Islands in the Clickstream: The Brain Needs Time to Catch Up with the Body

“Is that how you experience Israel?” asked my friend when I shared what I wrote about a week in Tel Aviv and Eilat. “With all the bombs, guns, and weapons, it sounds more like Texas!”

It feels like that moment when Obi-Wan Kenobi suddenly lowered his head as if he had a bad headache and said he sensed a disturbance in the force.

In that Star Wars episode, Obi-Wan was feeling the explosion of a planet and the dying of all its inhabitants.

It’s hard to stay in denial when a whole planet is exploding.

Which those of us on earth should realize right about now.

Making Peace

by Denise Levertov


A voice from the dark called out,
"The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war."

But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can't be imagined before it is made,
can't be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.

A house divided against itself can not stand.

Nor can a people, half slave, half free, long endure.

Or we might say in a network-centric world: a society divided between those who manage surveillance, intrusion and data-mining on behalf of the rest of us and the rest of us, who lack access to the output of that universal engine will not last forever.

In the meantime, though, we're in for a bumpy ride. As our President said, freedom doesn't come cheap.

Make no mistake, these are perilous times, and the stakes are high. There are legitimate needs for intelligence and secrecy but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the ripening of a surveillance society that suggests that even prophets like Orwell, Huxley, and Philip K. Dick were not sufficiently paranoid to prepare us for the twenty-first century.

Scott McNealey's glib admonition about the loss of privacy `Get over it!' is no longer the flip realism of a Silicon Valley seer but a sinister warning. Those who have access to information and know what to do with it are free. Those who do not are slaves.

The internet like a kaleidoscope unceasingly juxtaposes images in different patterns. Turning on the computer in the morning is almost like casting the I ching or throwing bones. Sometimes the images form a coherent picture of everyday reality, but sometimes. sometimes they illuminate a crazy place.

Three translucent images came to the desktop the other day to be tilted into an architect's model.