn3http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_ednref2http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_ednref2http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_ednref2http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn3http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/neo/#_edn2


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Andersons concept of nations being imagined communities has become standard within books reviewinggeographical thought (e.g. Massey and Jess, 1995; Crang, 1998; Cloke et al., 2001). The

contention that a nation is imagined does not mean that a nation is false, unreal or to be distinguished from

true (unimagined) communities. Rather Anderson is proposing that a nation is constructed from popularprocesses through which residents share nationality in common: It is imagined because the members of even

the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the

minds of each lives the image of their communion. (Anderson, 1991: 6; original emphasis)This understanding both shapes and is shaped by political and cultural institutions as people imagine theyshare general beliefs, attitudes and recognize a collective national populace as having

similar opinions and sentiments to their own. Secondly, The nation is imagined as limited because

even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries,

beyond which lie other nations. (Anderson, 1991: 7; original emphasis)

Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may

prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this

fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much as

to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings. (Anderson, 1991: 7; original emphasis) Nations hold such

power over imaginations, claims Anderson, that patriotic Benedict Anderson 17 calls to arms are understood

as the duty of all national residents. Further, in war, national citizens are equal and class boundaries are

eroded in the communal struggle for national survival and greatness.

Disparate occurrences were bound together as national experiences as people felt that everyone was reading

the same thing and had equal access to information: the convergence of capitalism and print technology on

the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in

its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. The potential stretch of these communities was

inherently limited, and, at the same time, bore none but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political

boundaries (which were, on the whole, the highwater marks of dynastic expansionisms).

(Anderson, 1991: 46)


All are but parts of one stupendous whole,Whose body Nature is;

Without number. WorldsLie in this bosom like children.

The Pattern-Recognizer. Esther DysonA new kind of community, not a culture, is coming. The difference between a culture and a community is that

a culture is one-way you can absorb it by reading it, by watching it but you have to invest back in a

community. Absent this return investment, it's not really a community. People will be investing in sharingcontent and sending messages to each other, in spending time together, and, in part, that's what builds these

communities.

The digerati tells us that a new world order, or "the digital nation," is being born in cyberspace, and it will

bring an end to politics as we know it. While much of this talk is just talk, the wired writings of these "info-

insurrectionists" are fascinating speculations about nationality, sovereignty and territoriality in the

contemporary world system.


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Anderson argues that the standardization of national calendars, clocks and language was embodied in books

and the publication of daily newspapers. This generated a sense of simultaneous national experiences for

people as they became aware of events occurring in their own nation and nations abroad. Newspapers madeit possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and relate themselves to others,

in profoundly new ways (Anderson, 1991: 36). Disparate occurrences were bound together as national

experiences as people felt that everyone was reading the same thing and had equal access to information: theconvergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the

possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern

nation. The potential stretch of these communities was inherently limited, and, at the same time, bore none

but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries (which were, on the whole, the highwater

marks of dynastic expansionisms). (Anderson, 1991: 46)

They maintain that Andersons geographical imagination . . . permits him to link themes of space, mobility

and the nation, but comment that he fails to fully acknowledge or develop the implications of this within hiswork (Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996: 118).



and that we are all connected by its very geometry.

If we consider the initial myths projected upon America such as the City upon a Hill, the City on a

Mountain, El Dorado, Arcadia and others underlining the idea of manifest destiny it becomes clear that theEnglish colonists thought of America as a realm chosen by Providence to be exploited and built upon



primordial times. America is the place of nostalgia, a utopian attempt to represent and embody theunrememberedpast.



and that we are all connected by its very geometry. There is a sense then that we have always wanted the

world to be a global village and that McLuhan is working within this ideal of community himself. 'The

electronic age' has sealed 'the entire human family into a single global tribe (1962: p.8). Benjamin Symes.Marshall McLuhans Global Village.

