311 - The Spirit of the Internet

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Lorenzo

This podcast features a recording of a talk that I gave in March of 2001 at The Inside Edge, a Southern California association of cultural creatives. The topic was some of the themes in my book, “The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness”. One of the more controversial aspects of this talk is my comparison of a deep Internet experience with a psychedelic experience… . Also included in this podcast is some discussion of the growing student strike in Quebec and the mounting student loan debt bubble here in the U.S.

Full Text of this talk (PDF)
The Inside Edge

OCCUPY TRACK 1
100,000+ Quebec Students Protest Debt

OCCUPY TRACK 2
Student debt: the new slavery? by RTAmerica

OCCUPY TRACK 3
Occupy Graduation: US student debt destroying the Future of our Youth - RTNews

10 Things You Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement
Huge Montreal Student Protest, March 22 2012 (view from bridge)

Howard Bloom’s KickStarter project to promote “The God Problem”

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:26 ►

space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And today you’re going to actually get a really big dose of Lorenzo, along with some sound bites and discussion about the

00:00:31 ►

growing student protests, particularly the ones that are currently underway in Canada.

00:00:36 ►

But before I introduce the talk that we’re about to hear, I first want to point you to a Kickstarter

00:00:41 ►

campaign that may be of interest to you. And it is by way of a little coincidence that I learned about it just a few hours ago.

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The person behind this campaign is the renaissance man Howard Bloom,

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who, among other things, launched the public relations firm that had a lot to do with the rise of musicians

00:00:59 ►

such as Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Aerosmith, Queen, Kiss, Simon and Garfunkel, Billy Joel, and over a hundred others.

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So his street cred in the music business is well established.

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However, it was a book that he wrote that first brought him to my attention.

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It’s titled The Global Brain, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century.

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And it is a book that I highly recommend.

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At the time it was published, my own book that we’re going to hear about in a few minutes,

00:01:31 ►

The Spirit of the Internet, Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness, well

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that book had been out for about a year already, and so I was really fascinated to watch Howard’s

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book climb to the top of the Amazon list, while my own book had only sold

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a few hundred copies by then. Obviously, Howard knows a lot more about selling books than I ever

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will, and so I became involved in his online community for several years until my nomadic

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ways took me away from the net for an extended period, and so I kind of lost touch with him.

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But just as I was about to begin working on today’s podcast,

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I received a message from him telling me about his next upcoming book,

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The God Problem,

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and asking if I would let you know about his Kickstarter campaign

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to raise funds for a campaign to publicize it.

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Once the book is available at the end of this coming August,

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I’ll have more to say about it,

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and hopefully we’ll get Howard into the salon here

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to talk about it a little.

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But for now, I’ll leave you with what Barbara Ehrenreich

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had to say about this book.

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If Howard Bloom is only 10% right,

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we’ll have to drastically revise our notions of the universe.

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There’s no mysticism in the God problem.

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No God, no religion, no incommunicatable spirit insights.

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Just the contagious joy of a great mind set loose on the biggest intellectual puzzles humans have ever

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faced. Whether you’re a scientist or a hyper-curious layperson, Bloom’s argument will rock your world.

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And since I’ve always valued Barbara Ehrenreit’s opinion, I can only say that it is with great anticipation that I await Howard’s new book,

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and I’ll post the link to his Kickstarter campaign in the program notes to today’s podcast so you can read more about his work on your own.

00:03:15 ►

Now, the little coincidence that prompted me to bring this up right now is the fact that the talk that I had just finished editing for inclusion in today’s podcast

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was a talk that I gave on March 14, 2001, about my own book, The Spirit of the Internet,

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which in many ways complements the things that Howard wrote about in The Global Brain.

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And so I thought it was an interesting little synchronicity.

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Anyway, to set the scene for this talk, it was given at a meeting of a group that calls itself the Inside Edge, which is a speaker’s forum that has been an important fixture in the intellectual life of Southern California since 1985.

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In fact, you’ve already heard one other Inside Edge talk here in the salon back in Podcast 145, and that talk was given by Timothy Leary.

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Podcast 145, and that talk was given by Timothy Leary.

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Interestingly, at least interestingly to me, I think that the talk that I gave and the one you’re about to hear right now actually discusses the issue of psychedelics more than

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did Dr. Leary at the time.

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To be honest, I was a little concerned about bringing up that subject to this particular

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audience, since it was what to me seemed like a somewhat conservative,

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straight-laced group of professionals and business people.

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However, it turned out to be an audience that bought more of my books that morning

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than any audience has before or since.

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And I should mention that the Inside Edge meetings are held so early in the morning

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that it was still dark as I made my way there. It still amazes me how they can get hundreds of people to turn out so early in the morning to listen to speakers who, in cases like me, were complete unknowns.

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in the Los Angeles area, you may want to look up their website and look into attending some of their sessions, as it’s probably one of the best places for networking in Southern

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California.

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So now let’s roll back the clock to March of 2001, which at the time we didn’t realize

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was still a period of relative innocence, a pre-9-11 time, a time when we were still

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amazed that over 400,000 people were already connected to the Internet.

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And a time when there were people even predicting that by today there would be close to 1 billion people connected.

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Little did we expect that by 2012 there would now be over 4 billion people already taking the Internet for granted.

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4 billion people already taking the internet for granted.

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So now let’s travel back in time a few years and hear what was on my mind back in March of 2001.

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In the computer business, in the Navy, as an author of a variety of books on technology,

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he’s been a business trainer, trainer on goal setting, a motivational speaker.

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If you look at his extensive resume,

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he’s had about three or four different careers,

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incarnations, if you will.

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And he’s really inspired by

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and committed to telling us about

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that the Internet has an important spiritual component.

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And that there are aspects of spirit involved in the Internet community.

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So he’s a really talented, multifaceted gentleman.

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And let’s give him a big Inside Edge welcome and bring him to the stage.

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gentlemen, and let’s give him a big InsideEdge welcome and bring him to the stage.

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Thank you all. I’d like to thank you for inviting me here today, and thank Sydney for introducing me to this organization. It’s an honor to speak to such a forward-thinking group that you don’t

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realize probably how forward-thinking you are compared to many other groups that we see around the country. And I have to admit that I absolutely

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love your name, the Inside Edge. Most of my life, my friends and particularly employers told me I

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was a little too far out on the edge for them. And I always said, well, at least it’s the Inside

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Edge. So it’s very reassuring to see how many other people have been there with me all this time.

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And by the way, if you don’t feel like taking notes this early in the morning, which I never do,

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I have a complete printed full text version of this presentation that is going to be available

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on our website. I’ve given it to Michael. I don’t know if you’ll be able to get on your website,

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but if you go to mymatrixmasters.com toward the end of the week, you’ll be able to get it on your website. But if you go to mine, matrixmasters.com, toward the end of the week,

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you’ll be able to get the whole full-text version of this.

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I’ve noticed that most of your speakers talk about interdirected self-awareness, self-building.

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And today I’m going to ask you to take some of that strength,

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that inner strength that you’ve been building,

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and look at projecting it and taking it out into the world a little bit,

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because I think that we’re at a point in our species history, if you will,

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where we really need some really strong people to go out into the world

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and take a spiritual approach to our business and our daily lives and in our technology.

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I’ll be speaking today about my book, The Spirit of the the Internet some of the subjects I touch on in there

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and so that you don’t panic

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I know we’ve already had some discussion at our table

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and we all agree that we all hate computers

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because they don’t do what they should do

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or we think they should do

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this isn’t going to be a highly technical talk

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I’m not going to go geek on you

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so you don’t have to worry about that

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what I’ll really be talking about is the intersection

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of spirituality and technology. And if you’ll forgive me, I’ve got some notes here. I wrote

00:08:50 ►

this presentation just for this morning, and so it’s not like a canned presentation I have

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memorized. So if you’ll forgive me, I’ll be looking at my notes a little bit. Actually,

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today I’m going to mention three books, four actually, but the three main books I’m going to mention are my own.

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And one by Gene Houston and a third book that I’ll talk about in just a minute.

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I think these three books help round out the picture of the future that we are in the midst of creating right now.

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And the first of those books is one that I’m sure many of you have, most of you have probably heard about,

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many of you have probably read.

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It’s called The Cultural Creatives by Sherry Ruth Anderson and her husband, Paul Ray.

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And in a nutshell, these people are sociologists who have been studying cultures,

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how cultures form, how they’re grown, how they’re nourished.

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And they discovered, as you would expect,

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our American culture has primarily two subcultures,

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the traditionals who want to go back to the good old days that probably never really were,

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and the moderns,

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who want to keep things just about the way they are

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because they’re starting to get their share.

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But what the Rays discovered

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is that a third group started evolving

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toward the end of the 60s,

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and they call this group the cultural creatives.

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They are not necessarily liberal, conservative, new age.

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They fit all specters of life, but they have a little different outlook on life.

