OpEd
December 28, 2006

What will they think of next?

STEVE BALLMER; NED SHERMAN; RAFAT ALI; KEVIN WERBACH; CHRIS ANDERSON; HANK BARRY; JOHN BROCKMAN

Napster in 1999. MySpace in 2004. YouTube in 2006. Experts from the tech community look ahead to the innovations that will change how we work, play and communicate in 2007...

All computing, all the time

JOHN BROCKMAN
John Brockman is publisher and editor of Edge (edge.org)

WE WILL SEE migration of social applications as user-generated content moves to the WiFi environment. YouTube, MySpace and multi-user games will be available on hand-held devices, wherever you go. People will carry their digital assets much like their bacteria. Israeli tech guru Yossi Vardi calls it "continuous computing."

The nanotechnology world foreseen by K. Eric Drexler arrives in the form of MEMS, or microelectronic mechanical systems. Very inexpensive moving parts will be mass-produced like a semiconductor. But unlike semiconductors, they move. Useful for anything that employs moving parts.

Synthetic Biology pioneer George Church of Harvard University expects $3,000 personal genomics kits in stores.

"Pop Atheism" might include popular atheist TV and movie characters, professional athletes, political figures, etc. Look for the first billion-dollar IPO for the Web service that gets atheists together for "rituals," dating and political and business networking.

Rod Brooks, director of MIT's computer lab, is looking at new Web services aimed at the baby boomer age group, who realize that, in terms of IT use, they've been passed by, missing out on IM, text-messaging, MySpace, etc.

But don't put much stock in predictions. Consider that YouTube/ /MySpace/ Napster didn't change the real world for most people very much. MySpace became TheirSpace and YouTube became TheirTube faster than you can say "2006."
...

December 18, 2006

"A brilliant book: exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling."

Danger – brilliant minds at work
By William Leith

What is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable Edited by John Brockman (Simon and Schuster, £12.99)

JOHN Brockman is a kind of entrepreneur of ideas. He runs edge.org, a website for boffins, and writes and edits clever books on subjects such as the future and God. Here, he has had what might be his whizziest idea yet. He simply asked the cleverest scientists in the world to tell him one thing: what is the most dangerous idea they can think of? And they did. And it's really good.

When you ask clever people about dangerous ideas, it turns out, they normally say one of two things. Some say that we, as a species, are becoming too clever for our own good - that our ideas are excellent, and that, pretty soon, life will get much worse as a result.

Others say quite the opposite - that the human race has no idea about anything, and that, pretty soon, we'll realise this fact, and that, as a result, life will be much worse. Of course I'm simplifying.

But not much.

Let's start with John Horgan, of the Stevens Institute of Technology. What, he asks quite reasonably, would happen if we managed to get to the bottom of the "neural code", and understood exactly how the brain works? "Will we be liberated or enslaved by this knowledge?" he asks. Quite possibly enslaved, because nobody would be able to believe in the soul any more.

And David Buss, the Darwinian psychologist famous for his research into human mating behaviour, wonders what might happen if we understood ourselves so well that we could grasp the concept "that evil has evolved".

That, in other words, lots of us are descended from tyrants such as Attila the Hun. And that, therefore, he has passed on some of his evil genes to us.

In the end, says Buss, we need to face up to this. "The danger," he says, "comes from people who refuse to recognise that there are dark sides to human nature."

The geneticist Craig Venter has similar worries - understanding the fact that we are all different, genetically speaking, challenges the cosy, politically-correct word we have got used to.
There's more of this - the fear that, in the end, good ideas might actually have bad consequences. What will happen, asks the psychologist Diane Halpern, when we know enough to be able to choose the sex of our children? Too many boys, she believes. She's done the research, and it doesn't look promising.

On the other hand, what if we don't know anything? The Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind wonders about the effect of the " landscape" idea on the future of physics. What if the universe is so big that, "rather than being a homogeneous, mono-colored blanket, it is a crazy-quilt patchwork of different environments"? In this case, we might realise that we only have knowledge of an infinitely small part of it. And then, dispirited, we might give up the ghost.