Authority &Utopia: Utopianism in Political ThoughtNot surprisingly this has led to pessimism about the ability of the human race to achieve a better society, and

the dystopia, warning that things could get even worse, became the dominant utopian form.33 Can we make

correct choices? Are we condemned to failure? These are the questions raised by the dystopians. Some

dystopias are deeply pessimistic and can be seen as a continuation of the idea of original sin. Ejected from the


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Page

Garden of Eden, unable to return and unable to achieve a securalized version of it, the human race is

incapable of utopia. But many dystopias are self-consciously warnings.

Authority &Utopia: Utopianism in Political Thought, by Lyman Tower Sargent

the large egg-shaped glob of theworldout of which a man fromNorth Americais struggling to hatch. Thereis blood running out of the crack in the egg and the new man's hand has England firmly in its grasp. In the

foreground two figures are watching; one an adult the other a small child. pointing at the new man beingbirthed, which is seen[by whom?] asSouth Caucasus.

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man.A 1943 painting bySalvador Dal

Digital domains: nation, state and virtual territory.Doug Stuart

We live mythically and integrally... In the electric age, when our central nervous system is

technologically extended to involve in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us,we necessarily participate ... in the consequences of our every action. (1964: p.4)

The history of science and technology is as old as mankind. Since human beings are naturally curious, they

have always tried to comprehend the natural and physical world around them. One of the earliest examples of

this is the observation of the stars, the planets and the moon.

Man has always used tools to change and manipulate the environment. In this respect gaining the mastery

of fire marked an early turning point in the evolution of mankind, because of its many different uses: It

provided heat, was used for the preparation of food and made it possible to shape raw materials.

The next milestone was the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, which took place during the

latter part of the Stone Age (around the year 8000 BC). The social changes which came with this Agricultural

Revolution were enormous. Social groups settled down and became larger, calling for more governmentalorganisation. Since farming provided a reliable supply of food, not everybody had to collect food any moreand some people could become specialised craftsmen. At about the same time, the wheel was invented, which

enabled the development of new means of transport and, what was probably more important, helped to

harvest energy (e.g. water wheels, windmills).

The next major change the Industrial Revolution did not take place until the middle of the 18th century,but several inventions and progress in science had prepared the way: the development of the modern

printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the 15th century, progress

in mathematics and chemistry and the discovery of atmospheric pressure, which led to the invention of the

steam engine. The relationship between science and technology came closer than ever before. The pace of

technological progress on the basis of systematic scientific research was increased by the foundation of new

colleges for engineering.

The changes in society were dramatic. People no longer worked on the land or at home, but in factories built

near the coal mines. Towns grew around the factories. Patterns of work changed as manufacturing processeswere broken down into smaller parts to make better use of the new production lines. The standard working

week was introduced. Steam engines gave working people the opportunity to travel by train to work from

dormitory towns. In countries like Britain the Industrial Revolution was completed by the end of the 19th

century. The final push into the modern era came with the discovery of electricity, the invention of the

automobile and the production of the first synthetics.

The most recent dramatic change began in the 1950s. It is sometimes referred to as the TechnologicalRevolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Americahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Americahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Americahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_wordshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_wordshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_wordshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Caucasushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Caucasushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Caucasushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%ADhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%ADhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%ADhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%ADhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Caucasushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_wordshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Americahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World


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More problematically if cultural meanings are more embodied on the Internet by means of images, music,

video and all the other cultural baggage of the modern World Wide Web, does this mean that a more

meaningful basis is created for the production of communities?

Even less post-modern writers suggest the Internet is eroding geography, and clearly this has implications

for the formation of communities. According to Mike Hol

same place" and as a result, Communities of communication can therefore be expected to form around

common interests and not around common physical location: Ideography replaces geography.(1998: 35-36)

However at one level the displacing of geography in the formation of community is surely a feature of

industrial societies. The Internet may mark an even greater displacement but it is not anything new. Neither

is it very clear what is meant by geography other than in a common-sense use to designate natural spaces.

Geography like history is important because it marks sites (as history marks periods) of social struggle. In

geography we can trace the exercise of social power, the operations of class and the other constraints that

govern peoples lives.

