You go surfing around to find stuff for fun.
 But the reality is, where's the value?
 Where's the value?
 And if you put it in an economics context,
 now you're seeing the advent of e-commerce, you know,
 and portals are in, but soon hubs are going to be in,
 and business is going to say, "Okay, this has been really fun.
 We've got a website here, but how are we going to use it?
 How are we going to make sense out of it?"
 And there's going to be a shift occurring.
 In fact, I think there is a shift occurring right now
 as the technology continues to evolve
 and it's easier to deliver services.
 And I think that when that happens--
 You can't charge for advertising.
 Forget advertising. How about creating some other value?
 Markets, yeah.
 Well, you know, like destination sites,
 that's as valuable as dollars and stuff.
 You know, in other words, you get people to your site.
 But in the background of all this,
 the Web still does best what it was originally designed to do,
 which is facilitate esoteric research.
 And if you're trying to free yourself
 from the illusions of the society,
 this is just an enormous, unclosed loophole
 that they've left open.
 And, you know, it used to be that at some literature department,
 at some girls' school in Massachusetts,
 they would undertake some massive project
 of studying the Dunsead or something like that.
 Then when it was finished, it would fade out of existence.
 Now all that stuff is uploaded
 and exists for anybody to browse through.
 And I think esoterica has gotten the greatest shot in the arm
 since the reign of Rudolf of Bohemia.
 [laughter]
 And it has a dark side
 because it spawns squirrely conspiracy theories,
 because now there are so many more factoids than ever before
 that whoever and whatever you believe is manipulating your life,
 you can go onto the Web and find incontrovertible evidence
 to back you up.
 But on the other hand, if you really have a sincere sense
 of what research is, the Web is like a magic wand.
 I mean, I've been interested for years and years in alchemy.
 Well, for years it was expensive, overpriced facsimile editions
 or visits to libraries in obscure parts of the world
 to pay for microfiches and all this.
 Now one guy, Adam McLean, puts a site up at Levity
 and it's essentially a larger alchemical library
 that ever existed anywhere in the world
 during the hike of the age of alchemy.
 And that's just one site.
 So I think it's impossible to predict the number of pathways
 and trajectories through what the Web is.
 What it really is is freedom spelled very large.
 I'd like to bring something up from that three years ago.
 There was this work called "Ultimate Frisbee"
 that was invented, I don't know if anybody knows about it.
 I started playing back in '71.
 It was this very cool sport where everyone was just happy
 to be playing with each other.
 And you'd travel all over the country, meet people
 all over the country. It was this great thing.
 And it evolved into this national sport where--
 I always thought it was the younger kids,
 but it was probably the older guys too, right?
 It became more competitive and it became a game
 that you had to win.
 It became a game that you just enjoyed to compete.
 And the time I saw this guy get strangled in the field,
 I decided it was time to go do something else.
 And so the Web seems to me like it's an infancy,
 as far as I understand it, where you're touching people
 all over the place.
 It seemed to me it was this natural urge,
 man's aggression and woman's aggression, whatever,
 is both sides, and get very competitive.
 And this deal seems to have much more financial implications,
 which scares me knowing the people I know in the finance world.
 How do you think that-- I mean, to me--
 I mean, the markets--
 --stay free? I don't know.
 Well, the markets are going to have--
 you know, they're playing in this space, but that's it.
 They're at play in this space in just the same way
 we're at play in this space.
 And in fact, the beauty of it is that Disney can't actually
 bring people to their side.
 The beauty of the Web is that the portals exist,
 and you may click on them briefly,
 but that's not where you stay.
 There are a few, in a sense, of commercials,
 like news sites that are sort of giving people what they want.
 But everything else on the Web is--
 and I mean everything else--
 is this vast, just vast set of arcana, esoterica.
 That's actually where people are.
 I mean, yes, you may be bringing in a certain amount of content
 as daily news and things like that,
 but I almost think of it as a homicide.