Maths in the digital age, writes the Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz, has entered a troublesome new world. These days, we are able prove theorems by crunching numbers in unearthly quantities. But we have no insight - we may know that something is true, but not why. Scary, no? And psychologist Geoffrey Miller gives us a good reason why we haven't had signals from other life-forms - because, if they ever did exist, they got so good at sating themselves with junk food and video games that they died out.

A brilliant book: exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling. But is anything else out there? Quite possibly. As the physicist W Daniel Hillis says: "I don't share my most dangerous ideas."

December/January 2007

"An unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is nothing short of an oracle — a book ro be dog-eared and debated."

WHAT WE BELIEVE BUT CANNOT PROVE
John Brockman, ed (Harper Perennial)

Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Freeman Dyson, Craig Venter, Leon Lederman, Ray Kurzweil, Sam Harris, Alison Gopnik, and dozens of others let us in on what their gut is telling them. An unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is nothing short of an oracle—a book ro be dog-eared and debated.

14 December 2006

"Intelligent Thought, edited by John Brockman, is a collection of essays from the likes of Jerry Coyne and Tim White who provide elegantly expressed scientific arguments to counter the claims of intelligent design."

Books and Arts
Nature 444, 821-822

2006 wrapped up
Mary Purton¹

It has been a strange year for science books. Some authors have presented new ideas about science — there has been a tussle over string theory, for example, and in Moral Minds Marc Hauser has suggested that morality is as innate as language (see Nature 443, 909–910; 2006).But perhaps the dominant theme running through many of the popular science books published this year has been, surprisingly, religion.

The continuing debate about the teaching of creationism in schools has no doubt fuelled this preoccupation. Many scientists, particularly those in the United States, have been moved to take a stand against proponents of creationism and intelligent design. Intelligent Thought, edited by John Brockman, is a collection of essays from the likes of Jerry Coyne and Tim White who provide elegantly expressed scientific arguments to counter the claims of intelligent design. This book should appeal to "those who already see evolutionary biology as a science", according to John Tyler Bonner (see Nature 442, 355–356; 2006). Michael Shermer's Why Darwin Matters is perhaps more accessible for the public, but neither book is likely to sway creationists from their belief.

Many of the scientists who made it to the top of the bestseller lists focused specifically on religion. Daniel Dennett's book Breaking the Spell provides essentially a natural history of religion but skirts around the cultural reasons why religion has developed and become such a dominant force in politics today, in the view of reviewer Michael Ruse (see Nature 439, 535; 2006).

......But Richard Dawkins isn't interested in reconciling science and religion. In The God Delusion, which has topped the bestseller lists in both the United States and Britain this autumn, Dawkins argues with the fervour of a preacher that religion has no place in the modern world, and that atheism is the 'true path' (see Nature 443, 914–915; 2006).

Dawkins' domination of the genre of popular science books was celebrated earlier in the year with the publication by Oxford University Press of a thirtieth-anniversary edition of his book The Selfish Gene, and Richard Dawkins: How A Scientist Changed the Way We Think, a collection of comments and testimonials edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley (see Nature 441, 151–152; 2006).

Physicists have also been questioning our place in the Universe. Cosmologist Alex Vilenkin's Many Worlds in One takes a look at the multiverse theory — the idea that many different universes exist and explanations for how we came to be in this one (see Nature 443, 145–146; 2006). Paul Davies' The Goldilocks Enigma gives the topic a more popular treatment (see Nature 444, 423–424; 2006). ...

After a spate of books on string theory in 2005, the hottest hope for a 'theory of everything' came in for criticism this year, with the appearance of Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics ... (see Nature 443, 482, 491 ... 2006).

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DIGITAL MAOISM
By STEVEN JOHNSON

Karl Marx famously predicted that industrial capitalism’s individualist ethos would engender its opposite: a new collective consciousness that would ultimately fuel the socialist revolution. But the old dialectician would probably have been shocked to see how much collectivism has flowered in the hypercapitalist Internet economy of late. First there was open-source software — large-scale digital engineering projects miraculously executed by groups of programmers contributing their intellectual labor for the sheer reward of participation. Then Google took on the seemingly insurmountable problem of organizing the Web’s information by tapping the collective wisdom embedded in the links between Web sites. Then Wikipedia applied the open-source model to encyclopedia production, and — against all odds — built a genuine challenger to Britannica in four short years.