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And that outlook is their underlying themes are ecological and planetary in perspective.

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They see the big picture a little bit more.

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And the real big news about this, the real big news is because I think many of us in this room, you’ll

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see in a minute the definition of a cultural creative. You’ll kind of think, well, that fits

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me. And every time I mention this to friends, they say, well, I’m one, but you know, there’s not many

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of us around. Here’s the big news, and this is a quote. Since the 1960s, 26% of the adults in the

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United States, 50 million adult Americans,

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have made a comprehensive shift in their worldview, values, and way of life, their culture in short.

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50 million Americans are starting to see the big picture.

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It’s a really tremendous shift that’s taking place.

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And the biggest, here’s the interesting thing.

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These people see the big

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picture. They’re synthesizers, healers. They understand the importance of an inner self-awareness.

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And yet the biggest weakness of this group, they think they’re all alone. They think that’s them

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and one or two of their friends. You know, maybe they belong to a group like this. And you think,

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well, we’re the only ones like this in this whole county. But it turns out there’s a big, big and fast-growing group of cultural creatives, the people that are

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creating the culture. And the reason I think the creation of culture is important is because

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culture is what ultimately defines us as who we are as a people. It’s what teaches our children

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what they should do, what they shouldn’t do, what they should long for, what they should question,

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what they should dream about. These are all cultural values.

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And we, of course, live in the Western culture.

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And quite frankly, here we are on the left coast of the…

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I used to live in Florida, so we called this the left coast.

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I hope you don’t mind that.

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Well, you look at the map, you know, and it’s on the left.

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But here we are on literally the edge of the North American continent,

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and it’s the edge of the West, the Western world.

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Where do we expand from, Western civilization?

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Not many of us are going to be able to go up into outer space

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or down to the bottom of the ocean.

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So where does the expansion of culture go to?

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Well, fortunately, there’s now another dimension,

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and it’s the dimension of cyberspace.

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Now, cyberspace is kind of a nebulous concept.

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In my book I spend a fair amount of time

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trying to nail down what cyberspace is

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because there’s a lot of different definitions

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and concepts of cyberspace.

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For this morning, I think the easiest one to lock onto

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is one that Bruce Sterling, a novelist, came up with

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and he said cyberspace is the place

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a telephone conversation takes place. It’s a space where a telephone conversation happens. It doesn’t

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happen in the receiver on your end. It doesn’t happen on the receiver on the other end. It doesn’t

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happen in the wires. It’s that mind space, the place where your minds are in a conversation.

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And the important part about this, a couple of important parts,

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one is that this is a mental space

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where communications are taking place

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and technology is involved.

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But keep in mind,

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cyberspace is not a physical place.

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There are no material elements in it,

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no bodies.

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So it’s a place where mind and technology coincide.

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In other words, another word for mind, obviously, could be spirit.

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So cyberspace, just by definition, is a place of spirit.

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Now, the original intent I had when I was writing my book, when I first began it,

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was to write a brief history of the original spirit of the people who built the Internet

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back in 69 and the 70s and the academic and defense industry

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crowd. They really had a little different spirit than many of the other technology developers were

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and the spirit of the first adapters. Essentially, I wanted to write a history of the net before the

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web came along in the 90s. But what happened is the book started taking on a life of its own.

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And before long, I realized that I had

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totally left that concept, and I had to come up with a subtitle. So the subtitle for my book is

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Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness. And this is kind of a heavy subtitle,

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but when you see what’s going on, you’ll see that we’re living in some pretty strange days,

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and the internet is a pretty strange piece of technology. But the themes today and in my book

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are essentially the spiritual essence of technology.

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And I think it’s important to keep in mind

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that at heart, at our core, we are spiritual beings.

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We happen to be in a material incarnation,

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but we’re spiritual beings in a material world.

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And the material world of necessity requires technology.

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I know there’s a lot of discussion, particularly in New Age circles,

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about getting rid of technology.

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But, you know, our clothes, our shoes are technology.

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Everything we do is involved in technology.

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Biological survivability depends upon technology.

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If we cut off our electricity and our water plants and sewer

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plants, we’re not going to survive these civilizations very long. So technology is

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important. It plays a crucial role. And technology, of course, also plays a crucial role in the

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formation of cultures. Just one technology that’s already been mentioned this morning

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is the technology called television. That certainly shapes a culture. If you want,

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I think a sure sign of someone who is a cultural creative is somebody that can surf 100 channels

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of cable TV and not find anything they want to watch. If you want to see what the dominant

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culture finds worth preserving, look at television. Look at, watch, and the commercials. Somebody said

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some of the commercials are more interesting than the shows. And at, watch, and the commercials. Somebody said some of the commercials are more interesting

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than the shows.

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And I agree that,

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particularly the funny ones,

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I like them.

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But if you watch

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the advertisements,

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you’ll see what the moderns

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wish to preserve.

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This is the culture

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they wish to preserve.

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All the things that we

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are trying to sell

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to each other.

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This is a cultural tool.

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And, of course,

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many of us,

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I think some people today

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even said,

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how did we get

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to this state where this is our culture? Is there any hope to get above this? Can our species rise

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to a higher level of consciousness than what we see on just normal television? Well, I believe not

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only is a change of consciousness required in the days immediately ahead, but I think there’s a

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measurable change of consciousness taking place on this

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planet that people are kind of ignoring. And I think there’s hard evidence and measurable evidence

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of this. If you’ll think back to the 1980s, when a lot of writers were talking about the young

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people just getting into the workforce, and they called them the me generation. Some of you probably

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were the me generation. And allegedly, the me generation was

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only about getting theirs, and they were greedy. Well, at the same time, futurists were writing

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about the end of the industrial age and the beginning of the information age. And you couple

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that with the fact that today, we really are truly into the information age. We’ve begun that.

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And so here’s an age where material resources

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that come out of the earth,

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you know, ore and gold and diamonds,

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aren’t as valuable

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as the primary resource of the age,

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information.

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And what are we doing

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with information on the internet?

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We’re giving it away

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to a large degree.

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Now, it’s not perfect.

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There’s only, what,

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about 400 million people so far

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on the planet that have connection.

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But if you can get access

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to an internet connection,

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there’s a lot of information that’s being given away. I’ve done a lot of consulting in corporations, and I’ve sat in meetings where CEOs would say, well, you want

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a $10,000 budget for this website. What’s it going to do to the bottom line? And people say,

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I don’t know, but we’ve got to have it. And sure enough, there it goes up there.

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There’s a wealth of valuable, you know, there’s a lot of bad information on the Internet,

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but there’s a lot of really good information.

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In fact, the number one thing people search for is health care information.

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And there’s a lot of valuable health care information.

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I experienced that myself when I’d had a medical crisis about five years ago.

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Without the Internet, I might have had a much more difficult time of it. So here we are in a new age,

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and the supposedly me generation,

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who are coming into control,

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are giving away the most natural,

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the biggest resource of the age.

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I think that’s a measurable change in consciousness.

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Now, I actually go a little bit farther

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and think that the Internet

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is actually the physical manifestation of the

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evolution of human consciousness. I think it’s something physical that we can see and measure

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and see that our consciousness as a species is starting to change. Now, the first chapter in my

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book is actually called A Place Called Cyberspace. And in it, I talk about new communities that are

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forming, virtual communities that are forming in cyberspace.

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They’re essentially colonies of consciousness.

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In fact, many of you probably don’t give a lot of thought to this,

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but there is a virtual community in cyberspace that formed around this very organization.

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I have many friends that come to your website and come back and look at programs that were aired in the past.

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You’re kind enough to put this information out on the web.

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Today, it’s being broadcast live around the web.

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Anywhere in the world with Internet connections,

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someone can tap into this, or they can tap in next week

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and bring down some of the speakers that you have brought here.

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So by supporting this organization,

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you maybe don’t think about it this way,

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but by supporting this organization, you maybe don’t think about it this way, but by supporting this organization, you are actually supporting the birth and growth

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of culture in cyberspace. This is how the culture in cyberspace is being formed.

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Another culture in cyberspace that you may not have had too much experience with,

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but is a very important one, and it’s not written in the press, the popular press at all,

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important one, and it’s not written in the press, the popular press at all that I can find.

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They’re called inhabited virtual worlds. And these are essentially worlds that people go into and build. It’s not virtual reality. I know virtual reality makes the news where you can put on the

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headgear and see all these, you know, experience things and have, you know, be in a movie yourself, whatever.

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But virtual reality is very expensive.

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Not many people can afford the equipment.

00:20:10 ►

The inhabited virtual worlds work on just your average home computer.

00:20:13 ►

It’s a two-dimensional flat screen that gives a 3D perspective,

00:20:16 ►

and you get in a little avatar, and you move your mouse, and it moves you through these worlds.

00:20:21 ►

Well, they set up cities where colonists, cyber colonists, come in and subdivide the city.