Cyberia appears to stand for an embodiment of post-modern malaise.As a technology it disembodies and fragments identity and leaves cultural meaning rootless

and capable of any kind of assembly or bricolage into new meanings.

Virtual geography and Digital domains: Nation, state and virtual territory.Doug Stuart

Running Flat Out on the Road Ahead by Timothy W. Luke the Net was created initially to operate after the erasure of nations,sovereigns, and territories by superpower thermonuclear exchanges, which were denominated


Cyberspace, then, can be seen as an extension, expansion and amelioration of our collective consciousness.

And the stuff of cyber-consciousness is information energy: information from us, to us, about us, about what

is within and without us, supremely what it is we are ourselves about. Which evokes a new perspective, and

demands a new terminology.

Cyber spacetime, A New Perspective On-line by Jeremy S. Gluck

The foundation of politics was the inscription of laws, not only on tables,

but in the formation of region, nation or city. And I believe this is what is now challenged, contradicted by

technology" (1983: 142). Politics once was the polis enscribing its jurisdiction across the atoms of lands,

peoples, and their settlements. The bottom line of informationalization may be this deterritorialization;

and, by extension, its disembodiment, disinheritance, and dismemberment of

terrestrialized social emplacements.

For Ohmae, "the nation-state is increasingly a nostalgic fiction" as well as a "remarkably inefficient engine of

wealth distribution" 1995: 25). Most importantly, as Gates argues, the digitalization of everyday life withinthese global flows "promises to make nations more alike and reduce the importance of national boundaries"

(Gates, 1995: 262).


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Nation-states will become museum pieces and as such digital neighborhoods function

as playgrounds for web-wise interconnected selves to assemble ideas and socialize all over the world.

Running Flat Out on the Road Ahead: Nationality, Sovereignty and Territoriality in the World of theInformational Superhighway, by Timothy W. Luke

It is precisely because of this primordial and unsuppressible impulseto know that humanity should be called not only sapiens, but also utopicus.

Homo Utopicus:On the Need for Utopia, by Cosimo Quartaand Daniele Procida

In a new imagined social space, we find the possibility of seeing the world in a different light,

where old paradigms and patterns can be broken and viewed in new ways. By offering spaces for theexploration of ideas, utopias offer spaces in which new paradigms can be developed, explored,

and inhabited. (Moylan & Baccolini, 2007:39).





The anthropology of online communitiesSamuel M.Wilson and Leighton C. Peterson

Rushkoff on Cyberia.1994One potential new content with many commingled points of origin is the utopia of "Cyberia," or new

transnational imagined communities arising, out there in "cyberspace"--the territory or digital information.

This apparently boundless universe of data breaks all the rules of physical reality. People can interact

regardless of time and location. They can fax "paper" over phone lines, conduct twenty-party videotelephone

conversations with participants in different countries, and even "touch" one another from thousands of miles

away through new technologies such as virtual reality. All this and more can happen in cyberspace (Rushkoff,

1994: 2). Commingling bits with bits regardless of time and location, then, is creating new kinds of bits that

claim the life energies of people allegedly heedless of time and location.

Cyberia, 1994. Douglas Rushkoff.


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electronic age' has sealed 'the entire human family into a single global tribe (1962: p.8).

But if we disentangle ourselves from the way that McLuhan would like to see the world, it seems likely that

the world was circumnavigated with a more imperial purpose in mind. Technology is still used today to help

us understand our environment and in doing so makes us more able to predict it and control it. McLuhan

writes: Today, electronics and automation make mandatory that everybody adjust to the vast global

environment as if it were his little home town (1968: p.11).Benjamin Symes. Marshall McLuhans Global Village.

