No Maps for These Territories Page #8

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right through the event of the nuclear war, regardless of which cities were being vaporized.

So these university mainframes were connected,

and what we know...what we know today as the Internet,

grew out of that as a completely unplanned side effect.

And I...I rather believe that if the...that side effect could have been foreseen,

the people who ordered, you know, the people who ordered those...

those mainframes connected, would've had second thoughts,

because it will eventually bring about their extinction, to a large extent.

It will bring about the extinction of the nation-state,

as...as we know it. And that is an unplanned impact of technology.

We're using technology to...

to extend the human nervous system.

We're sort of, you know...the Internet is a kind of global,

prosthetic extension of human consciousness.

It wasn't...it wasn't consciously intended as one, but it amounts to one.

The Internet, if one could see its totality,

I think, would be a very profound expression of what it is to be, to be human today.

But I think it will be...

it's almost meaningless...it's almost meaningless to say even now,

because it's become...it's become the place where we do everything.

t's become the place where we look for everything.

We're doing something new here. It resembles some things we've done before,

but it's...it's different.

think it is probably as big a deal as the...

the creation of cities.

A number of your characters are searching for meaning in cyberspace.

Laney, in IDORU, looking for patterns in the flow of data

Gentry, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, looking for the overall shape of cyberspace...

I mean, I think that's for me that's the nature...

that's the nature of experience,

is sensing through all this stuff that we're moving through,

some huge structure that's too big,

too big to get a handle on.

And the question is, then, "How important is it?

Why are we...

why are we drawn back to that? Why do we do that?"

You know? Why do we...in evolutionary terms,

why do we do that stuff?

We seem to do it as a...as a species.

What, what is it, what is it in service of?

We've been doing, you know, we've been trying to do that forever.

But why, you know...I wonder why we do it. I mean, here we are,

mammals, bipedal mammals with opposable thumbs and overgrown frontal lobes,

creating this...this wacky collection of artifacts that we're moving through, now,

and sitting in, and recording on. Why do we do that?

How... How did it come to be? You know, what is the...

what is the shape of that, if we could see it,

see it from without? Which we can't because we are...we are it.

It's just basic, basic curiosity. What's going on here?

Why am I here? What's it all mean, if anything?

And, I think as...you know, I, in my sort of mid-cult way,

I wrestle with that stuff in my fiction.

[Search]

When we were only several hundred thousand years old,

we built stone circles,

water clocks.

Later, someone forged an iron spring,

set clockwork running.

Imagined gridlines on a globe.

Cathedrals are like machines defining the soul.

Bells of clocktowers stitch the sleeper's dreams together.

You see? So we've always been on our way to this new place,

that is no place, really, but is real.

It's our nature to represent.

We're the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps.

And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors

of our calendars with the true weather of days,

and the parchment's territory of our maps

with the land spread out before us...

never mind

We've always been on our way to this new place,

that is no place, really, but is real.

No Maps For These Territories

Timing by WM

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