But all the hype over the powers of the so-called hive mind was bound to provoke a reaction, and in May of this year, it arrived in the form of a thoughtful — though controversial — essay by the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier. “What we are witnessing today,” Lanier wrote on Edge.org, “is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments and major universities have all gotten the bug.” Lanier dubbed this newthink “digital Maoism.” Against this collectivist mythos, Lanier tried to carve out a crucial space for the insight and creativity of the individual mind.

Unlike most counterrevolutionary manifestoes, however, Lanier’s essay aimed not so much to topple the dominant regime as to limit its application. “There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual,” he wrote. “When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the result is often inferior to the answer that would come from a reasonably informed collective. . . . But when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.”

In the essay, Lanier grouped everything from his personal Wikipedia entry to “American Idol” under the umbrella of digital Maoism, and many of the responses to the article by assorted Internet luminaries observed that Lanier had elided important differences between these systems to make his point. The entirety of Wikipedia, for instance, is most certainly a collective undertaking, but many articles are written and edited by small numbers of individuals. Wikipedia may be not too far from the historical reality of Maoism itself: a system propagandized with the language of collectivism that was, in practice, actually run by a small power elite.

In any case, culture and technology are increasingly reliant on the hive mind — and whatever its faults, Lanier’s broadside helps us consider the consequences of this momentous development. A swarm of connected human minds is a fantastic resource for tracking down software bugs or discovering obscure gems on the Web. But if you want to come up with a good idea, or a sophisticated argument, or a work of art, you’re still better off going solo. ...

Seven areas of brain research that will shift the current behavioral orientation of teaching and learning
By Robert Sylwester

The renowned neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran suggested earlier this year on a website known as The Edge (www. edge.org) that mirror neurons may provide the same powerful unifying framework for our understanding of teaching and learning that the 1953 discovery of DNA did for our understanding of genetics. ...

November 22, 2006

Intervista — Gabriele Becari

JOHN BROCKMAN

COSTRUIAMO IL FUTURO CON IDEE FOLLI
I vecchi intellettuali sono diventati irrilevanti
L’unico sapere possibile è quello della ricerca

Unmodello di pensatore che in Europa non esiste...

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November 19, 2006 — London

The Galileo effect: dangerous ideas waiting to happen

A group of scientists has been given freedom to express heretical theories. Steve Farrar reports

Scientists and empirical thinkers have always generated dangerous ideas as they wrestle with evidence and theories that appear to contradict conventional wisdom and widely accepted social mores. Dawkins sees this as healthy for society. "Dangerous ideas are what has driven humanity onward, usually to the consternation of the majority in any particular age who thrive on familiarity and fear change," he says. "Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché." He adds, however, that it is patently not enough for an idea just to be dangerous. It must also be good.

It was, of course, a particularly good idea to bring this remarkable group of scientists and thinkers together. Few would have been capable of doing so. But not for nothing has Brockman been described by Dawkins as having "the most enviable address book in the English-speaking world". More than that, though, he has an insatiable hunger for ideas and intellectual debate. Back in the 1960s, when Brockman was working alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Hunter S Thompson as an avant-garde arts promoter, he was invited regularly to dine and debate with John Cage, the composer and philosopher, and a small group of fiercely bright young artists and scientists. The experience had a profound impact on him." Out of that I got an appreciation for almost the purity of ideas and the excitement of rubbing shoulders with people that could challenge you," he says.

When his friend, the late conceptual artist James Lee Byars, proposed getting together 100 of the world's greatest thinkers to debate with one another in a single room, Brockman shared his excitement at the prospect of an explosion of ideas. And although the project — the World Question Centre — never got off the ground, the concept lived on. Working with Heinz Pagels, the physicist, Brockman later founded the Reality Club so that top thinkers could spar with and inspire one another over dinner. In 1997 he took this informal conversation into cyberspace with the online magazine Edge. It is here that the intellectual elite that he has gathered now thrash out their often contrary views. And it is here that each year on January 1, Brockman posts the group's answers to a different, deceptively simple question. In 2005 it was: "What do you believe to be true, but cannot prove?" Last year it was: "What is your dangerous idea?"

