the first global distributed-wisdom project:

THE LIBRARY

about the future ...

The future is not going to work out the way people want.  It never really has, either.  Sometimes one can see trends, ... for example the financial collapse was predicted by many people.

It was obvious there was a housing bubble and that people were being allowed to borrow money that they could not repay.  It was also obvious that with ending the distinction between commercial banks and investment banks, bankers were going to start to take a lot of unjustified risks.  We could go on, but if you’ve been paying attention there is no need.  Just note please that our governments have not reigned in these thieves, pirates and wolves, and they are continuing to make trouble for the rest of us, while still making themselves rich.

The whole world is a complex system of interrelated sub-systems.  Commercial agricultural interests are wrecking the food supply.  Not only is their no nutrition in their products, they think they can mess with the DNA of the plant world to no bad effects.  Its like watching some kind of weird horror movie, where the mad scientist is clearly going to make a monster.

Everywhere we have drained the aquifers in order to do too much too fast.  The coming water crisis will be huge.  Climate change is real, whether it was caused by human beings or is basically just a natural cycle.  Various nations manage to elect or allow complete idiots to run and ruin their Countries.   America did it with Bush II, so why can’t everyone else do it?

Almost no large social institution is being prudent.  Most leaders think short term, and only want to reward their friends.  Many people just want to make things better for themselves, and screw the other guy.

Anyone really believe the world can survive all this madness without some kind of major collapse and restructuring?  Nothing seriously wrong is being fixed.  Nothing.

There is a wise ordering to the world.  Here is what this wisdom has given us in order to go through this remarkable Rite of Passage, in which Western Civilization dies into something new.

Make a picture of the Globe with your imagination.  Make the surface of that Globe covered with glittering and very bright stars - billions of them.  Each star is a human mind, and wherever a star is connected to other minds, via the global social networks by even so little as just a cell phone, there has now arisen a Global Mind.  It has analogous characteristics to distributed computing, but in this case the Global Mind can care about what it does.  A computer running a program can’t do what people can do.

An early global test of this Global Mind - this vast system of distributed wisdom - created open source software.   Recently, via Kickstarter, it funded a movie people wanted.

Now the world needs this Global Mind to create the Library.  As the collapse of Western Civilization goes through its various phases, people in different areas of the world will suffer all varieties of deprivations - some quite different from others.  People need knowledge of how to deal with water issues and health issues and so forth.  Imagine a world where vast areas are like Haiti is now, including places which ought to feel completely safe, such as Boston or London or Paris.  What is happening in Greece and Cyprus will spread.  Vast crowds of unemployed and hungry people. Governments will try to over-control - that’s how they always deal with tendencies to anarchy.  Over-control will only make things worse - that’s a clear lesson of history to anyone who wants to pay attention to history.

There will be many places of social chaos, and lack of food, water and medicine.  The usual expectable social networks too will break down.  Such organizations as the Red Cross may well lose their ability to come to the rescue.  Only those living in a particular place can really care for each other.  This Rite of Passage is not just about physical needs, it is more about psychological and spiritual needs.

At present the Internet is full of knowledge.  Its all there - a kind of huge electronic Whole Earth Catalog.  There are places where this knowledge is being organized by people who can see the need for survivor knowledge, for how to fight dysentery or cholera.  How do you make penicillin or insulin?  How to you take the junk lying everywhere about and make a filter for water, or turn a broken bicycle into a way of making electricity?  How do you make zip guns and IEDs out of household products in order to fight off marauders, who only want to steal from those who have little, but are too lazy to work things out on their own?  Anybody been following the TV Show  “Walking Dead”?

What did people do in Libya to survive amidst a civil war?  How do you socially organize refuges when there are no longer big institutional social organizations to help?

The coming resulting social chaos will place us more and more on our own.  There are lessons learned in New Orleans, after Katrina.   When things break seriously down, electricity disappears.  Electricity disappears and the Internet disappears.  All over the world we have already seen Nature punch us in the face and say WAKE UP!!!  A big DOOM is falling on you, if you remain asleep.

Yet, everywhere on the Internet is the wisdom acquired in ways so hard and painful it makes one want to cry.  But all that hard-earned wisdom is useless if we do not collect it and organize it.  My youngest son says you can put 20,000 books on a high density DVD.

What we are doing here is decentralizing the Internet’s practical information.  Why? Because we may not always have the Internet, for vast powerful social forces already don’t like it.  We decentralize it by editing it, and transferring the essential material off of remote (and indefensible) servers onto DVDs.  The knowledge of how to survive the already happening social crisis Rite of Passage becomes lodged in local off the grid nodes, in small laptops, for example, that can get their electricity by being hand cranked - these already exist.

This is the classic snowball situation.  All that people, with  social network access, need to do is to start making off-Internet web-centers where data is collected.  If a common name is used, such as “the Library”, coupled with the specialty being collected at that node intersection, for example: “Library - cholera stories”, then material will gather there.  Then will follow another data collection node intersection, maybe to be called: “the Library - basic medical needs”, which too will gather data, but at a vaster scale.

Meanwhile, open source software people need to design a search engine that be part of the high density DVDs, and which will be able to be used to search these DVDS, made via downloads to laptops and other off-Internet storage devices.   With the such search engines the possibilities are endless.  The Internet is full of answers to questions, ... they just have to be organized according to the wisdom of all the individuals participating, and then off loaded from the vulnerable servers onto personal nodes that are no longer connected and hackable.  Save our needed knowledge!  Don’t just create a small or large hoard of medicine, food and water, save knowledge!

Save too knowledge of culture and art and law and peoples.  And, because the Global Mind is distributed, everyone can participate.  Think of what happens when a salt solution crystallizes.  Everything for a time is watery - unformed.  Then something initiates a connection, and soon everywhere there is order.  Each individual member of the Global Mind just does their part.  There are lots of ways to do this, and once people catch on to the idea, ... well, we just will have to see just how wise this Global Mind really is.

See: Economic and Social Rebellion for certain political details, and The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything for certain philosophical and scientific details.