Cyberspace problematizes a geography of space and place. What has been central to living beings, transpiring

through their biotic times at metabolic speed, is place. Now, Virilio suggests, "in some way, place is

challenged. Ancient societies were built by distributing territory. Whether on the family scale, the group scale,

the tribal scale or the national scale, memory was the earth; inheritance was the earth. The foundation of

politics was the inscription of laws, not only on tables, but in the formation of region, nation or city. And I

believe this is what is now challenged, contradicted by technology" (1983: 142). Politics once was the polis

enscribing its jurisdiction across the atoms of lands, peoples, and their settlements. The bottom line of

informationalization may be this deterritorialization; and, by extension, its disembodiment, disinheritance,

and dismemberment of terrestrialized social emplacements.


Cyberspace and the Territorial Imperative:Colonization, Identity, and the Evolution of Peace Cultures.The impact of cyberspace, its use and abuse, its alternately open and closed ports, its swirling imagistic digital

cities, its evocation of enduring myths of human strength and frailty, and its surging reconfiguration ofpersonal and collective selfthese are all important aspects of analyzing the present, rethinking the past, andreclaiming our romance with the future. Scott L. Bills

a natural adjunct of electric technologyThe aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness

is a natural adjunct of electric technology ...There is a deep faith to be found in this attitude

- a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being.

Scott L. Bills. The Territory of VirtualityThe internet was created on well-honed ground. It was a product of a specific historical epoch and the

immediate systemic demands for complex, centralized systems of command and control to enable global

surveillance, massive resource management, and the configuration and targeting of a growing cache of

nuclear weapons. The internets design was molded by technostrategic priorities, the structure ofprogramming code, government subsidization of digital computing, prescribed gender roles, and other

cultural dominants (Stone, 1995; Hafner and Lyon, 1996). Amidst the haunting imagery of nuclear

annihilation, the closed-world rationality of programmers and policymakers created scenarios that made

war itself as much an imaginary field as a practical reality (See also Waring, 1995; Engelhardt, 1995; and

Gray and Driscoll, 1992).


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Running Flat Out on the Road Ahead by Timothy W. LukeThe qualities of nationality, sovereignty, and territoriality are attenuated in the Internet's bit-worlds,

because the Net was created initially to operate after the erasure of nations, sovereigns, and territories by

superpower thermonuclear exchanges, which were denominated in the deadly codes of mutually assured

destruction.

Digerati by J. Brockman. Prologue. 1966McLuhan had pointed out that by inventing electric technology, we had externalized our central nervous

systems; that is, our minds. Cage went further to say that we now had to presume that "there's only one mind,

the one we all share." Cage pointed out that we had to go beyond private and personal mind-sets and

understand how radically things had changed. Mind had become socialized. "We can't change our minds

without changing the world," he said. Mind as a man-made extension became our environment, which he

characterized as "the collective consciousness," which we could tap into by creating "a global utilities

network."

"The Modern Utopia must not be static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state

but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages"A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells.

As we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of a nation-state

will give way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities. We will socialize in digital Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte

Nation-states will become museum pieces and as such digital neighborhoods functionas playgrounds for web-wise interconnected selves to assemble ideas and

socialize all over the world. Running Flat Out on the Road Ahead:

Nationality, Sovereignty and Territoriality in the World of the Informational Superhighway,by Timothy W. Luke

The Internet, for instance, pays no attention to national boundaries and it is not subject to government

regulations. New technologies have many other implications for patterns of employment and class and other

relations of inequality: Coming increasingly to replace or complement television and other established

technologies for the provision of instruction, information and communications, the international networks

host unique potential. They have interactive capabilities that render national boundaries meaningless, permit

immediate access to huge amounts of data and on a 24 hour a day basis, are fully usable from wherever a

telephone call can be made and they are now an indispensible component of international competition

(Behling & Records, 1995).

In this heady stew of technological and social change, issues of localism and cultural pluralism must, then, belooked at against not only economic, organisational and structural changes, but changes in the character of

education itself. This is happening over and against new concepts of space, distance and location.

