posted on Aug, 21 2009 @ 10:16 AM
Interview about Timewave Zero Theory
D: It’s interesting, perhaps romantic to think of the precision of the date that you’ve predicted for the zero-state (12:00 A.M. December 21,
2012). In what ways do you see that as an end of history and in what ways do you see it as a beginning? Or is it more of one than the other?
TM: Well I vacillate on this, because I’ve lived with this idea since 1971. I know how it feels to take a hard position and how it feels to take a
soft position. I’m kind of inclined to the hard positions, I mean, why not, you know? And what a hard position is is not that this is a social
transformation, not that this is a political dispensation, but that in fact it’s a crisis in physics itself. And that we didn’t cause it and
we’re not responsible for it. We’re just being pulled along by something on the scale of an earthquake. And that it affects physical law. So
that’s a hard position. A modified hard position would be that it’s something in the human collective personality that is seeking to express
itself through fusion of all the individuals into some kind of cyber-organic matrix whose intent lies in the collective unconscious of the species,
and we don’t know what that is. We are all just tits on that boar. And then the soft position…There’s a group of people on the Internet called
“singularists”. And they are complete tech heads, engineers, not an iota of psychedelic or spiritual manna in them. But they take all these
engineering curves–curves of energy release, curves of speed, curves of population, curves of information densification–and reach exactly the same
conclusion, that some time between 2010 and 2020, life becomes unrecognizable. We apparently possess starships, can build nano sites, can download
ourselves into circuitry, can completely control our genetic expression, remain immortal, transform into other species, on and on and on, just based
on the programs in place in R&D at the corporate-state level. Well, so, clearly, what we’ve done is we’ve found the change button and just like a
mad ape we’re just pounding the change button.
And the trick, I mean, the motivation for my career, why I do this rather than stay home in Hawaii where it’s very pleasant, is I think a lot of
people are anxious. This causes anxiety, all this. It needn’t. It isn’t a bad thing. It’s scary because the future was postponed for so long
that now the breaking of the logjam is going to look like Armageddon. But it isn’t Armageddon. What lies beyond all this I think, is the first
authentic human civilization. These are the pre-pre- times. You know Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western Civilization and he said “It
sounds like a veddy good idea.” So, that’s my idea of how the future will look back at this scene.
K: So that explosion of novelty is like your idea of the technology of time travel. It’s the sort of event that once it occurs, changes
everything.
TM: Yeah, because, interestingly, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the time wave and asking questions like how does it relate to the
dynastic fortunes of the great families of Europe, how does it relate to the rise and spread of capital, how does it relate to earthquakes, how’s it
relate to religions. What it really relates to well, where it just snaps into focus, is technology. Apparently McLuhan was right. It’s technology
that shapes culture more than anything else. The politics, the art, all this is derivative of what technologies are in place. And you know when you go
from the unstirrupped horse to the stirrupped horse, when you go from the front-loading muzzle to the, whatever, these things are what make the
difference. Technological innovation is just reaching an excruciating level of intensity in this society. And the interesting thing is that, unless
you’re somebody like me who can surf the net all day from a Hawaiian mountain, you don’t know what’s going on. The people working in these
laboratories, the people bringing high bandwidth, they don’t know what’s going on in nanotechnology, neither of them know what’s going on in AI
or complexity theory, and none of them know what’s going on in education theory and social programming. In each one of these fields, the top people
feel like the Holy Grail of their whole enterprise is five to six years away. Well, it’s going to start arriving, all this stuff. You know, like
what I talked about last night, this discovery of these planets outside the solar system is entirely the fact that a certain technology was pushed
beyond a certain level of resolution and then–bingo!–these things snap into focus. They knew that if they were there, they would see them, when
that technology reached that level of noiseless operation. So, biological evolution has stopped. In a sense cultural evolution has stopped.
It’s funny, I was in a gallery yesterday to see the new James Rosenquist show at the Castelli. So we go in and there’s this construction. I’m
familiar with his work, and it’s like a complete departure from everything he’s ever done. I say to the gallery guy, “This is like a complete
departure,” and he said, “No, no. This is a reconstruction of a piece he did in 1974 that we showed right in this gallery”. So you realize that
the complete departure was the later work and you’re caught in a time loop. All of the art world is like this. Culture has looked like this, felt
like this for 25 years. It’s technology that is changing and the first one to surface really is the net. The net is huge, I mean nobody understands
the implications of it, not the people building it, not the people using it, not the people fighting it, none of them realize that this protean
form…There’s this wonderful line of Stephen Vincent Benet’s, in one of his poems, “John Brown’s Body”, speaking of electricity. He says,
“our willing serf already half a god” and this is what the Internet is like. It is really the nervous system of the planet forming embryonically
in the Gaian womb and you can just feel it minute by minute knitting and connecting.
[edit on 21-8-2009 by Matteo]