 You know, this just sort of--
 Well, you know how in Manhattan the desirable business spaces
 are at street level on major thoroughfares?
 There's no parallel to that in the Web.
 It's just a mycelial mass.
 There are no privileged positions.
 And so there's no way to really reach people
 unless they are somehow participating in what you're selling.
 So there's all these pages, millions, right?
 Billions. That's getting close to 100 million or more.
 How do you find where you want to go?
 Well, I see people that--
 I want to get a couple of people to throw some things out there,
 help you with 100 favorite Web sites.
 Right.
 And that's maybe where people--
 Learning filters and search engines is the challenge of the next level.
 It's about learning how to filter.
 Finding meaning.
 We've talked very little about the idea of a bot,
 which is like your servant,
 which essentially will know your tastes
 and is going to do your Web for you, kind of,
 will deliver you the type of things you're interested in.
 That's coming about more.
 The indication has always been that those will be kind of like animated,
 sort of, or video-type images that are going to talk to you.
 "Hello. Good morning.
 Here's what I've got for you.
 Oh, did you know the new Tori Amos record was out today?
 Shall I have them dropped on to you in two days?"
 That sort of thing.
 How many days to Eschaton?
 I want to throw this ripple, though, on your economic question.
 It's been troubling me for the last about 18 months,
 and I'm going to ask Mark, Owen, and Steven,
 anyone that's been in the Vermont community,
 to dance around it a little.
 And correct me, but for the rest of you,
 I'll spin a little bit about Vermont,
 which you probably don't know, or might not know,
 which is sort of the birthing.
 Mark, in that list that he talked about,
 of those, did you say 200 or so?
 Two thousand.
 What?
 Two thousand.
 Two thousand researchers and programmers created VRML
 and very consciously fought to keep it from being owned
 or redirected by one corporate interest.
 And so they got these big corporations,
 Silicon Graphics and Microsoft.
 And they got on board and said,
 "Okay, we will not try to rip off your code and copyright it.
 We will not try to compete with each other."
 And that's how VRML was born.
 And from that was this profusion of amazing design and ideas
 and stuff that spilled out into the web.
 The next stage was that there was a browser war,
 that Microsoft came out with Internet Explorer,
 which was to go head-to-head with Netscape,
 and that VRML, you understand, operates as a kind of a plug-in
 that works inside the browser and just shows you how,
 it shows you 3D objects or environments in your browser.
 But the problem that I experienced,
 having worked for many or most of the people in the Bay Area
 doing VRML work in those years,
 was that in the last 18 months,
 it seemed to me that the browser war kind of killed VRML
 because due to, I don't know how,
 and that's what I want you guys to answer, kind of,
 the plug-ins for VRML really didn't function very well in the browsers.
 And most people I knew couldn't get it to run.
 It's a very rapidly changing environment.
 It's a very chaotic environment.
 And in some cases, it's very difficult to make complex pieces of software
 stable in that environment.
 Okay, but my question really is,
 do you think there was any kind of concerted effort
 to devolve your vision,
 or is that some function of the economic forces
 that created the browser war?
 I think, personally, I think it does come down to market forces.
 I think there's a big issue with that because you have to look at,
 I mean, first it went from being a gee whiz technology
 to everyone wanting to use it and get on board with it.
 And a lot of people came on board right of course and said,
 "We have to have this."
 And people started producing it.
 And then it was a question of, well, how do we use it?
 And I think that that's one issue with 3D graphics right now
 is that it's still looking to get--
 What do we use it for?
 That's the grand project right now.
 It's a solution looking for a problem.
 It's not like--
 People don't understand a 3D space the same way they understand a web page.
 Why?
 Because they think magazine when they look on the web.
 People look at the web and they see books.
 I want to just spin this a little bit.
 Get this really clearly.
 We're devolving into geek talk.
 That's right.
 Let's make this very clear.
 You are the browser.
 That other shit is just code.
 It's written by people.
 But you are the browser.
