Author: Walter

Interview with Kevin Kelly

No One is as smart as everybody

“we project onto technology what in earlier eras we would have projected onto the supernatural” – Jung

The Star in Man by Dolores Brien. Alchemy, gnosticism, Jung and technology. Towards a Jungian Psychology of Technology

According to Jung, we project onto technology what in earlier eras we would have projected onto the supernatural. For many, indeed, technology is experienced as numinous. Under the influence of science along with technology, we are less willing to attribute events to divine intervention. But unconsciously, we still cling to the hope of a revelation of that archetype of “order, deliverance, salvation and wholeness.” We express this hope, however, in symbols derived from technology rather than from traditional religious beliefs or from mythology.

It is characteristic of our time that the archetype, in contrast to its previous manifestations, should now take the form of an object, a technological construction, in order to avoid the odiousness of mythological personification. Anything that looks technological goes down without difficulty with modern man. The possibility of space travel has made the unpopular idea of metaphysical intervention much more acceptable. (CW,10, para. 623. )

Update, 7 August 2002: I have completed reading this essay and I find it good, and pertinent to my current project. There are plenty of themes here that I am contemplating at this time.

One idea that is important in probing cyberspace is the question of perception and or creation? Do we discover it or create it. Here is Brien quoting Jung:

… the self is more than passive receptor mirroring, or imaging what it has received. …The self it seems is not only a receptor, but an agent as well, or in alchemical terms, the artifex. It is the “self” who achieves the transformation of the energy into gold.

But later on in the essay Jung is quoted again:

Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter.(CW 13, para 163).

So has the psyche gained anything? This made me think that it had gained these “made not born” things to allow the self to transform. There is a loop here that adds “gold” at each iteration, because we make, create and then we also make it anew in our perception.

Another quote, Brien quoting Jung:

The alchemists made a distinction between God who became Man in Christ, the light of the world and the filius philosophorum, “the light of nature,”who was “extracted from matter by human art and, by means of the opus, made into a new light-bringer.”( CW 13, para. 163.) In the case of the former man’s situation is “I under God.” With the other, it is “God under me.” Jung excuses the alchemists as being naive and not aware of what they were doing. Nevertheless the splitting off of divine from human power had been irrevocably accomplished. From now on, human beings will think and act if they were God. Nature is subordinated too, becoming primarily a tool to fulfill our needs and desires.

This is interesting when juxtaposed to This from Stuart Brand: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Which by only one degree leads to the conversation about all this with Steve Talbott and Kevin Kelly.

Useful to have. Click here to convert.

Academic article on the navigation metaphor. Useful in my writing about the steering inherent in Cyberspace, etymologically.

The C.G. Jung Page: Archetypes of the Internet by Dolores Brien. adapted from a review of Mark Stefik’s book Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors

One last word-if the Internet acknowledges a god, that god has to be Hermes: mediator, communicator, messenger, trickster, patron of merchants, always on the move. His attributes seem as inexhaustible as does the Internet, of which he seems to be the soul.

I have updated an earlier post about Steve Talbott in conversation with Kevin Kelly.

RE: Should Wine follow Sleepycat’s Deven T. Corzine (deven@ties.org) on Date: Fri Feb 22 2002 – 11:45:13 EST wrote:

Sleepycat's approach is to let anyone use the code freely with open-source applications, since they're giving something back by increasing the amount of open source code in the world. For those companies that aren't willing to contribute to the common good in that fashion, they sell them a fairly traditional software license instead.

This mailinglist is a way of discovering the meaning of the distinctions, in a series of well worded collaborative posts. From the paragraphs above it is possible to glean how the purists might object. Is theres something tainted in allowing closed software for a price? We will let you dump the oranges in the sea, as long as you pay some money to a charity? Or must these pragmatic arrangments be permitted until they become part of a more primary contradition, when Linux has world domination, and the battle is for the software that runs on it? I somehow prefer a clearer dividing line, but then what do I know, here in Windows XP!!

Berkeley DB

Sleepycat Software distributes Berkeley DB under a
license agreement that draws on both the UC Berkeley
copyright and the GPL. The license guarantees that
Berkeley DB will remain an Open Source product and
provides Sleepycat with opportunities to make money
to fund continued development on the software.

I am intrigued by licences, not because of the legal complexity, rather because of the way in which some make the world worse, and others make it better. Not just the world, but the noosphere, that is the offence. It is a sin to hoard knowledge, just as it is a sin to dump oranges in the sea to keep prices high when people are starving. The logic of a system that makes that viable for a few is a flawed logic. It might take a lawyer to explain why the Sleepycat licence is used instead of the GPL… but it does seem to accomplish the same end, of keeping modifications open for our future.

I just noticed my use of the word “sin” here. That may be how this item relates to the seemingly diverse string of items in my weblog. Sin ties in with soul. Crime is wrong, but crimes against soul are sins?

I’m glad this item by William Rivers Pitt makes it into the top of the links in daypop. It puts clearly the view of Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, who is opposed to the war. He has more info than anyone to refute the Bush lies. This war must not happen!

This is not about the security of the United States,” said this card-carrying Republican while pounding the lectern. “This is about domestic American politics. The national security of the United States of America has been hijacked by a handful of neo-conservatives who are using their position of authority to pursue their own ideologically-driven political ambitions. The day we go to war for that reason is the day we have failed collectively as a nation.

I have an earlier link to Spring Publications, however they no longer publish the Spring Journal, that happens here at Spring Audio Journal and Books. See the site for who is who.