The question was proposed by the psychologist Steven Pinker, a prominent member of the group. "I suggested to John Brockman that he devote his annual Edge question to dangerous ideas because I believe that they are likely to confront us at an increasing rate and that we are ill-equipped to deal with them," Pinker says. He notes that such ideas get loaded with ethical implications that in retrospect often seem ludicrous. The urge to suppress heretical views is, Pinker declares, a recurring human weakness.

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October 24 , 2006

Will Wright's Dangerous Idea
The game designer was one of some thirty paradigm-shifting thinkers and doers who took the stage at this year's Pop!Tech conference
by Jessie Scanlon

A Global Who's Who

Five hundred entrepreneurs, thinkers, designers, educators, and inventors attended this year's conference, which closed Saturday, and which focused on the theme of Dangerous Ideas. ...

While a glance at the Pop!Tech program suggests an eclectic, almost random assortment of interesting people—co-founder of the Global Business Network Stewart Brand and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman...the conference held together surprisingly well, in part because one particular "dangerous idea" kept coming up again and again. ... In the kick-off session, Brian Eno, the British experimental-music pioneer and theorist, presented an idea which shocked society when it was first introduced and which, although now widely accepted, continues to reverberate through culture and business: the theory of evolution.

... Pop!Tech isn't the only one to emphasize community and the power of the network, but it walks the walk more than some. Its focus is less on high-power networking—there's no equivalent of the exclusive "Billionaire's Dinner" that publisher John Brockman hosts for TED muckety-mucks every year—and more on the network. ...

December 8, 2006

Opinion

...More recently I found "Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement," fascinating brief essays by leading evolutionists and edited by John Brockman.

... Each side of the evolution versus intelligent design debate has tended to draw me similarly, yet there is a winner. I am persuaded that the evolutionists have far the better case. In an essay titled "Unintelligent Design," Scott Atran, in the last volume noted above, points out that "no scientific theory can ever be proved true, but states that "scientific theories are validated when their surprising predictions are confirmed ..." ... (Grael Gannon, of Bismarck, is a teacher at Shiloh Christian School.)

December 2006

Einstein and me

My Einstein, edited by John Brockman, the founder of the Edge forum (www.edge.org), brings together essays by 24 leading scientists and science writers in which they discuss how Einstein has influenced their professional and personal lives.... Like other Edge projects, Brockman has brought together an impressive selection of thinkers to produce an accessible and entertaining book.

November 19, 2006 — Glasgow



Perils of Wisdom

We talk about thinking out of the box but some ideas don't even get off the ground because of cultural taboos or political correctness. Here, five experts – including Richard Dawkins – propose the unthinkable …

Today's most shocking pro posals are those that provoke outrage: not among the religious or political establishments, but in the heart of every well-meaning, peace-loving, Make Poverty History-marching denizen of the world. Dangerous ideas, according to psychologist Steven Pinker, "are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, nor because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order" and "challenge the collective decency of an age".

Are suicide bombers driven by sane, moral motives? Do African-American men tend to have higher levels of testosterone than whites? Could it be that some sexual abuse victims suffer no lifelong damage? Have religions caused more human suffering than the Nazis? Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease? Pinker reels off a long list of suggestions that have caused "moral panics" during recent decades. Which of them makes your blood boil?

But hurt feelings are not a measure of the legitimacy of a scientific hypothesis, and Pinker's point is that in attempting to advance our understanding, progressive thinkers must be prepared to question sacred values and break the taboos of political correctness. Scientists, he adds, have always been heretics, and today, "the galloping advances in touchy areas like genetics, evolution and the environment sciences are bound to throw unsettling possibilities at us. Moreover, the rise of glo bal isation and the internet are allowing heretics to find one another and work around the barriers of traditional media and academic journals."

The website, www.edge.org, founded by writer John Brockman, allows leading thinkers to engage in uncensored debate, by inviting responses to one provocative question each year. In 2006, Steven Pinker was asked to come up with a query designed to get their intellectual juices flowing. Pinker dared the Edge community to propose "an idea that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true". The responses are collected in a new book published this week. Overleaf, we present a selection of the most explosive ideas of our age.