00:20:25 ►

And they build things.

00:20:27 ►

And social rules have to evolve.

00:20:28 ►

You have to have some rules.

00:20:30 ►

You can’t build here.

00:20:31 ►

You can’t put a fence.

00:20:32 ►

Just like we have

00:20:33 ►

in the flesh here.

00:20:35 ►

In cyberspace,

00:20:37 ►

colonies are evolving.

00:20:38 ►

So much so that archaeologists

00:20:39 ►

have gone back

00:20:40 ►

to some of these cyber cities

00:20:42 ►

and are digging down

00:20:43 ►

to see what was

00:20:44 ►

under these buildings.

00:20:45 ►

Sociologists are doing a lot of,

00:20:48 ►

there’s a lot of PhD candidates doing work on these

00:20:50 ►

because a cyber colony, a cyber civilization,

00:20:54 ►

evolves on Internet time.

00:20:55 ►

You may have heard the expression Internet time.

00:20:58 ►

It’s like a dog year, seven to one,

00:21:01 ►

that if you’re working in the Internet field,

00:21:03 ►

the seven times things happen in one year.

00:21:06 ►

There’s talk now it’s going to hamster years, 26 to 1,

00:21:09 ►

but let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

00:21:12 ►

But here’s the point I’m trying to make, and it’s very important.

00:21:16 ►

I’ll come back to this in my conclusion.

00:21:18 ►

Cyberspace is a very real place.

00:21:21 ►

It’s not imaginary.

00:21:22 ►

It’s a very real place.

00:21:24 ►

And it happens to be a place that

00:21:28 ►

cultural creatives really thrive. Now, I devote another chapter in my book to the relationship

00:21:34 ►

between the internet and the noosphere. How many of you have heard that term noosphere? I’m sure,

00:21:40 ►

yeah, I know some of you have, probably more than realize, that in the 1960s there was a very popular book by a man named Teilhard de Chardin.

00:21:50 ►

He wrote a book called The Phenomena of Man.

00:21:53 ►

And in that book, Chardin postulated that there’s a membrane of thought around this planet.

00:21:59 ►

We have the geosphere, the biosphere, the atmosphere, and around that, the noosphere.

00:22:06 ►

And the noosphere, he postulated, is actually sort of like our species consciousness,

00:22:11 ►

that all human consciousness winds up in the noosphere.

00:22:16 ►

It’s what he postulated, and he postulated as a living membrane of thought.

00:22:22 ►

He also predicted that at some point in time, and he thought perhaps this

00:22:25 ►

could be a hundred thousand years, a million years in the future, that the noosphere would reach some

00:22:31 ►

sort of omega point. And this was sort of like the moment of enlightenment where the whole species

00:22:36 ►

acquired some sort of a planetary perspective. And he likened it to like the noosphere turning

00:22:43 ►

into a sea of consciousness where every drop was intimately aware of its own existence and individuality as a drop.

00:22:51 ►

And yet at the same time was fully aware that it was part of a much larger body.

00:22:56 ►

Essentially a human species consciousness.

00:22:59 ►

Now he foresaw this in, well he wrote the book in 1938.

00:23:09 ►

this in, well, he wrote the book in 1938. And he saw this as our species, our all humans,

00:23:14 ►

essentially achieving sort of super psychic abilities and looking at things from a global perspective. Now, what does the internet have to do with the noosphere, you might ask? Well,

00:23:19 ►

I asked myself the same question for quite a while. And I thought I was the only one asking

00:23:24 ►

that question until I started doing some research,

00:23:26 ►

and I found hundreds of websites talking about it.

00:23:29 ►

I found thousands of people talking about it,

00:23:32 ►

and I thought, well, there goes that original idea.

00:23:35 ►

But I wrote a book about it anyhow.

00:23:38 ►

Nobody else was doing that.

00:23:40 ►

So as I kept doing my research,

00:23:43 ►

I came across what I think is probably the last writing Chardin did about the noosphere.

00:23:48 ►

And that was a paper he wrote in 1937.

00:23:51 ►

Even though the phenomenon of man came out in the late 50s, he wrote it in 38.

00:23:56 ►

And he was a Jesuit priest, and they wouldn’t let him print it because it didn’t follow into their teachings at the time.

00:24:02 ►

I don’t think it does yet.

00:24:07 ►

But I went to Notre Dame, so I didn’t fall into their teachings at the time. I don’t think it does yet. But I went to Notre Dame,

00:24:09 ►

so I didn’t fall into their teachings either.

00:24:11 ►

They don’t even send me literature anymore.

00:24:16 ►

But he wrote this article in 47 in a French journal.

00:24:17 ►

It was titled

00:24:18 ►

The Formation of the Neosphere.

00:24:20 ►

And in it, he said that the neosphere

00:24:24 ►

to really reach an omega point

00:24:26 ►

required a mechanical infrastructure and that’s what was lacking

00:24:29 ►

and he saw, of course this was in 1947

00:24:32 ►

there were only a handful of computers on the planet

00:24:34 ►

and he saw the radio and television as possibly

00:24:38 ►

the mechanical infrastructure but even though computers were so new

00:24:41 ►

he even mentioned, he says, and it could even be those

00:24:44 ►

insidious computers, which I found amazing, for a Jesuit paleontologist in 1947 to foresee what

00:24:52 ►

would happen with networked computers when a computer had never even been networked yet. So

00:24:55 ►

it was a very forward-looking projection. Now, there’s two speculations here. Remember,

00:25:02 ►

the subtitle of my book begins with the word speculation. So the first speculation is that there is a noosphere. The second speculation

00:25:09 ►

is that the internet is a mechanical infrastructure. And so you’ll have to kind of ride with me on

00:25:15 ►

those two speculations through the rest of this, because that’s what the book is built on.

00:25:19 ►

Now, I’m not saying the internet is the noosphere. The closest metaphor is obviously the most

00:25:24 ►

obvious one, too, is the brain is to the mind what the internet is to the neosphere. The closest metaphor is obviously the most obvious one too,

00:25:25 ►

is the brain is to the mind what the internet is to the neosphere. Our brain is the physical

00:25:31 ►

substrate that our mind rides on, and the same with the internet and the neosphere, possibly.

00:25:38 ►

If these speculations are correct, what will this mean for global consciousness? What does

00:25:42 ►

this mean for our species? I’ll come back to this in a minute.

00:25:46 ►

But first I’d like to mention another speculation that I don’t think is too speculative, at least in this crowd.

00:25:52 ►

And that is that the Earth herself is conscious.

00:25:55 ►

I believe that, I call it Gaia.

00:25:56 ►

You may call it Mother Nature.

00:25:58 ►

And some people think this consciousness is merely just a complex series of feedback loops that we don’t understand yet.

00:26:05 ►

Other people think it’s actually conscious. I believe it’s sort of a conscious being.

00:26:10 ►

I meant to ask to have a sheet here so I could draw this picture, and I forgot to do that.

00:26:15 ►

But if you’ll think of Gaian consciousness as a big oval, Gaian awareness, Gaian consciousness,

00:26:21 ►

I see it as the collective consciousness of all the mineral consciousness,

00:26:25 ►

the plant consciousness, the animal consciousness.

00:26:28 ►

And then part of that animal consciousness

00:26:30 ►

is the noosphere.

00:26:32 ►

And I see the noosphere is not totally incorporated

00:26:35 ►

into Gaian consciousness.

00:26:36 ►

Part of it’s kind of hanging out.

00:26:38 ►

And the part that’s incorporated

00:26:39 ►

are essentially what I see as the cultural creatives,

00:26:41 ►

the people that have an ecological

00:26:43 ►

and a planetary perspective,

00:26:49 ►

and they’re the ones that are trying to pull the rest of the noosphere into a more planetary Gaian awareness. Now, the defining characteristics of a cultural creative are exactly that, and I

00:26:56 ►

believe that our job, all of us have a job, to try to pull the rest of our species into more of a

00:27:03 ►

Gaian perspective, a more global and ecological perspective.

00:27:06 ►

Now, how do we do that?

00:27:08 ►

As I thought about that problem, I thought,

00:27:10 ►

what kind of tools can we use to speed up this process?

00:27:13 ►

Because things are going downhill from an ecological standpoint.

00:27:16 ►

So how are we going to get people, get the rest of our species,

00:27:20 ►

looking at things on a global scale?

00:27:23 ►

So I looked at a study of the archaic past. What did

00:27:26 ►

the civilizations do way back before industrialization disrupted the rhythms of the

00:27:32 ►

planet? And what I found was really intriguing. And this is, it may sound controversial, but it’s

00:27:38 ►

backed up by lots of research, lots of books, lots of PhD dissertations. Virtually every ancient culture that’s been studied,

00:27:47 ►

literally every ancient culture,

00:27:49 ►

formed around some sort of sacred plant,

00:27:52 ►

a visionary plant, a psychedelic plant.