 You make your browsing decisions.
 You don't want pieces of code written by Microsoft, Netscape, SGI,
 or any other company making your browsing decisions for you.
 You have to own that process.
 Putting your energy into the web surfing process
 and deciding where you want to go.
 If you're going to use a search engine or a filter,
 you're going to use that search engine or filter.
 You are still the one that's going to plug the words in,
 telling it what you're looking for.
 It's going to give you back selections,
 and then you're going to select even further.
 You're going to filter up in here.
 The original reality engine is up in here.
 Right.
 I think this is really, really important.
 One of the things you talked about compelling earlier,
 and I found some years ago a formula for compelling.
 The formula for compelling is always richness over resolution.
 Markets are creating a resolution because every day there's more stuff.
 There's a bigger size to it.
 But the richness comes from what Susan was saying about the kids.
 Look at the kids.
 Look at them.
 They're under 20 for the most part,
 and they just go and do it.
 They don't talk about it.
 Half the time, they create barriers to entry that if you don't have enough technical savvy,
 you can't find them.
 You can't play with this.
 You're lame.
 Go play someplace else.
 You have to pass the test before you can walk through this door and play with this.
 But once you can pass that test,
 it's a pretty fine, pretty rich, pretty compelling experience.
 But just remember that you are the browser.
 Well said.
 There you go.
 Did you want to do it?
 Yeah, I'll throw it in.
 We're going to take a little twist out of the technical and back up to our main theme.
 You're on deck.
 He's been very, very silent this weekend, but he's been my assistant.
 And more than that, he's been my philosophical foil for five years and counting now.
 So that a lot of the ideas that you hear coming from me,
 and I need to be very honest, not all of them are my own ideas.
 I'm just sharing where I've been.
 Yeah, I know.
 I'm sharing where I've been.
 Big shock.
 And Ronan has, who's now up here, has helped me explore a lot of these ideas.
 I owe an enormous amount of my intellectual development to him.
 And he's going to take the idea of the new story and where that new story is and was
 and where maybe it should be a little bit further.
 All right, thanks.
 I'll kind of start off talking about the new story.
 One thing that Terrence mentioned about the webbing, he mentioned the word "freedom."
 I think this is kind of ultimately what we want to move towards in our lives, in living,
 and weaving these stories is this freedom.
 I mean, it's one of the ultimate things that we can have in our lives.
 And for this kind of freedom, there's a letting go of our egos that needs to take place
 and a kind of immersion within being that needs to take place.
 And there's a quote from a Jewish rabbi named Abraham Joshua Heschel,
 and he said, "There is no freedom without awe."
 And I think if you do a good dose of psychedelics, I think that you kind of get the idea of awe.
 Or if you get a good night of the stars watching meteor showers, you get a good sense of awe.
 Or if you have a good night of making love, you get this sense of awe.
 And this is one of the fundamental experiences of being human.
 And this is what talking about an archaic revival, in a sense, is a recovery of that primordial awe
 of the splendor of existence.
 And so when we talk about creating a new story, it's a process of remembrance,
 of coming back to where it is we've come from,
 and an intense process of self-knowledge and examination.
 The end of history, in a sense, requires first an understanding of history, of what's gone forward.
 And so this is kind of an understanding of the evolution of the human species, the evolution of cultures.
 We need to learn how did we get to this place, and where are we now?
 And it's this process of self-exploration that can lead us into whatever it is that's before us.
 And I think the story that we're looking for is a story of wholeness.
 Also, what Terence talks about a lot is this concrescence.
 And so this story of wholeness is a way of making this concrescence happen.
 That word concrescence, one way to think of it is the coming together of disparate strands into a nexus.
 It's this kind of unification of being.
 And this story of wholeness is not just that we need to go beyond these naive kind of propositions.
 A story of wholeness in our times also requires a deep acceptance,
 which also requires an acceptance of fragmentation.
 We live in a world of fragmentation, and yet somehow that's part of the larger wholeness.