The Information Superhighway and Post-modernity, by J. Kenway


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Utopicus" as a yearning to "know more" to be more. We have seen that as far as anthropologists are

concerned, the species homo has been characterised, since its origins, by its restlessness, by the search for

new possibilities

The question now is to understand the reasons for the constant presence of utopia throughout human history

or, which is the same thing, why humanity has always manifested an impelling, unsuppressible, need for

utopia. It is thanks to this defect," if it may be called that, this apparent behavioural "immaturity," thathumanity possesses that plasticity, versatility, creativity, freedom, which distinguishes it from the other

creatures. It is precisely because of this primordial and unsuppressible impulse to know that humanityshould be called not only sapiens, but also utopicus.Homo Utopicus:On the Need for Utopia, by Cosimo Quarta and Daniele Procida

On Utopia.Arcadia, The Golden Age, the Renaissance Era,

Utopia, the New World and the American Dream and no dystopia.

On the Golden Age. Ancient Greece.Dreaming of the New World. Arcadia, the first ever global village.

set in an idealizedArcadia, a region of Greece that was the abodeand center of worship of their tutelary deity, goat-footedPan, who dwelt among them.[3]

Wikipedia. On the Golden Age in Europe. Ancient Greece.

Representing Utopia Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World.The Golden Age in Greece having passed, Here we reach the source of utopia, somewhere between myth and

fable, as these uncertain places inspire (happiness had taken refuge somewhere on earth, trading its

temporal identity for a territorialized myth, (especially among historians) tales describing, in theseunverifiable elsewheres, societies heir to the original happiness, places to which

some voyager has supposedly strayed.

Wikipedia. On the Golden Age in Europe. Ancient Greece.The Golden Age in Europe: Greece during the Golden Age, before the invention of the arts and of private

property, primitive communism prevailed, and the earth produced food in such abundance Hesiodmaintains that during the Golden Age, before the invention of the arts and of private property, primitive

communism prevailed, and the earth produced food in such abundance that there was no need for

agriculture. EuropeanPastoralliterary and iconographic tradition often depicted nymphs and shepherds as

living a life of rustic innocence and simplicity, untainted by the corruptions of civilization a continuation of

the Golden Age set in an idealizedArcadia, a region of Greece that was the abode and center of worship oftheir tutelary deity, goat-footedPan, who dwelt among them.[3]

The Golden Age in Greece having passed, Here we reach the source of utopia, somewhere between myth and

fable, as these uncertain places inspire (happiness had taken refuge somewhere on earth, trading its temporal

identity for a territorialized myth. especially among historians) tales describing, in these unverifiable

elsewheres, societies heir to the original happiness, places to which some voyager has supposedly strayed . They argue that the Utopian tradition grows out of earlier traditions, most especially with the myth of the

Golden Age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_%28god%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_%28god%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_%28god%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age#cite_note-3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age#cite_note-3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age#cite_note-3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoralhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoralhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoralhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_%28god%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_%28god%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_%28god%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age#cite_note-3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age#cite_note-3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age#cite_note-3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age#cite_note-3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_%28god%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoralhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age#cite_note-3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_%28god%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29


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The Golden Age.A period of primordial peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity.

On better societies: the pastoral tradition (the Golden Age, Arcadia, Cockayne and,

in its Judeo-Christian variants, the Garden of Eden, Paradise, the Promised Land of Canaan)and the ideal city tradition (Platos Republic, the New Jerusalem).

before the invention of the arts and of private property,primitive communism prevailed, and the earth produced food in such abundance

that there was no need for agriculture.

The Arcadians. The birth of Jove.It is a fact well known that the Arcadians had their land before the birth of Jove.

They had their land before the birth of Jove and that their race is older than the moon. How come it is said

that the Arcadians had their land before the birth of Jove Who are they? Who are the Arcadians who had

their land before the birth of Jove and whose race it is said is older than the moon?

Net in Arcadia:The Virtual Museum of Contemporary Classicism

Who are they? Who are the Arcadians who had their land

before the birth of Jove and whose race it is said is older than the moon?

It may indeed be the place where the clear and rational Olympians banishedthose untamed and unnamable qualities, far from the ordered hierarchies needed by a dynasty

of tyrannical sky-gods. Arcadia is then the anarchist state inhabited by uncontrollable misfits where Pan

keeps vigil over his domain, scaring away rational beings with his unearthly howls and screeches.