00:27:55 ►

These plants didn’t come into these cultures

00:27:57 ►

after the cultures were formed.

00:27:59 ►

The cultures actually formed around some kind of visionary plant.

00:28:03 ►

Our prehistoric ancestors and some of our historic ancestors

00:28:07 ►

participated in these rituals with mushrooms or peyote or whatever,

00:28:11 ►

some of these visionary psychedelic substances.

00:28:14 ►

And this is what their cultures formed around.

00:28:17 ►

Now, Western culture has achieved this sense of superiority.

00:28:21 ►

You know, we put down on these natives and all these shamans in the jungle

00:28:25 ►

drinking ayahuasca.

00:28:26 ►

You know, what do they know?

00:28:27 ►

If you read a book by Jeremy Narby

00:28:29 ►

called The Cosmic Serpent,

00:28:31 ►

you’ll be surprised what they know,

00:28:32 ►

that he’s actually taken molecular biologists

00:28:35 ►

to the Amazon to quiz shamans

00:28:37 ►

about DNA and molecular biology.

00:28:40 ►

And these men and women

00:28:42 ►

who have never been to school

00:28:43 ►

can tell them more than they have learned in a lot of their laboratories.

00:28:46 ►

There’s something very important and interesting going on here.

00:28:49 ►

So here in the West, we say, well, that’s just some superstition.

00:28:54 ►

What we forget is that we are a product of Greek civilization.

00:28:58 ►

The ancient Greeks, you know, they formed their culture,

00:29:01 ►

really was formed around the Eleusinian mysteries, the Greek mysteries, and the inner circle, the ones that formed their culture, really was formed around the Lucian mysteries, the Greek mysteries,

00:29:05 ►

and the inner circle, the ones that formed their cultures, participated in these rites.

00:29:10 ►

And it’s very well established now that the center, the core of those mysterious rites

00:29:15 ►

was the participation by the initiates of drinking this brew that was ergot-infested rye.

00:29:23 ►

of drinking this brew that was ergot-infested rye.

00:29:26 ►

Now, if you want to know the modern name of that,

00:29:30 ►

the chemical synthesis of it is called LSD.

00:29:33 ►

And that’s what Western civilization was formed on.

00:29:36 ►

This is pretty well documented, but it’s not very well reported.

00:29:43 ►

It doesn’t make the front page every day, anyhow.

00:29:46 ►

We don’t want to talk about these things.

00:29:49 ►

But if you think about why did these plants evolve?

00:29:50 ►

They’re not plants that we eat.

00:29:53 ►

They don’t provide nourishment. They provide, they obviously evolved for some reason to some way to provide a communications channel between humans and the other, between humans and Gaia.

00:30:03 ►

They’re a communications technology.

00:30:05 ►

That’s primarily what they were and what they’re used for.

00:30:08 ►

Now, today, we’ve made their use, even in a spiritual practice, a criminal offense.

00:30:12 ►

If you grow one of these plants, we’ll put you in a cage for several years.

00:30:15 ►

So we have cut off a communications channel with the other.

00:30:19 ►

We’ve cut off a channel of communications with Gaia.

00:30:22 ►

And there comes now the third major speculation in my book.

00:30:25 ►

And I believe the Internet

00:30:27 ►

is a product of evolution

00:30:29 ►

and has actually evolved

00:30:30 ►

as a new form of sacred plant,

00:30:31 ►

a new form of sacred medium

00:30:33 ►

to help our species expand our mind

00:30:36 ►

and see more of a global view.

00:30:37 ►

And I think it serves and acts

00:30:39 ►

in the same method, same manner,

00:30:41 ►

as these sacred visionary plants.

00:30:43 ►

And that, again, is to bring us into more of a full state of Gaian awareness.

00:30:48 ►

Now, I think it’s important to note that most technologies become infused

00:30:52 ►

with the spirit of those that created it, too.

00:30:55 ►

And, again, this should come as no surprise because it’s very well documented.

00:30:59 ►

It’s been written about extensively.

00:31:01 ►

But the Internet was designed, built, and is largely operated by most

00:31:06 ►

of the key people consider themselves psychedelic. You might be surprised to see some of our great

00:31:11 ►

national scientific laboratories where people consider themselves highly psychedelic. And I

00:31:16 ►

believe that any technology, look at television, is infused with the spirit that created it,

00:31:20 ►

essentially commercialism. The internet was actually built and designed and created by people who were very psychedelic,

00:31:27 ►

and I think as such it has evolved

00:31:29 ►

as sort of a psychedelic communications technology.

00:31:33 ►

Now, the reason that I think this is so important,

00:31:37 ►

the state of mind of the creators of this technology,

00:31:40 ►

is almost universally you also will find

00:31:42 ►

that people that ingest these substances

00:31:44 ►

become very green.

00:31:46 ►

It brings out the deep ecology in people.

00:31:48 ►

It’s really amazing.

00:31:49 ►

If you go out to the web where you can see hundreds of thousands of reports

00:31:52 ►

of people that use these substances

00:31:54 ►

and read some of the great books that are out,

00:31:56 ►

you’ll find almost to a single person,

00:31:58 ►

it awakens in them a sense of a global planetary ecological perspective.

00:32:03 ►

So I really believe the Internet as a technology created by green people is a green technology.

00:32:10 ►

Where is this going to take us?

00:32:13 ►

Nicholas Negroponte, who many of you know is one of the founders of MIT’s Media Lab

00:32:18 ►

and is probably one of the world’s leading futurists, he predicts that before this decade

00:32:23 ►

is over, there will be over 1 billion people

00:32:26 ►

connected to the internet. Most of them will be connected through wireless transmissions.

00:32:30 ►

Over half of them will be speaking Chinese. That’s before this decade is over. And before long,

00:32:36 ►

before 25 years is up, the majority of people in this world, third world included, the majority,

00:32:43 ►

over half, well over half the people,

00:32:45 ►

will have daily instant connection to the internet, will always be connected. They’ll

00:32:50 ►

always be able to instantly email or chat with their friends. They’ll be able to be in constant

00:32:55 ►

touch with their families. They’re going to be able to access essentially the whole body of

00:32:59 ►

human information through the internet. This is going to actually change the way people see the world.

00:33:06 ►

There are already programmers

00:33:07 ►

working in China, India, Russia,

00:33:09 ►

working in their homes

00:33:10 ►

for American corporations.

00:33:11 ►

What’s that going to do

00:33:12 ►

in 10, 15 years?

00:33:14 ►

Right now it’s mainly programmers,

00:33:15 ►

but the telecommuting

00:33:16 ►

is going to become global.

00:33:18 ►

What’s it going to mean

00:33:19 ►

when everybody in the world

00:33:20 ►

knows at least one person

00:33:22 ►

who’s working for a foreign company?

00:33:24 ►

It’s going

00:33:25 ►

to give us a much more planetary perspective. Now, according to Chardin, part of the

00:33:32 ►

noosphere becoming, reaching the omega point is when humans achieve some sort of super psychic

00:33:38 ►

ability, able to tap into a lot of knowledge. I’m not saying the internet is the noosphere,

00:33:42 ►

remember, it’s just a tool.

00:33:51 ►

But I think it’s a tool that has the power to move our whole species consciousness to a much higher level, to a planetary level.

00:34:00 ►

And I don’t want to preach doom and gloom here, but I believe that unless we, as a human species, move to a higher level of consciousness,

00:34:04 ►

such as you have been working on most of your lives, and particularly in this group,

00:34:09 ►

unless we can move the rest of our neighbors up to that higher level of consciousness, such as you have been working on most of your lives, and particularly in this group, unless we can move the rest of our neighbors up to that higher level of consciousness,

00:34:12 ►

we don’t have a lot of time left to change what’s going on ecologically.

00:34:14 ►

Things are getting pretty dire.

00:34:21 ►

And the Internet comes along as an aid to out-of-the-box thinking, to essentially psychedelic thinking.

00:34:23 ►

You know, the word psychedelic doesn’t mean hallucinations.

00:34:30 ►

It means mind-expanding, mind-manifesting, and that’s what it’s all about. And the Internet, I believe,

00:34:35 ►

is a new sacred medium that can help move human consciousness, species consciousness, to a much higher level. Now, I’m not talking about substances here. This isn’t about ingesting

00:34:42 ►

substances or doing this, having this illegal, not illegal, whatever.

00:34:47 ►

What I’m talking about is expanding our consciousness,

00:34:50 ►

using tools to expand our consciousness to see the bigger picture.

00:34:54 ►

Now, there isn’t a lot of time today because I want to leave a little time for questions and answers,

00:34:58 ►

so I don’t have time to go into a lot of the other things that are in my book,

00:35:02 ►

but I think you’ll probably find them interesting because on your website, your guiding principle says,

00:35:07 ►

we welcome the challenge of change.