 And what Western civilization has gone through is an intense separation from its cosmic womb,
 this birth and separation process.
 And that's part of it.
 But there's always a higher level of order, of interconnection.
 And so this new story, one, has this fundamental premise that everything is related.
 And this story, there are some people who are working it,
 it's based fundamentally on the insights of the new science and of quantum physics.
 It's this scientific understanding of the world and this fundamental premise that everything is connected.
 And so this technology that we're using are ways to highlight these interconnections
 and tell the story of who we are as human people and as members of the Earth community and as members of the cosmos.
 And so the fundamental discipline for this new story, for us to be able to remember who we are
 and evolve who we are in our many different permutations,
 I would say the fundamental discipline of our time is cosmology.
 And a lot of my understanding of this idea of a new story
 within the context of an understanding of science comes from two philosophers and scientists
 named Thomas Berry and Brian Swim.
 One is a cultural historian and Catholic priest in his 80s who's a student of Teilhard de Chardin.
 And the other one, Brian Swim, is a mathematical cosmologist.
 And they basically articulate this kind of trajectory of evolution
 and to give us a context for understanding ourselves in relationship to the planet and to the cosmos
 and understanding that the cosmos is an ongoing experience.
 It's cosmogenic. It's constantly giving birth.
 And part of our role is to participate in that and that we create these worlds
 and there's these dynamics that go on that are larger than us,
 but we also fundamentally are also giving birth to them.
 We bring forth a world together.
 And let me see where...
 So anyway, what I was going to point to, what cosmology is,
 is the synthesis of art, religion, philosophy and science.
 And so this is what we need today is... we need a new wisdom school, basically, in my opinion.
 We have vast tracts of knowledge. Everything is out there on the plate.
 And it's how do we bring these things together.
 And I think a lot of it we need to start with...
 From this place of awe, we have a sense of reverence for the sanctity of creation,
 for the sanctity of ourselves.
 And I think from this we need to start from a place of respect for ourselves and for others.
 And from this place I think we can move to create from the heart in that place.
 And all these tools we're talking about can be used for this.
 And I think a lot is to take a responsibility to learn who you are as a person in relationship to all that is.
 And there's vast amounts of material out there to do that.
 And then I think from this place, using that to move towards freedom.
 And also in one article I read from Terrence, I think it was published about 10 years ago in Revision Magazine,
 and it was on UFOs.
 I remember him saying something like, "What will the end of the world look like?"
 And he said in the article, "Well, it's not going to be just aliens coming down and having this big thing."
 He said, "It's kind of an inner revolution where this is something about appropriate activity and felt experience
 and letting go of the illusion of separateness."
 That itself would be the revolution and this appropriate activity coming out from authentic being and interconnection
 and letting that move through us.
 And that, in a sense, is the eschaton, is a sense of authentic being and interrelationship,
 grounded in a sense of deep remembrance of who we are from the place that we began.
 So anyway, that's pretty much all I have to say.
 But really the things, freedom and celebration, those are the two key.
 And awe.
 Yeah, for creating this new world together.
 So without it becoming an ideology, are you arguing then that the work, the great work,
 and also all the little works we should do, should in every part try to show relation?
 Is that in fact what part of the new story is?
 Is that the new story is invoking and making explicit the relations that have always been implicit?
 I mean, I certainly, I take a look at my own work and in light of what you just said, that makes sense.
 Yes, I'm trying to invoke into explicitness the relations that have always been implicit.
 Yeah, I definitely think that that's what we want to do.
 And that's part of the fundamental ecological crisis, is that we don't understand the thing.
 We don't see the ecosystemic interconnections, and so it's easier for us to pollute and so on.
 And we don't see the ramifications of that until it becomes some toxic waste site.
 So, yeah, this fundamental, and also that it needs to start at home.
 It needs to start within our own center of the relationships within ourselves,
 which will also help us keep from going the schizophrenic route.