On Arcadia. The Virtual Museum of Contemporary Classicism

On the Arcadian Theme by Elsie RussellThe term "Arcadian" has gone through many transformations through the ages as well. A native race of the

wild hills of the Peloponnesos in southern Greece, the Arcadians were "a tribe older than the moon" certainly

pre-dating the Dorian invasions, or "the birth of Jupiter" and the establishment of the Olympian Pantheon.

According to Curtis N. Runnels in the March 1995 issue of Scientific American they may have inhabited the

area as early as 50,000 years ago causing, through millennia of poor land management, the severe erosion

that created the wasteland of dry shrubs and rocks we visit today. The popular term "Arcadian," describes a

utopian garden paradise where serene pastoral folk drink, dance and lounge around in an endless summer. It

is here in this untroubled land that Nicolas Poussin's shepherds first encounter the solemn reality that all

things must pass.

It may indeed be the place where the clear and rational Olympians banished those untamed and unnamable

qualities, far from the ordered hierarchies needed by a dynasty of tyrannical sky-gods. Arcadia is then the
http://www.parnasse.com/net.in.arcadia.htmlhttp://www.parnasse.com/net.in.arcadia.htmlhttp://www.parnasse.com/net.in.arcadia.htmlhttp://www.parnasse.com/net.in.arcadia.html


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anarchist state inhabited by uncontrollable misfits where Pan keeps vigil over his domain, scaring away

rational beings with his unearthly howls and screeches.

Maybe Poussin's painting has more of a lesson than even he realized.

Death is not in Arcadia, because the wasteland of Arcadia, like the subconscious,

like the moon, like cyberspace, is the realm of the imagination,

where all things are possible.

In a sense, classical Arcadia was never a Utopia,and its character is as complex and mysterious as the human psyche.

On the Arcadian Theme by Elsie Russell

the global village is the new world,utopia a call to mourning

Brave New World:Imagined communities,

the global village and the collective consciousness.

When we go online, where do we go?

When we go online, where are we?

The global village, the collective consciousness,

but what are the rites of passage to who and what we are becoming?

Brave New World:

Imagined communities and the collective consciousness.

Occupy Cyberia.

On just societies, the rights of humans andthe relevance of nations and national identity in cyberia.

On Imagined communities, identity and nation-making.

Virtual geography and Digital domains: Nation, state and virtual territory.Doug StuartCyberia appears to stand for an embodiment of post-modern malaise.

As a technology it disembodies and fragments identity and leaves cultural meaning rootless

and capable of any kind of assembly or bricolage into new meanings.

When you use your Oyster card in the tube,

you're not thinking that you're creating a relationship between the work you're doing

and all the people who are working on the tube but that is exactly what's going on.

We don't see it because it is all mediated through technology.


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Our expectations of technology are borne out of Cold War spin.Christine Evans-Pughe


Golden Nowheres that defy Dystopia.On Cyberia, Ultimate Utopia, imagined communities,


"Like scriptural images of Eden, Heaven,

or the Millennium, so too classical images of Arcadia, the Golden Age, Atlantis,

and the Isles of the Blest could be transported to the New World."

Diana Gonalves (Re)Turn to Dystopia.

Utopia and Arcadia: An Approach to More's UtopiaWarren W. Wooden

And the often striking similarities between the form and function of

these two modes may be best explained by regarding pastoral and Utopiaas mutually sustaining, concomitant manifestations

of the same spirit of the age.

On Arcadia, Cyberia and the New World.



If we consider the initial myths projected upon America such as the City upon a Hill, the City on aMountain, El Dorado, Arcadia and others underlining the idea of manifest destiny it becomes clear that theEnglish colonists thought of America as a realm chosen by Providence to be exploited and built upon



primordial times. America is the place of nostalgia, a utopian attempt to represent and embody the

unrememberedpast.