00:35:10 ►

And I don’t know if you realize what you signed up for when you did that,

00:35:13 ►

but you couldn’t have picked a better place in time and history to be alive than right now.

00:35:18 ►

And just the one change I’d like to point out that sometimes is being forgotten.

00:35:23 ►

The last half of the last century,

00:35:25 ►

we saw technology in particular go up at an exponential rate. But what’s happening now is

00:35:32 ►

the rate of change in technology has also become exponential. And when the rate of change becomes

00:35:38 ►

exponential, some strange things and some good things are going to happen. In the next 10 to 20 years, we’re going to see amazing things happen.

00:35:48 ►

You’ve got nanotechnology.

00:35:50 ►

We’re going to be regrowing organs.

00:35:51 ►

We’re going to be augmenting our hearing, our eyes with cyber connections of some kind.

00:35:57 ►

We’re actually going to be entering into an age where my granddaughter’s child,

00:36:02 ►

my granddaughter is only two, but her child should have a life expectancy of 200 years.

00:36:07 ►

Now, that’s coming.

00:36:09 ►

I mean, if you start reading Scientific American, some of these journals,

00:36:12 ►

we’re really just at the beginning of some just awesome changes that are going to happen.

00:36:17 ►

But while all that good stuff is happening, there’s a cloud out on the horizon.

00:36:22 ►

And that cloud 20 years ago was no bigger than a man’s hand.

00:36:26 ►

But now it threatens to fill the whole sky.

00:36:28 ►

And that cloud is our global ecological crisis.

00:36:32 ►

I don’t think it’s…

00:36:33 ►

We’re at the point where we can’t ignore this anymore.

00:36:37 ►

The United Nations just last month

00:36:40 ►

released a report that was put together by 700 scientists.

00:36:44 ►

This report made the front pages

00:36:46 ►

for not quite a whole day, but here’s one of the quotes from their conclusions. Projected climate

00:36:52 ►

changes during the 21st century have the potential to lead to future large-scale and possibly

00:36:58 ►

irreversible changes in Earth’s systems. Possibly irreversible changes, and we may be to that point already. This is very

00:37:06 ►

significant, very serious, never stays on the front pages. And until recently, I have to admit, it

00:37:12 ►

didn’t penetrate my everyday consciousness too much. But after reading that report, now I realize

00:37:17 ►

before this century is over, the people who are living in coastal Florida, which includes part of

00:37:22 ►

my family, will all have to move. Essentially, all of coastal Florida is going to be underwater by the end of this century,

00:37:28 ►

and that’s probably too late to change that now.

00:37:31 ►

We’re already at the point of no return.

00:37:32 ►

In California here, the focus is very sharp.

00:37:35 ►

We know we’ve got a severe water problem.

00:37:37 ►

We certainly have an energy problem.

00:37:39 ►

This time, these problems aren’t just going to go away.

00:37:42 ►

We can’t ignore them.

00:37:43 ►

We can’t think they’re going to just magically fix themselves.

00:37:47 ►

We’re going to have to face the situation that it’s time for us as a complete species around the planet

00:37:52 ►

to live a sustainable life.

00:37:54 ►

We’re certainly not doing that now.

00:37:56 ►

And there’s going to be some very hard choices ahead.

00:37:59 ►

We’ve got one that this country is facing here shortly,

00:38:02 ►

and that’s the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge up in Alaska,

00:38:06 ►

that we want to drill for oil there, or some people do, I don’t, that the best estimates I see,

00:38:11 ►

there’s six months worth of oil. If you’re supplying the whole United States, there’s only

00:38:14 ►

six months worth of oil. We’re going to take a chance at totally destroying all the wildlife up

00:38:20 ►

there for this little dribbly supply, and it’s going to take, what, two to five years to get the infrastructure built

00:38:26 ►

and the oil out and start bringing it in.

00:38:27 ►

We won’t do it over six months.

00:38:28 ►

We’ll take 20 years to do it.

00:38:30 ►

Why don’t we spend the next two to four years instead figuring out ways to reduce our demand

00:38:35 ►

by the amount that that new supply would bring us?

00:38:37 ►

I mean, it’s just real simple.

00:38:43 ►

It’s not in the pipeline today, and these are hard choices.

00:38:46 ►

It’s going to cost us money.

00:38:47 ►

We’re going to have to live more sustainably.

00:38:49 ►

But I think most of us realize at some point in time that we’re going to have to change the way we live.

00:38:57 ►

But we all thought that day was kind of far off.

00:38:59 ►

Maybe our grandchildren are going to have to face it, whatever.

00:39:03 ►

I think that the people alive on this planet today, all of us, our children, our grandchildren,

00:39:08 ►

everybody alive today, we are the ones.

00:39:11 ►

It’s not just our generation, but it’s the people alive today.

00:39:14 ►

We’re the ones that are going to make the choices that determine the biological survivability of this planet for the next millennium.

00:39:20 ►

It’s choices we make in the next 10 to 15 years.

00:39:23 ►

It’s now.

00:39:23 ►

We can’t keep putting this off.

00:39:26 ►

Now, this is really kind of pessimistic and doom and gloom,

00:39:29 ►

but I am very optimistic that we’re going to rise to these challenges and we can do it.

00:39:34 ►

And the reason I’m so optimistic is because we have this incredible tool we call the Internet,

00:39:39 ►

this communications tool, this sacred medium,

00:39:42 ►

this green technology that will help us expand

00:39:45 ►

our global awareness.

00:39:46 ►

I think the Internet is just of such unprecedented power.

00:39:49 ►

For example, environmental groups have always had the slogan, think globally, act locally.

00:39:55 ►

Now the local people can interact with each other and even see how their local actions

00:39:59 ►

can be built and help or prevent some good actions taking place.

00:40:06 ►

So I think the communications technology,

00:40:09 ►

the ability for people to get into the Internet and inhabit virtual worlds

00:40:14 ►

and experience a civilization in two years that would take 150 years to grow and evolve and develop

00:40:21 ►

and find out what worked, what didn’t work. They’re using the Internet and virtual reality for a lot of speeded-up evolutionary looks at things.

00:40:30 ►

And I think the same can happen with culture.

00:40:33 ►

And it’s become taking hold, not only in voting.

00:40:37 ►

People are starting to vote a little bit more green.

00:40:39 ►

But now you can go out to the Internet and find sites that will tell you,

00:40:43 ►

this company is a terrible polluter or if

00:40:45 ►

you buy this candy bar so much of the money is going to go uh to anti-environmental lobbying

00:40:50 ►

etc there’s the technology used for purposes like this has to be considered a spiritual technology

00:40:56 ►

i believe you know archimedes we all learned in grammar school that archimedes once said if i had

00:41:02 ►

a lever big enough i I could move the world.

00:41:07 ►

And the Internet, I believe, is that lever.

00:41:09 ►

I think the Internet is big enough to move the world.

00:41:12 ►

Now, it’s not very obvious to those that are just watching the rise and fall of the dot-com stocks

00:41:15 ►

or buy a book here or there or get in a chat room.

00:41:17 ►

It’s just not so obvious.

00:41:19 ►

But I really think that if you step back a little bit

00:41:23 ►

and see what’s happening.

00:41:24 ►

You know, I had a neighbor

00:41:26 ►

in Florida whose 12-year-old son every Sunday night would stay up till midnight to play chess

00:41:31 ►

with a 27-year-old engineer in China. And while they played chess, they would chat. These kind of

00:41:36 ►

things are happening by the millions around the globe right now. Things are changing. It’s a

00:41:41 ►

marvelous tool. The concluding chapter in my book, in fact, is titled

00:41:46 ►

The Internet as a Cathedral. And I use the metaphor of a cathedral

00:41:50 ►

because the great cathedrals were places where people would come to

00:41:55 ►

this sacred place and they would join in community, they would learn,

00:41:59 ►

they’d reflect on new things that they’ve learned there. And just like

00:42:03 ►

many great cathedrals, if you visit the great cathedrals of Europe, what’s the first thing you have to do? You have to get through

00:42:08 ►

all the vendors on the outside, you know, selling all the trinkets. Well, the internet’s no different.

00:42:13 ►

You know, you got to get through all that garbage up front. But once you get inside, you see the

00:42:18 ►

tranquility of this great sacred place. Those great cathedrals of old were built by technology.

00:42:24 ►

And this technology, this internet, if you don’t look at it as

00:42:28 ►

just wires or strings, but look at it as a great sacred place to come in

00:42:31 ►

and grow and learn and develop, I think you’ll approach it with a little different

00:42:35 ►

respect, even though it crashes all the time and you have to use a computer

00:42:39 ►

to do it. Now, these great

00:42:43 ►

cathedrals were created by technology.

00:42:47 ►

Technology is creating the internet. We’re at the dawn of a new age

00:42:51 ►

called the information age. And at the beginning

00:42:55 ►

of this age, I’m saying we’re also at the

00:42:59 ►

beginning of a new branch of the human species. I call this branch

00:43:03 ►

Homo Cyber.