 We might have thoughts of selves, which is okay.
 If you understand the connections between them, you can be with them and not go nuts.
 And then from that place inside, you're in a structural coupling with reality, with other human beings,
 and when you make explicit and honor those relationships,
 I think there's a new level that can take place.
 And I know from my study, I work a lot with the Lakota people from the plains,
 and in all of their prayers and all of their ceremonies,
 like if any time you're in a sweat lodge and you finish saying a prayer or something,
 they say, "Aho, mi taku e o yasi," "All my relations, I'm related to everything."
 And that's a constant thing that's always said.
 You get in a ceremony, and this is a story that they tell themselves all the time.
 So it's a new story that's an archaic story.
 Yeah. And again, it comes down to this remembrance as well.
 Yeah, remembrance and the explicitness of relationship.
 I think that maybe the disnification of reality is something I've been disturbed about,
 and I think you all have, was leading to that.
 And that may be the divergence or the opposite of what you're talking about,
 is the web can be used to market, mass market, a view of reality
 that you can just sit there and be entertained in front of your TV.
 And I just hope that, like this gentleman was saying about the first 50 years of the print,
 that this desire to incorporate the paradigm, the archaic paradigm,
 doesn't just get viewed by the kids 100 years from now as,
 "Oh, that was just the transition state where they were trying to hang on to the old before we..."
 I mean, it might be, but that might be because we've transitioned to something that's just as authentic
 and just as meaningful, ideally.
 I think that in trying to think about a new story,
 what's really changed or what the sea change has been, at least for me over the past 50 years,
 is modernity was thoroughly existential.
 In other words, reductionist science tells you you're the product of cosmic accident,
 meaning is conferred, you're lucky to be here,
 nature has no interest in your fate, nature indeed has no purpose at all,
 all of these things.
 And my own intellectual journey, both experientially with psychedelics
 and through mathematical analysis of history and all this kind of stuff,
 leads to the conclusion that this existential point of view is able to maintain itself
 only by ignoring the evolutionary thrust toward complexity and novelty
 that occurs on every level of being.
 And that in fact, if you begin to value novelty,
 you suddenly have a basis for a new human ethic,
 because human beings with their languages and their technologies
 represent a level of novelty never before achieved on this planet,
 something which builds on animal nature as a platform but goes well beyond it.
 And so suddenly, from being a random accident,
 from being a chance-created witness to a meaningless cosmos,
 we become the cutting edge of the very process that the cosmos itself
 seems to value or seek to magnify and preserve.
 So what has crept back in to being is, for me and anybody else
 who accepts these overarching metaphors, what has crept back in is value.
 And value, it's a different kind of value than we've ever seen before.
 The last time we knew values, they were handed down from a religious hierarchy
 that talked directly to God and got strange messages.
 The new values are self-evident from an examination of nature.
 Anybody can inform themselves about the facts of biology
 and large-scale complex systems and so forth and so on.
 So the new story is a story of recognize our placement
 at this breaking wave of novel advance,
 and then suddenly technology becomes a religious enterprise,
 good for something other than buildings, consumer electronics, and small appliances,
 but actually seen as the path toward some kind of transcendent possibility.
 The goal is well-formulated in spiritual ontology,
 but the methods are a mess.
 These methods either don't work or require lifetimes
 or make demands on people's behavior that is practically inhuman.
 So I think the new story is based on the recognition of our own centrality.
 We haven't stood at the center of the cosmic stage for 700 years in our official myth,
 and now suddenly we're returned there,
 and returned there not merely as witnesses in a central position,
 but suddenly as actors,
 because these technologies that are coming into our hands are truly Promethean,
 truly Faustian, truly capable of making us like unto a god,
 but not in the service of market capitalism and consumer fetishism,
 more in the service of this emotion of awe which Ronan invoked.
 You wanted to say something?
