Tag Archives: systems

Faces in the clouds

What does technology want?

Can we reasonably expect a protopia from the system of people, laws, and technology? Or should we expect darker things from Industrial Society and Its Future?

My favorite theory of consciousness is that it doesn’t exist – it is an illusion that a system creates to handle all the conflicting demands of subsystems. The internet doesn’t seem conscious yet – but it seems close. Perhaps we are putting our pareidoliac predilections on processes that have no analogue to our lives, seeing faces in clouds of networks and switches.

Doesn’t it seem that a system that spends so much time looking at itself will begin to have a working model of itself, that it will eventually build feedback mechanisms that reshape it in even more interesting ways?
Will it be a community or an entity or are both the same?