00:43:13 ►

You know, when humans first came into history,

00:43:15 ►

started writing history and creating technology,

00:43:20 ►

we started a branch called Homo Faber, man the maker, man the tool maker.

00:43:25 ►

And with the advent of the net, we’re coming to get cybernetically enhanced people,

00:43:32 ►

and it’s HomoCyber. Now, contrary to some futurists, I don’t see HomoCyber as mind uploading into a computer. I don’t think consciousness going into a computer is going

00:43:36 ►

to be human consciousness. By definition, it can’t be. So I’ll give you a place to look for the

00:43:42 ►

beginning of HomoCyber. The first place to look is at a shopping mall or an airport.

00:43:47 ►

You see people everywhere with cell phones in their ears and wires coming out.

00:43:50 ►

Now they’re worried about the radiation, so they put a wire and put the radiation on the hip instead.

00:43:54 ►

Well, those are the beginning of homo-cyber.

00:43:58 ►

It’s the beginning of the evolution of a new form of our species.

00:44:01 ►

And the significance of this step is important because these people are going to have instant access

00:44:06 ►

to the body of all of humanity and to each other.

00:44:13 ►

There’s one other book I’d like you to think about reading at your list.

00:44:18 ►

It’s Jump Time by Jean Houston.

00:44:20 ►

I don’t know if you’ve read it.

00:44:21 ►

Many of you have heard about it.

00:44:23 ►

She brings together a lot of things I have in my book about what’s happening right now.

00:44:27 ►

The Mayans, ancient Mayans, predicted that at the winter solstice of 2012,

00:44:33 ►

there will be a jump in human species consciousness.

00:44:36 ►

The scientists like Dr. Werner Wenge have predicted a technological singularity

00:44:41 ►

that will take place sometime between 2030.

00:44:44 ►

Jean Houston has pulled all these together into a book called Jump Time,

00:44:48 ►

talking about the fact that we’re about to have a quantum jump.

00:44:52 ►

Things are going very fast right now.

00:44:54 ►

There’s going to be a quantum change take place.

00:44:56 ►

And so I highly recommend that book.

00:44:59 ►

I think the three books, Spirit of the Internet, Cultural Creatives, and Jump Time,

00:45:03 ►

taking in the context of the Internet, Cultural Creatives, and Jump Time, taking in the context of ecological

00:45:05 ►

crisis, will put this picture in perspective and give you a little more confidence that we’re in

00:45:12 ►

good times. These are not times that call for revolutionaries. These are days that call for

00:45:15 ►

evolutionaries. You know, that we’re not going to overthrow governments. We need to overthrow

00:45:19 ►

cultures. You know, it’s not evolution is the most lasting form of revolution. And so we need

00:45:25 ►

to become evolutionaries. I think there’s reason to have great faith that we’re going to rise to

00:45:30 ►

this challenge. But I do realize that it gets stressful thinking about these terrible problems

00:45:35 ►

we’re faced with. So what I’d like to leave you with is the thought that gets me through every

00:45:40 ►

day when I think about these big problems and what can I do to solve them. And it’s a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. He once said, whatever you do will be insignificant,

00:45:51 ►

but it is very important that you do it. And I think that’s true of all of us. I’ve kind of

00:45:57 ►

given up trying to change the political structure. I’ve been a political activist and got nowhere.

00:46:01 ►

I’m now thinking that we have to change our culture, and it begins at the home level, one-on-one level.

00:46:07 ►

I wish I had more time, but thank you so much for inviting me here.

00:46:19 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:46:22 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

00:46:26 ►

Well, as you no doubt have already thought to yourself, some of the predictions I mentioned

00:46:32 ►

in that talk were off the mark. For example, my rosy view of inhabited virtual worlds hasn’t

00:46:38 ►

materialized on the scale that I imagined, but in many ways the world of gaming has become even more populated than

00:46:45 ►

other forms of virtual worlds.

00:46:48 ►

However, I think that by and large, the spirit of the internet still stands up quite well

00:46:52 ►

today, and if you want to read it online, it’s available for free on my Matrix Masters

00:46:57 ►

website, and I’ll put a link to it in the program notes for today’s podcast, which,

00:47:02 ►

as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

00:47:06 ►

And to those three people who bought a Kindle version of it on Amazon so far this year, I sincerely thank you.

00:47:13 ►

Your support is very much appreciated, and you know who you are, so thanks again.

00:47:19 ►

You know, back when I was still working in the belly of the corporate beast and doing what I could back then to spread the word that the Internet was a revolutionary technology,

00:47:29 ►

one of the things that was mentioned in almost every conversation that I had with some of the folks who were instrumental in its evolution

00:47:36 ►

was that we were striving for the day when the net would become so pervasive and transparent

00:47:41 ►

that people wouldn’t even think about connecting to it any more than they thought about the fact that they were connecting to the telephone network when

00:47:48 ►

they called someone.

00:47:49 ►

And it seems to me that we have now reached that moment in time when the technology of

00:47:54 ►

the internet is both taken for granted and looked upon as something close to a basic

00:47:59 ►

human right.

00:48:01 ►

Without this technology, I think that we would probably still be years away from

00:48:06 ►

an Arab Spring and a global shift in consciousness that broadly can be called the Occupy Movement.

00:48:12 ►

And while I realize that attaching the word Occupy to every anti-establishment activity

00:48:17 ►

that’s going on right now may cause some negative reactions in conservative minds,

00:48:23 ►

it’s still a banner that I intend to use in order to help us all see that

00:48:27 ►

no longer are these demonstrations of all kinds just isolated incidents.

00:48:31 ►

Today it’s much easier to see the interconnectedness of the protests

00:48:35 ►

against all kinds of injustice, and that we humans truly are interconnected

00:48:40 ►

in more ways than we can imagine.

00:48:43 ►

And the ongoing action that I want to feature

00:48:45 ►

today is a form of an Occupy protest that has been going on for over 100 days and is actually

00:48:51 ►

now really gaining momentum. I’m talking about the student strike in Quebec, Canada, that looks like

00:48:58 ►

it’s already spilling over into other countries, including the U.S. You know, one of my favorite

00:49:03 ►

quotes coming out of that movement up there is,

00:49:06 ►

we didn’t know it was impossible, so we did it.

00:49:10 ►

Now, in case you haven’t been following the news about this movement,

00:49:13 ►

I’d like to read a few lines that Andrew Gavin Marshall wrote in the Maple Spring.

00:49:19 ►

It is titled, Ten Things You Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement.

00:49:24 ►

The student strikes in Quebec, which began in February and have lasted for three months,

00:49:29 ►

involving roughly 175,000 students in the mostly French-speaking Canadian province,

00:49:36 ►

have been subjected to massive provincial and national media propaganda,

00:49:40 ►

a campaign to demonize and dismiss the students and their struggle.

00:49:44 ►

The following is a list of ten points that everyone should know about the student movement in Quebec

00:49:49 ►

to help place their struggle in its proper global context.

00:49:53 ►

The issue is debt, not tuition.

00:49:57 ►

Striking students in Quebec are setting an example for youth across the continent.

00:50:03 ►

The student strike was organized through democratic means and with democratic aims.

00:50:10 ►

This is not an exclusively Quebecese problem.

00:50:14 ►

Government officials and the media have been openly calling for violent and fascist tactics to be used against the students.

00:50:23 ►

Excessive state violence has been used against the students.

00:50:28 ►

The government supports organized crime and opposes organized students.

00:50:34 ►

Canada’s elites punish the people and oppose the students.

00:50:39 ►

The student strike is being subjected to a massive and highly successful propaganda campaign

00:50:45 ►

to discredit, dismiss, and demonize the students.

00:50:50 ►

The student movement is part of a much larger emerging global movement

00:50:55 ►

of resistance against austerity, neoliberalism, and corrupt power.

00:51:01 ►

Now, as you know if you’ve been following the news of this movement,

00:51:05 ►

there have been mass demonstrations that brought out hundreds of thousands of people, and over 2,500 people have

00:51:11 ►

been arrested so far in conjunction with this student uprising. Obviously, the ruling elite of

00:51:17 ►

Canada are copying the militaristic police tactics that are also being used against students here in

00:51:23 ►

the United States. In Montreal now, it is unlawful to cover your face in public, and they are also trying to

00:51:29 ►

eliminate the people’s right to peaceably assemble.

00:51:33 ►

As one commentator said, we are quickly moving towards a society where there will be two

00:51:38 ►

classes of people, those with criminal records and those without.

00:51:42 ►

And in a recent article on Alternet.org, the author said,

00:51:46 ►

Last night, as we marched in Montreal,

00:51:49 ►

it was with the knowledge that hundreds of our Occupy Wall Street comrades in New York

00:51:54 ►

were marching in solidarity for the third time.