Europe was presented as a fallen world, as Hell, by contrast with the Paradise of the New World. The

saying was Heaven or Europe meaning Heaven or Hell. The trials of the pioneers in the desert of Americahad as their principal goal the redemption of man from the carnal sins of the pagan Old World. (95)




. ... Perhaps, in western civilization, it was the circumnavigation of the world that first planted the seeds of a



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electronic age' has sealed 'the entire human family into a single global tribe (1962: p .8).

But if we disentangle ourselves from the way that McLuhan would like to see the world, it seems likely that

the world was circumnavigated with a more imperial purpose in mind. Technology is still used today to help

us understand our environment and in doing so makes us more able to predict it and control it. McLuhanwrites: Today, electronics and automation make mandatory that everybody adjust to the vast globalenvironment as if it were his little home town (1968: p.11).Benjamin Symes. Marshall McLuhans Global Village.

Europe was presented as a fallen world, as Hell, by contrast with the Paradise of the New World. The

saying was Heaven or Europe meaning Heaven or Hell. The trials of the pioneers in the desert of Americahad as their principal goal the redemption of man from the carnal sins of the pagan Old World. (95)


the geography of the world is not a product of nature but a product of histories of struggle betweencompeting authorities over the power to organize, occupy, and administer space" (1996: 11 1).

Thus, as a consequence of the impact of the voyages of discovery upon the sixteenth-century artistic

imagination, the mythic conceptualization of the happy Arcadians basking in the Age of Saturn acquired a

contemporary local habitat in the New World.

The sixteenth century Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano applied the name "Arcadia" to the entire North

American Atlantic coast north ofVirginia. In time, this mutated toAcadia. The Dictionary of Canadian

Biographysays: "Arcadia, the name Verrazzano gave to Maryland or Virginia 'on account of the beauty of the

trees', made its first cartographical appearance in the 1548 Gastaldo map and is the only name on that map to

survive in Canadian usage.

It was during the first high tide of excitement and enthusiasm concerning the exploration of the New World

that Utopia was written. Among the English, Cabot's voyages had aroused much interest in the New World,

including that of Henry VII.






http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/wiki/Giovanni_da_Verrazzanohttp://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/wiki/Virginiahttp://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/wiki/Acadiahttp://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/wiki/Acadiahttp://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/wiki/Acadiahttp://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/wiki/Acadiahttp://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/wiki/Virginiahttp://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com/wiki/Giovanni_da_Verrazzano


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Running Flat Out on the Road Ahead:Nationality, Sovereignty and Territoriality in theWorld of the Informational SuperhighwayTimothy W. Luke

In this silent world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a

thing of words alone. You can see what your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but not what either they

or their physical surroundings look like. Town meetings are continuous and discussions rage on everything

from sexual kinks to depreciation schedules. Whether by one telephonic tendril or millions, they are all

connected to one another. Collectively, they form what their inhabitants call the Net. It extends across that

immense region of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi writer

William Gibson named Cyberspace. - John Perry Barlow, "Crime and Puzzlement," 1990







The perfect society or the ideal state that exists (as yet) nowhere.A Citty upon a Hill.Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth and

the New Island of Utopia (1516).

The qualities of nationality, sovereignty, and territoriality are attenuated

in the Internet's bit-worlds, because the Net was created initially to operate after the erasure of nations,

sovereigns, and territories by superpower thermonuclear exchanges, which were

denominated in the deadly codes of mutually assured destruction.

Running Flat Out on the Road Ahead by Timothy W. Luke

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings

having a human experience. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Le Phnomne Humain (1955)

There was a man of thePharisees, namedNicodemus, a ruler of the Jews:

The same came toJesusby night, How can a man be born when he is old?can he enter the second time into his mother's womb,

and be born? How can these things be?
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd292.htm#008http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd292.htm#008http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd292.htm#008http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd272.htm#005http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd272.htm#005http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd272.htm#005http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd205.htm#006http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd205.htm#006http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd205.htm#006http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd205.htm#006http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd272.htm#005http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/ebd/ebd292.htm#008


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A second time into the womb.Ultimate Utopia. Cyberia is the new utopia.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body Nature is; Without number. Worlds

Lie in this bosom like children.



occupy cyberia.the global village is the new world,

utopia a call to mourningand cosmopolitan, the new indigenous.

