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The Chip Replaces Palladio

An interesting overview of how we might be headed for a very literal kind of "information culture," written by John Lobell — with a wonderful, headlong rush of a summation which I reprint below because I don’t want to lose it:

From Newton’s Space through Einstein’s Spacetime, we now live in a non-space, each point of which constitutes an entire four dimensional geometry. As more of our personalities can be stored and transmitted, and as technology makes time, distance and energy meaningless to human existence, we approach a cosmic nature in which all of reality is integrated into the personality.

The world becomes less matter and more information; translatable, storable, and transportable at the speed of light. The human personality as contained in its biological housing can be indefinitely preserved in liquid nitrogen. Translated into genetic code it can be stored and shipped on DNA. Translated into digital code it could be projected across the universe.

The new world created by a new perception becomes a timeless spaceless flux of simultaneity. Nations dissolve into projections of cosmic consciousness. Buildings and cities become the magnetic tapes and the fluidic valves that house and transmit projected consciousness. Photo-etched onto ceramic micro-circuits; structured on self-reproducing DNA, personality survives the ravages of entropy. Cities empty and circuits are occupied. The computer chip replaces Palladio.

Published in researchmaterial


  1. Keith


    So, we could send a voyager-style probe with real people on that gold record instead of just noise and symbols, which would then be rebuilt on the surface of some alien planet, beamed down like in Star Trek, to explore the alien world and fuck the alien women. Sounds like a plan to me.

  2. For them that’s wanting it (and presuming, at the risk of an arse-eeling, that The Boss has no better reason than Monday blurriness for not including it), the link for the original piece is here.

  3. Warren Ellis

    Warren Ellis

    shitfuckbugger i left the link off DAMNIT thanks

  4. I find it interesting how certain phrases pop up that we would otherwise think of as very modern, like his reference to an ‘electronic web encircling the globe’.

  5. And then some chav scratches your car…

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