00:51:57 ►

Occupy Wall Street itself grew out of solidarity with the Tunisian and Egyptian

00:52:02 ►

and Spanish and Greek uprisings,

00:52:04 ►

after people began asking themselves, how do we do that here?

00:52:08 ►

Now, our generation of students here in the United States has yet to mobilize on such a mass scale,

00:52:14 ►

but after watching what’s happening up there in Quebec, perhaps that will change.

00:52:20 ►

And, in fact, there are also things beginning to heat up here in the States around the student debt bubble, or what is better thought of as perpetual indebted servitude.

00:52:30 ►

And now I’d like to play a few sound bites that I’ve collected to better explain this issue.

00:52:44 ►

Follow that with two bits from RT News about student debt being the new slavery and how it is destroying the future of many of our best and brightest young people here in the states.

00:52:51 ►

It is one of the biggest student protests this province has seen in years.

00:52:56 ►

Thousands of university and Sajab students took over parts of the downtown core.

00:53:01 ►

It’s a response to proposed tuition hikes that would see fees rise 70% over the next five

00:53:06 ►

years. Paul Karwatsky has more. Student activists started recruiting with the rising sun.

00:53:15 ►

There’s such a large action happening today in spite of the rain.

00:53:19 ►

Outside, they were already chanting. Here at Dawson, the protest began at 6 a.m.,

00:53:24 ►

the call to stop proposed hikes to tuition fees in Quebec.

00:53:29 ►

The people who are in power now and making these laws

00:53:31 ►

benefited from this cheap access to education,

00:53:34 ►

and there’s no reason why after them benefiting from it,

00:53:37 ►

they suddenly want to take it away from us.

00:53:39 ►

Classes were disrupted at institutions across Montreal for the one-day strike.

00:53:44 ►

By mid-afternoon, a sea of demonstrators gathered at Barrie Square,

00:53:48 ►

a large crowd with a loud message.

00:53:53 ►

I think it’s the massive protest that we’ve seen in the last ten years,

00:53:57 ►

so we’re very proud of that.

00:53:59 ►

He’s seen it!

00:54:00 ►

Amid the throng students who know just how inaccessible education can be.

00:54:04 ►

I’m from the U.S., and the school I was going to go to was $56,000 a year. Amid the throng students who know just how inaccessible education can be.

00:54:09 ►

I’m from the U.S. and the school I was going to go to was $56,000 a year.

00:54:14 ►

And Sejep students concerned about how they’ll pay for their future.

00:54:18 ►

Trying to pay for your apartment, trying to pay for food, trying to pay for tuition.

00:54:20 ►

It’s too much and some students can’t do it. These protesters consider Jean Charest’s proposed hikes a declaration of war,

00:54:24 ►

These protesters consider Jean Charest’s proposed hikes a declaration of war,

00:54:29 ►

an increase of about $325 a year over the next five years to bring Quebec tuition on par with the national average.

00:54:34 ►

Right now, Quebecers pay about $2,000 a year to attend university,

00:54:38 ►

the cheapest tuition in Canada.

00:54:42 ►

Kilometers away from the noise, the education minister stood firm,

00:54:46 ►

saying the tuition hikes were just and that students have to pay their fair share.

00:54:53 ►

But for tens of thousands of others here today, the march and the message was unquestionably the

00:54:58 ►

priority. Paul Kowalski, CTV News. economic tier, things just got substantially tougher. Starting July 1st, federal Pell Grants

00:55:25 ►

are set to be cut for thousands of students. Here are the students that will be affected by the cuts.

00:55:30 ►

65,000 new college students without diplomas or GEDs. 63,000 students who have been in school

00:55:37 ►

more than new maximum of six years under the Pell Grant. 300,000 students will have their

00:55:42 ►

grants reduced or eliminated because of more stringent income requirements.

00:55:47 ►

So what is going to happen when the student debt bubble bursts? Or can this crisis be averted?

00:55:52 ►

For more on that, I’m joined by Sarah Jaffe, Associate Editor at Alternet.org.

00:55:57 ►

Sarah, what do you think about the recent decision to cut these Pell Grants?

00:56:02 ►

Well, it’s class war, Abby.

00:56:05 ►

I mean, how else do you phrase it?

00:56:07 ►

I mean, I was out in a march last night with a bunch of student activists here, and their

00:56:10 ►

new chant, their new favorite chant is, one, two, three, four, tuition fees are class war.

00:56:15 ►

The Pell Grants go to the poorest students.

00:56:18 ►

They go to the ones who don’t qualify for merit aid.

00:56:22 ►

In this case, they’re cutting them, as you said, to students who have

00:56:25 ►

been in school for over six years, which is usually working people who are going back to school or who

00:56:29 ►

can’t afford to go to school full time. So they’re taking it away for, once again, the hardest working

00:56:34 ►

people who are trying desperately to live the quote unquote American dream that says if you go

00:56:39 ►

to college and get a degree, you’ll get a better job and you’ll have a better future. Sarah, why do

00:56:43 ►

you think these austerity measures are always targeted toward the lowest economic,

00:56:48 ►

I mean, down, it’s like the people who need it the most. I mean, I know you’re saying it’s

00:56:51 ►

class war, but it just seems like it’s just over and over again, these talks of eliminating the

00:56:57 ►

debt, and it’s always just focused right on the people who need it the most.

00:57:03 ►

Those are the people who can’t afford lobbyists.

00:57:06 ►

I mean, it’s pretty simple, right?

00:57:09 ►

You kick people when they’re down, they have a harder time fighting back.

00:57:13 ►

What do you think about this interest rate debate, the freezing of the interest rates?

00:57:18 ►

Do you think that this is really going to change things if it’s frozen or not frozen?

00:57:25 ►

Do you think that there’s a bigger issue at hand and that this is kind of a distraction from that bigger

00:57:29 ►

issue?

00:57:30 ►

Well, here’s the thing. If they do actually let tuition, the interest rates double, that

00:57:35 ►

will materially affect a lot of students. That’s going to be thousands and thousands

00:57:40 ►

of students who will be paying twice as much interest on their student loans. It’s absolutely

00:57:44 ►

an issue that we should be concerned about.

00:57:45 ►

The problem is right now that both parties in Congress agree we should extend the tuition,

00:57:51 ►

freeze the tuition interest rates for a year.

00:57:54 ►

That’s one year.

00:57:55 ►

That’s still not going to help.

00:57:56 ►

The economy is not magically going to be 100 percent better next year.

00:58:00 ►

And meanwhile, they’re just fighting over how to pay for it when, by the way, the government

00:58:04 ►

makes money on these loans.

00:58:07 ►

OK, even at the three, the lowest interest rate, even though around three percent, they’re lending and they’re making more money back than they are spending on these loans.

00:58:16 ►

So having these stupid arguments about how to pay for it, it’s ridiculous.

00:58:22 ►

Sir, I see that you’re wearing a red ribbon.

00:58:26 ►

I know that’s installed there with the with the Canadian protests that are happening right now.

00:58:29 ►

How does their struggle relate to this struggle about the student debt crisis?

00:58:33 ►

Could you talk a little bit about that?

00:58:35 ►

So the red square is actually, it comes from the phrase, I’m sorry, my French is

00:58:41 ►

going to be awful, so I’m just not going to do it, but it’s a reference to being squarely

00:58:44 ►

in the red or in debt.

00:58:47 ►

So it’s the same struggle there, right?

00:58:49 ►

The students in Quebec have been striking for, yesterday was their 100th day of striking,

00:58:53 ►

over a tuition hike, which is essentially going to be more debt.

00:58:58 ►

There are students in Australia protesting tuition hikes.

00:59:02 ►

There are students around this country protesting tuition hikes.

00:59:05 ►

The students here at CUNY in New York have been protesting tuition hikes. There are students around this country protesting tuition hikes. The students here at CUNY in New York

00:59:07 ►

have been protesting tuition hikes,

00:59:08 ►

and they’ve adopted the Red Square

00:59:10 ►

as part of their own movement.

00:59:11 ►

It’s a symbol of the debt that we all have.

00:59:14 ►

I have student debt.

00:59:15 ►

I’ve had the same student debt for the last 10 years

00:59:18 ►

because I’ve essentially been able

00:59:19 ►

to only pay the interest on it for 10 years

00:59:22 ►

since I’ve been out of school.

00:59:24 ►

It is a global movement, just like the austerity is the same.

00:59:28 ►

It’s not exactly the same, but the policies are targeting the same people,

00:59:32 ►

and they are hitting in essentially the same ways around the world.

00:59:37 ►

And the students in Quebec and the students here in New York have been in communications.