 That was beautifully put, Ronan, what you said earlier,
 and I'm 100% convinced that we need to remember the source
 from which we came before we even entered these bodies, this particular incarnation,
 and getting to the authentic self in the community
 and things that we had talked about last night of coming back together
 instead of being isolated selves.
 Nowhere this weekend have we talked about actually experiencing life,
 the living of life in this particular moment.
 Past is a history, the future is a mystery.
 That's why they call it present gift.
 Where are we with the computer in simulations?
 For me personally, I answer this question as a rather beautiful curiosity answerer.
 I'm in the professional world, the working world of computers,
 and no one I know goes home and goes on the computer stage
 and searches around and plays with it.
 I have witnessed this metamorphosis in the service world as a tool.
 It's a tool that has been a stronger technological advance
 than what we've had before. Yes, that's true.
 But it's not a way of life, and I'm hearing a lot of people
 that the computer is their way of life.
 And the talk about TV and hypnosis and yada yada, all that stuff is very true.
 But is this what we want our life to become, or do we want to actually experience it?
 Do we want to come here and look out at the ocean
 and then come and talk about these ideas?
 Or do we want to sit in a room with this thing flashing
 as we have to have a saver to save our eyes from even staring at this thing?
 For so long, is that where we want to experience life?
 Well, I think the answer is a resounding yes.
 It is where we want to experience life,
 because it is part of life experience that our historical moment has dealt us.
 In other words, you mention it as a tool, but it is not a tool.
 It does not turn a screw or reset an alarm.
 It can do anything.
 It can look up data quickly.
 It does anything you can name.
 It does.
 It's not a life.
 Well, I don't know exactly what you mean by a life.
 If you mean it--
 Eating and walking around and interacting with people.
 In that sense, it is a life, I think.
 I think all dualism is a form of spiritual materialism.
 In other words, what we are trying to do here is raise consciousness.
 What we are trying to do is build community.
 It is arguable that walking on the cliff and smelling the roses
 is an incredibly self-indulgent thing to be doing
 when what you could be doing is building a worldwide data network
 that would raise people out of poverty and ignorance
 and give them a shot at full--
 How is that going to do that?
 Through education.
 How is that going to raise people out of the ghettos
 and give them college education, you said?
 Well, I think information liberates
 and that the control of information throughout history
 has been the mechanism by which class dominance and hierarchy
 has been maintained.
 So I think tearing the lid off the global database
 and inviting everybody to take what appeals to them
 is one of the most revolutionary things that--
 --already available in libraries, so to speak, in man and labor.
 To the elites of the high-tech industrial democracies it may be available,
 but we are talking about suffering mankind here.
 In other words, I think it is a political obligation
 to give people the option of becoming free.
 Not to free them, because then you are saying, "Follow me,"
 but to give them the option of becoming free.
 If you travel to Bangkok and Calcutta and Cairo
 and actually feel the earth bursting at its seams
 with its accumulated toxins and social problems and so forth and so on,
 you see that business as usual has been canceled.
 And this thing you call having a life is business as usual.
 If you mean smelling the roses and walking on the cliff and all that,
 there is a place for that.
 But on the other hand, there is a question which hovers over us,
 which is, "What is to be done?"
 What is to be done about the dilemma that our past history has placed us in?
 And all minds on deck.
 We are at battle station conditions here.
 We are entering into the narrow neck at the end of history.
 We will need every tool in our toolkit,
 from the poetry of Rumi to Vermeul and beyond.
 This is going to push us to the limit.
 Nothing human should be alien to us.
 And these technologies that we have created are as human as we are.
 They have been with us since the very first moment
 that we defined ourselves away from our fellow animals.
 So there is no turning back.
 The only people who can live in a world
 where they have endless time to smell the roses
 and contemplate the mysteries of bridge
 are people who are living in a social pyramid
 where their leisure time is purchased at the expense
 of the enormous suffering of other human beings.
 So I think--
 That's not fair. That's not fair.
 I don't know.
 Because that's the whole tradition.