When you use your Oyster card in the tube,

you're not thinking that you're creating a relationship between the work you're doing

and all the people who are working on the tube but that is exactly what's going on.

We don't see it because it is all mediated through technology. Our expectations of technology are borne out of Cold War spin.

Christine Evans-Pughe

The Information Superhighway and Post-modernity, by J. KenwayIndeed, new technologies of communication and the markets they support often bypass state boundaries

altogether as electrons pass through national borders at will. The state thus attempts to steer but is also to

some extent steered by the cultural and economic logic of these new media forms. These changes underminethe power of the nation-state to control its subjects and their form of life. Dion, (1995)

It is with this idealistic view that McLuhan has gained prominence again amidst the emergence of the

'Internet', a medium that seems to promote the idea of an integrated global community. One of the major

claims for the 'Internet' lies in the belief that it has the potential to break down centralized power, and help

form a community that lives on a more integrated basis, with more shared responsibility. This is the sense of

McLuhan's 'interdependence', as he writes: Electric technology... would seem to render individualism

obsolete and... corporate interdependence mandatory (1962: p.1).Benjamin Symes. Marshall McLuhans Global Village.

a natural adjunct of electric technologyThe aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness

is a natural adjunct of electric technology ...There is a deep faith to be found in this attitude

- a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being.

Marshal McLuhan. On the Global Village


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The word "cyberspace" (fromcyberneticsandspace) The metaphor used to describe the "sense of a social setting that exists purely within a space of

representation and communication . . . it exists entirely within a computer space, distributed across

increasingly complex and fluid networks." (Slater 2002, 355)

The term "Cyberspace" started to become a de facto synonym for theinternet, and later theWorld Wide Web,

during the 1990s, especially in academic circles[8]and activist communities. AuthorBruce Sterling, whopopularized this meaning,[9]creditsJohn Perry Barlowas the first to use it to refer to "the present-day nexus

of computer and telecommunications networks." Barlow describes it thus in his essay to announce the

formation of theElectronic Frontier Foundation(note the spatial metaphor) in June, 1990:[10]

In this silent world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a

thing of words alone. You can see what your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but not what either they

or their physical surroundings look like. Town meetings are continuous and discussions rage on everything

from sexual kinks to depreciation schedules. Whether by one telephonic tendril or millions, they are all

connected to one another. Collectively, they form what their inhabitants call the Net. It extends across that

immense region of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi writer

William Gibson named Cyberspace.

- John Perry Barlow, "Crime and Puzzlement," 1990

Scott L. Bills. The Territory of VirtualityThe internet was created on well-honed ground. It was a product of a specific historical epoch and the

immediate systemic demands for complex, centralized systems of command and control to enable global

surveillance, massive resource management, and the configuration and targeting of a growing cache of

nuclear weapons. The internets design was molded by technostrategic priorities, the structure ofprogramming code, government subsidization of digital computing, prescribed gender roles, and other

cultural dominants (Stone, 1995; Hafner and Lyon, 1996). Amidst the haunting imagery of nuclearannihilation, the closed-world rationality of programmers and policymakers created scenarios that made

war itself as much an imaginary field as a practical reality (See also Waring, 1995; Engelhardt, 1995; and

Gray and Driscoll, 1992).

The quest for utopia and renaissance.Ultimate Utopia. A second time into the womb.








Running Flat Out on the Road Ahead:Nationality, Sovereignty and Territoriality in theWorld of the Informational SuperhighwayTimothy W. Luke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberneticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberneticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberneticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Webhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Webhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Webhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-8http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-8http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-8http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterlinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterlinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterlinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-9http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-9http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-9http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlowhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlowhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlowhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlowhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-9http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterlinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace#cite_note-8http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Webhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics


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History and utopia either stand together or fall together, since the

occupy cyberia

Documents