00:59:42 ►

People that I know here have been up to Quebec to work with the students up there to learn their student union model and other tactics so that they can figure

00:59:49 ►

out how to get how we get 400, 500,000 people in the streets of New York, in the streets of

00:59:54 ►

Los Angeles, in the streets of San Francisco. Well, I was just going to say, you know, it seems

00:59:57 ►

like in other countries there are massive protests of students fighting against this debt crisis in

01:00:04 ►

their countries.

01:00:08 ►

And it just seems like, why did it have to take the student debt to hit one trillion?

01:00:14 ►

And we’re not really seeing that influx of, you know, thousands out in the streets protesting this.

01:00:19 ►

I mean, do you think that it’s just kind of looming and that we’re going to see that if nothing’s done about this?

01:00:26 ►

I think the thing with debt is that it’s delaying your payments, right?

01:00:30 ►

When you are taking out a college student loan, you don’t think about having to pay it. You just think, I’m going to get through school, I’m going to get a good job, and I’ll pay it off.

01:00:34 ►

And that has sort of been true.

01:00:37 ►

Although, like I said, I graduated 10 years ago, and I’m still carrying the same ball and chain.

01:00:41 ►

But now that the job market is terrible, that something like half of all

01:00:45 ►

recent college grads are either unemployed or underemployed. We’re seeing the fallacy of that

01:00:52 ►

story, which is that you can go to school and you will get a good job and it doesn’t matter how much

01:00:57 ►

debt you took out. Right. I mean, for the first time, for the first time, more, more of those

01:01:03 ►

unemployed are college graduates than not. I mean, so what is the solution here other than, of course, alleviating

01:01:09 ►

the debt, expunging it, you know, offering for you to be able to declare bankruptcy on it,

01:01:15 ►

all these things? I mean, should people start looking at alternatives other than going to

01:01:19 ►

college? I am a big fan of education. I have a master’s degree. I loved it. And I did. I went

01:01:26 ►

to school as an undergrad. I was an English major, which was certainly not going to get me a great

01:01:30 ►

job. But I did it and I loved it. And I don’t want to be the person who’s telling people not to go

01:01:35 ►

to school. However, I would say that if you are going to take out a massive amount of debt, you

01:01:41 ►

should think about where you’re going to school, how much it’s going to cost you, why you need to take out that much debt. And also, we need to be organizing. This

01:01:50 ►

needs to be a movement. This is why I’m wearing this. This is why a lot of people around this

01:01:53 ►

city and around this country are now wearing this square, because we need to understand that this is

01:01:58 ►

a political problem. It’s not just a personal problem. It can’t be solved by you taking out

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a little bit less or a little bit more debt

01:02:05 ►

each year. We need to freeze the tuition rates, the interest rates. We need to lower interest

01:02:09 ►

rates. We need to write down the principal on these loans. We need to fund public universities

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so that kids can actually go to school for free or very little money. I mean, we really need to

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entirely rethink the way we pay for higher education in this country. It is a shame when

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people have to choose between going to college

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or thinking it’s not worth it anymore,

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and it really is a sad state of affairs.

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Yeah, it’s going to be a really important crisis and struggle to follow.

01:02:34 ►

Thanks so much for your work.

01:02:36 ►

Sarah Jaffe, Associate Editor at Alternet.org.

01:02:41 ►

The American dream is a symbol of education and success,

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but many are finding themselves left with a lifetime of debt trying to achieve it.

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U.S. graduates can end up owing tens of thousands of dollars after college

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in an economy where they then struggle to find a job.

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And they’re questioning whether it’s all worth it.

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Zartes Marina Portnaya reports.

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It’s the heaviest investment a young American can make,

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now becoming a trillion-dollar ticking time bomb for the nation.

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I have $20,000 in debt.

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$40,000.

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I’m $150,000 in debt.

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The U.S. student loan bubble has inflated larger than car or credit card debt.

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In this ballooning crisis, graduates now have financial deficits that rival

01:03:27 ►

home mortgages. In New York, many have taken to the streets protesting against the unaffordable

01:03:34 ►

cost of higher education. We’re already seeing a large increase in the number of student loan

01:03:39 ►

defaults across the country. And that’s coming at a rate that is similar to the rate when the

01:03:44 ►

mortgage loans started to default as well. And like I said, this has a cumulative effect

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and it’s a downward spiral.

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According to reports, more than 50% of recent college graduates are unemployed or working

01:03:56 ►

low-wage jobs that don’t even require a degree. Now, unlike other debt, student debt cannot

01:04:03 ►

be dismissed through bankruptcy. This means

01:04:06 ►

loans that U.S. students take out for higher education follows them for decades or possibly

01:04:11 ►

the rest of their lives. Mike Friedman has a Ph.D. in biology and works as a part-time teacher

01:04:17 ►

because he can’t find a full-time position. It’s the option of getting an education and then being in a state of financial and economic

01:04:27 ►

insecurity for the rest of your life. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans

01:04:32 ►

60 years or older still owe 38 billion dollars in student debt and 10 percent of that group is

01:04:39 ►

past due on payments. Senior citizens can even have their social security checks taken away, the money

01:04:46 ►

reportedly redirected to banks waiting to collect. As the investment of a degree morphs from security

01:04:54 ►

to risk, more Americans are reportedly turning to online colleges to save money, while others

01:05:01 ►

are suing for a refund. Dozens of lawyers have filed class action lawsuits against their own law schools,

01:05:09 ►

accusing the colleges of fraud and inflating employment figures.

01:05:14 ►

It was an American dream when qualification equated to security,

01:05:19 ►

but now the once cherished degree appears to be no more than a gamble.

01:05:25 ►

Marina Portnaya, RT, New York.

01:05:29 ►

For what it’s worth, one of the ways I paid for my own college education was through what was then called a National Defense Student Loan,

01:05:37 ►

which I qualified for because my undergraduate major was electrical engineering,

01:05:41 ►

and at the time I guess the nation thought they needed more engineers. In any event, after graduating from Notre Dame, I then went to law school until I was

01:05:50 ►

forced to join the Navy to avoid the draft, and after the Navy I went back to law school, and

01:05:56 ►

all during that time I had been released from making payments on my loan due to either being

01:06:01 ►

in the service or in law school. So I was already in my 30s with a wife and three children

01:06:06 ►

before I began paying off my own student loan,

01:06:09 ►

along with all of its accumulated interest.

01:06:12 ►

It took another 10 years of monthly payments to pay it off,

01:06:16 ►

and all the while my family had to sacrifice so that I could make those payments.

01:06:20 ►

So if you want my advice, a college education is wonderful.

01:06:24 ►

It totally changed my life and helped me become the first person in my family So, if you want my advice, a college education is wonderful.

01:06:30 ►

It totally changed my life and helped me become the first person in my family to get a little jump ahead.

01:06:37 ►

However, if you have to go in debt, particularly the sizable debts that college tuitions now require,

01:06:44 ►

well, all that I can say is that personally there was no way I’d go into debt just to get a piece of paper from a college. You know, if it’s an education you’re looking for,

01:06:47 ►

there are now many schools, including Harvard and MIT, that are offering free courses online.

01:06:53 ►

Of course, you won’t get that expensive little piece of paper that comes with graduation,

01:06:56 ►

but you will get an education.

01:06:59 ►

And then you can act like some of the other famous Harvard students

01:07:02 ►

who never got their piece of paper either.

01:07:04 ►

Not that I would take them for role models myself, but little Billy Gates and the Zuckerman

01:07:09 ►

kids seem to have made out all right with just the knowledge and not the diploma.

01:07:14 ►

You know, college debt almost certainly means that you are going to be an indentured slave

01:07:20 ►

for the rest of your life, so be sure that that is what you want before you commit yourself to such a heartless existence.

01:07:27 ►

And my final thought for today on this issue

01:07:30 ►

is to suggest that you give some thought to the fact

01:07:33 ►

that here in the U.S., the so-called student loan bubble

01:07:36 ►

has now reached $1 trillion,

01:07:39 ►

which is even larger than the housing bubble

01:07:42 ►

that already has much of the world’s financial system struggling for life.

01:07:47 ►

Should all of the students who are burdened with this debt simply come together and jointly walk away from these unjust loans,

01:07:53 ►

the world financial system would probably come close to collapsing.

01:07:57 ►

Now, that’s a lot of power to have in the hands of some well-educated young people that really don’t have much of a future ahead of them.

01:08:05 ►

But one way or another, that very same group of people are going to be middle-aged one day,

01:08:10 ►

and they will be the ones who are then running things.

01:08:13 ►

So what’s going to be interesting to see in the years just ahead

01:08:17 ►

is how soon today’s young people decide to take over the reins,

01:08:21 ►

and take over the reins from those dusty old farts who are calling the shots right now.

01:08:26 ►

Who knows, maybe 2012 will be an eventful year after all.

01:08:32 ►

Well, that should be enough of me for a while,

01:08:34 ►

and so for now, this is Lorenzo,

01:08:36 ►

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:08:38 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

311 - The Spirit of the Internet

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