 It starts in Calcutta, Tibet, and other places,
 where each step is a precious step.
 It doesn't have to be a rose you smell.
 It can be shit that you smell, but it's precious.
 So I don't think that's a fair comeback.
 I don't think you've answered her question to be perfectly honest.
 Explain more about why you don't think so.
 Because I don't understand.
 You're saying everything we do is potentially a step?
 Is that what you're saying?
 Everything is a step. It's not even a potential.
 How does that contradict what I'm saying?
 No. She had a question, I think, and maybe I misunderstood it,
 about--she was sort of grounding herself in the physical reality of her life.
 No, she was asserting the supremacy of it.
 No, I wouldn't address her question.
 No.
 [laughter]
 Well, wait a minute.
 Before we address her question,
 let's address the fact that her question is not easily addressed.
 In other words, this is a primary schism,
 which too bad we pushed it off till seven minutes before the end.
 It's not going to be easily dealt with.
 People value the quality of life differently.
 They value their relationship to space and leisure differently.
 I understand what she means by "get a life,"
 but I feel it's an unfair attack on the position represented here.
 People exist along a spectrum of experience.
 We are going to have to keep one--
 and Mark was at great pains to make this clear throughout the weekend.
 I don't think it's true that this was not dealt with.
 You said you never heard immediacy dealt with.
 You said something about the future.
 Well, what was the aphorism?
 But what was the aphorism where you said something about
 history is something, the future is something?
 What I was talking about was the actual present moment that we are living in.
 Well, but didn't all the--
 History and the future of the country,
 they're just figments of our imagination,
 and we can play with them in a curiosity manner.
 But didn't all the talk about psychedelics imply
 the importance of the felt presence of immediate experience?
 Or all the yoga.
 Right, there have been 48 hours of immediate experiences in a row,
 and we've all been here for them.
 I just want to address this to Susan's question, which is this,
 that I think I heard recently, like this week, that Clinton or Gore,
 somebody suggested that every American should be on the web by a certain time.
 Right, yes.
 And I think that if you just took that model that the most impoverished ghettos
 in the cities, Appalachia, and all of this,
 that if all those kids were actually on the web,
 that that would be a good thing.
 But it doesn't mean they're going to spend all their time doing that, right?
 Are they going to have food in the ghettos in the mountains?
 I know they're going to be selling web computers for crap.
 Check this out.
 The availability of perfect information is the possibility of perfect resource allocation.
 Right?
 And that is what Mark's virtual reality is helping us get towards,
 the ability to understand information perfectly to allocate resources.
 I think what I hear her saying is, I have this web and I have a lot of information on it.
 I might not have had before from all over the world, right?
 But you know, this morning when my kid was going to fitness,
 doesn't want to leave today, your web isn't going to help me deal with that.
 And I think that's what she's saying, a piece of the world,
 this gives me so much more stuff than I ever had before at my fingertips,
 and I can search because I'm in the browser, right?
 But you know what?
 I still have to work with it inside myself.
 Now here's, I do need to make a comment here because I've been trying as hard as I can
 to stress the heart and stress the heart and stress the heart.
 The web is not knowledge in your head.
 It's not facts.
 It's the connection of hearts and minds on the planet.
 I'm sorry, I sounded very pedantic and I apologize.
 But I want to drive the point home.
 The problem is, the problem is,
 It's not that in and of itself.
 No, in and of itself it is that.
 It is that. It's pure connectivity.
 Yeah, but we have really poor interfaces to anything other than textual intellectual domains as yet.
 It is not a heart in and of itself.
 No, but it's connectivity. That's what he's saying.
 Pardon me?
 It isn't potential connections, it is real connections.
 I value actually, you know, it's just as real as talking to somebody on the phone.
 I mean, it's real time, it's really there, it is a communication tool.
 And I think what we're coming to, and I hope we're coming to,
 is some of us value actually living in real intimate communication, face to face, talking and stuff.
 Some of us value intellectualism as the answer to all necessities and needs.