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November 19th, 2006

Counterculture and the Tech Revolution
By RU Sirius

...What Turner does in From Counterculture to Cyberculture is trace an arc that starts with the very mainstream American interest in cybernetics (particularly within the military) and shows how that implicit interest in self-regulating systems leads directly into the hippie Bible, the “Whole Earth Catalog” and eventually brings forth a digital culture that distributes computing power to (many of) the people, and which takes on a sort-of mystical significance as an informational “global brain.”

...I identify counterculturalism with the continual emergence of individuals and groups who transgress some of the taboos of a particular tribe or religion or era in a way that pushes back boundaries around thoughts and behaviors in ways that lead to greater creativity, greater enjoyment of life, freedom of thought, spiritual heterodoxy, sexual liberties, and so forth. In this context, one might ask if counterculture should necessarily be judged by whether it effectively opposes capitalism or capitalism’s excesses. Perhaps, but complex arguments can be made either way, or more to the point, NEITHER way, since any countercultural resistance is unlikely to follow a straight line – it is unlikely to reliably line up on one side or another.

These reflections may not be directly related to one of Turner’s concerns: that an elite group of white guys have decided how to change the world. On the other hand, one might also ask how much direct influence the last decade’s digerati still has. The “ruling class” in the digital era is an ever-shifting target; all those kids using Google, YouTube, the social networks, etc., don’t know John Brockman from John Barlow, but a good handful of them certainly know Ze Frank from Amanda Congdon. Meanwhile, the corporate digital powers seem to be pleased to have an ally in the new Democratic Speaker of the House. And that may be the coolest thing about the world that Stewart Brand and his cohorts have helped to inspire. In the 21st Century, the more things change, the more things change. ...

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November 12 , 2006

Things We Like

Book, nonfiction: "What We Believe but Cannot Prove," edited by John Brockman. The editor, who also runs the very influential Web site Edge (http://www.edge.org), asks some of the most brilliant people in the world one heck of a good question.

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November 10, 2006

Losing Our Religion
A gathering of scientists and atheists explores whether faith in science can ever substitute for belief in God.

By Jerry Adler

The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, it is said, had a good-luck horseshoe hanging in his office. "You don't believe in that nonsense, do you?" a visitor once asked, to which Bohr replied, "No, but they say it works whether you believe in it or not."

If one thing emerged from the "Beyond Belief" conference at the Salk Institute in LaJolla, Calif. it's that religion doesn't work the same way. Some 30 scientists—one of the greatest collections of religious skeptics ever assembled in one place since Voltaire dined alone—examined faith from the evolutionary, neurological and philosophical points of view, and they concluded that some things only work if you do believe in them. Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist and author of the best-selling book "The God Delusion," said he couldn't have a spiritual experience even when he tried. After another panelist, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, explained that temporal-lobe seizures of the brain create profound spiritual and out-of-body experiences, Dawkins disclosed that he had participated in an experiment that was supposed to mimic such seizures—and even then he didn't feel a thing.

Dawkins obviously feels this loss is a small price to pay for freedom from superstition. But even physicist Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and an outspoken atheist, acknowledged that science is a poor substitute for the role religion plays in most peoples' lives. It's hard, he said, to live in a world in which one's highest emotions can be understood in biochemical and evolutionary terms, rather than a gift from God. Instead of the big, comforting certainties promoted by religion, science can offer only "a lot of little truths" and the austere pleasures of intellectual honesty. Much as Weinberg would like to see civilization emerge from the tyranny of religion, when it happens, "I think we will miss it, like a crazy old aunt who tells lies and causes us all kinds of trouble, but was beautiful once and was with us a long time."

To which Dawkins retorted, "I won't miss her at all." Only in the most extreme circumstances would he deign to take account of the consolations offered by religion. He would not, for instance, try to talk a Christian on his deathbed out of a belief in Heaven. He didn't say what he would do if he were the one near death, but it's unlikely he would be calling for a priest. The atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett had been expected to attend, but two weeks earlier had been rushed to the hospital with a near-fatal aortic rupture. At the conference, people handed around copies of Dennett's essay entitled "Thank Goodness," posted on the science Web site Edge.org, in which he described how annoying it was to hear from friends that they had been praying for his recovery. "I have resisted the temptation," he wrote, "to respond, 'Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?'"

