What we're missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see it in human terms and what does this do for us? "We're missing a tremendous opportunity. We're asleep at the switch because it's not a metaphor. In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that's not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It's a physical reality.
What do we take from such a reality? When we think of the history of technology, it operates like any other form of history. A linear direction from past to present. Things happen. Technologies get invented and adopted and eclipsed over and over again. Each of these is a point on the line of time.
But what if we took technology on the cosmological level? Past technologies don't exist in the past but as a part of the present galaxy. They can be explored, inhabited, renewed for use in another quadrant. The past is not in the past but indeed alive.
We don't have to look at the work of Douglas Engelbart or Ted Nelson as a past attempt of realizing what the computer could be. We can instead see them as realities in the sphere of technology that we can venture forth to. It makes the past truly alive, truly something we can interact with.