 And I agree, man, 100%, freedom is information that will give us strength and power.
 But, you know, back to what Ronan was talking about, until we actually come out and live,
 I mean, that's my value.
 And I think that was the point that he was making,
 is that in order to come together, we have to go back into smaller communities
 and remember from where we came, not all the information, it's just the basic core,
 our selfness, our livingness.
 So our values are opposite. That's what's going on.
 But are they really mutually exclusive?
 I don't see that as being opposite either.
 I think we're saying the connectivity of the web is part of the activities of learning.
 And what you're talking about is more how do we teach or how do people learn how to survive on the planet.
 And personally, I think that the web, branching off from what was brought up initially,
 that language assists or defines content or affects content,
 so you get a more elaborate language or a simpler language,
 and it might create better ways to communicate content
 because it's a fact that what we're doing doesn't look like it's working.
 You know, the way that society's evolved on the planet doesn't look self-sustaining.
 And the art and the web is probably our best shot to amp up the learning of everyone,
 and it certainly sounds like it's worth a shot.
 But it's not going to happen if it becomes all Disney and as it is now.
 One of the main things that children learn growing up is what Steven Spielberg buries within the theme of a movie.
 And maybe that's the way it always will be.
 And that was a great opportunity that people can learn from other ways besides mass media fed information.
 And if you don't happen to be lucky enough to be born with parents that can communicate ethics 100%
 in a seamless fashion from everything we need to survive,
 because what's going on now doesn't seem like it's really working to meet the needs of everyone on the planet.
 We're going to have to close this off, but I want Mark to have a chance to have a final word if he wants it.
 Before he has it, I want to thank him for being here.
 He and I had apparently never met or met only lightly in the past.
 I think having this in controversy is fine with me.
 These things are controversial. It's the business of the future to be dangerous.
 It's your job to decide what is human and to preserve it and expand it and live it.
 And Mark, say a final wise thing.
 A question slash commercial. Does S1 offer us each other's contact info?
 No.
 Then I would propose that if anyone wants to stay in contact or communicate via email, continue these discussions.
 I have a book which is sitting here with a pen. Please put your name in if you have email, if you don't, phone number.
 And also I have cards here where you can reach me.
 And also that I really appreciate it and love all of you for your singing.
 And also by giving me your information or taking mine, you can have more information on that.
 We want to kind of purport that activity.
 Thanks.
 In conclusion, it was probably in 1981 when my wetware processor booted up a simulation of Terence
 and it's been talking to me ever since.
 And the conversation has been actually really interesting.
 It is my great honor and pleasure to have met and work with you in the flesh.
 And this has been a wonderful weekend and I want to thank you for your graciousness and for the room that you've given me
 because it's been a great, great honor on my own part.
 I really, I can't even describe it, how I feel about being able to be with all of you.
 Thank you. It has been my great honor and my pleasure to be able to get away with things
 that they would normally drive me away kicking and screaming if I said in other places in this world.
 I've given some raps this weekend, which I won't call them canned, but I've given them before
 and I have said things in public here that I had not even dared ever to say.
 I've been thinking about them. I've been arguing them with my simulation of Terence.
 I've been working them through.
 But I felt like this room had the feeling and the trust where I could actually step over the boundary
 and I could enter the light cone and put my foot down and say,
 "Well, these are just some things that I'm thinking about."
 And I am incredibly grateful that I've been able to share with you
 because the things that I've been getting back from all of you, both individually as a group,
 have been insane, cathartic, transformative, revolutionary, things like that.
 I'm going to leave you with one last question or koan, which I want to be unresolved
 because it's an argument that I'm having with a simulation of myself that I'm running inside of my head.
 I'm not sure that I believe that the internet physically exists.
 I don't know about it. It's invisible to me all of the time anyway.
 I'm not sure that in fact it's not simply a way that we're all magically believing that we're communicating with each other.
 Thank you.
 [Applause]


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