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October 31, 2006

John Walsh: Tales of the City
'The whiff of Sixties hippiedom and Nelson Mandela saintliness are, I'm sure, unconscious'

John Brockman, the straw-hatted literary agent who looks after the fortunes of the world's major science writers, has had a smart idea. He's contacted 100-odd scientists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists and laboratory-based thinkers and asked them, "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?" The results, published next month, are provocative, if not exactly scary. It seems the most alarming idea is the possibility that the laws of physics may turn out to be local phenomena - that they hold true only in certain circumstances (like, say, living on Earth, specifically in south London) but might be completely different in a potentially infinite number of different universes - and that the world is (dammit) fundamentally inexplicable to the human brain. This is called "the anthropic principle" and you'll hear it being aired at a pretentious London dinner party, any day now, by the kind of person who used to bang on about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle....

...My favourite Dangerous Idea, however, comes from Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge psychopatho-logist, who suggests we try a political system based on empathy. He points out that parliaments and congresses across the world base their systems on combat, from waging war to the dirty-tricks campaigns currently enfuming the US airwaves. Isn't it time, he asks, that we tried the principle of empathising? It would mean "keeping in mind the thoughts and feelings of other people" rather than riding roughshod over them. It would mean acquiring completely different politicians and election strategies. Instead of choosing party leaders and prime ministers because of their kick-ass, "effective" leadership traits, we'd choose them for their readiness to understand other people's feelings, to ask genuinely interested questions and respond "flexibly" to different points of view.

The whiff of Sixties hippiedom and Nelson Mandela saintliness are, I'm sure, unconscious. Mr Baron-Cohen is a serious psychologist and his theory deserves sober reflection by political scientists, provided they can stop corps-ing at the image of Prime Minister's Questions as a murmurous chamber of thoughtful, non-adversarial debaters, muttering, "How interesting - I never thought of it that way before," as their leader, no longer forced to behave like a stag at bay, tells the leader of the Opposition, "I wouldn't dream of arguing over this point because I know you're very sensitive to contradiction???" If media journalists joined in, Newsnight would become a Shavian dialogue with no conclusions, and Radio 4's Today a warm and fuzzy group hug in which John Humphrys and John Reid strove to find their common humanity in the maelstrom of ideas. I don't know about dangerous, but Mr Baron-Cohen's idea is certainly radical. If only I could stop thinking it's all a spoof masterminded by Simon's cousin Sacha???

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October 14,2006

Entangled in the Matrix Net
DOROTHY WOODEND

YouTube is a conspiracy theorist's dream, as the number of clips that claim the collapse of the World Trade Center was a setup attest to. This democratization continues on Google Video (soon to swallow YouTube whole and complete its domination), which offers a number of feature documentaries including one called The Net by German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck. The Net recently screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival, but you can watch it free on the Web as many times as you would like.

This documentary explores the curious relationship between the development of the Internet and Ted Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber).

Mr. Dammbeck interviews several influential people, including John Brockman and Stewart Brand (old hippies turned founding members of the digerati); Robert Taylor, who helped to initiate the Arapanet (the precursor to the Internet); and the 90-year-old father of cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, who offers up a few wry observations about the nature of reality itself.

Along the way, there are also traipses through Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, the Macy Conferences, Theodor Adorno's Authoritarian Personality, the connection between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the military, Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, Henry A. Murray and the LSD experiments at Harvard and crazy old Mr. Kaczynksi with his terror of mind control and supercomputers.

Are you lost yet? I've watched the film a few times, and I'm still not quite sure what it all means, or if it means anything at all. Like the Internet itself, the bewildering density of information requires careful sorting.

But one idea does jump out. John Brockman paraphrases a quote from Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist's Reflections on the Brain by J.Z. Young that states: "We create tools and then we mould ourselves through our use of them."

In the brave new world of Google Video, YouTube, MySpace, et al., what does this mean? If we create technology and then become what we have created, have we now succeeded in making Jackass World?...

...So, are you being controlled by an elite group of cyber-hippies and ex-CIA military types without even knowing it? Or, as Theodor Adorno believed, lulled into a state of passivity and pseudo-individualization by pop culture. Or are you part of what Marshall McLuhan heralded as the new dawn in which "we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned."

[Ed. Note: See the trailer]

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