The Mandelbrot Set?
from Cosmic Trigger Volume II: Down to Earth by Robert Anton Wilson


War is a crime. Ask the infantry. Ask the dead.-- Ernest Hemingway

 

According to computer scientist Dr. Jacques Vallee, information is now doubling every 18 months.
Nearly four billion years of evolution to get to the first tool. Almost four million years to arrive at the information density of Rome in 1 A.D. Only one-and-a-half thousand years for information to double and for the West to arrive at Leonardo, the high point of Renaissance and the dawning of Protestantism. Two-and-a-half centuries for the next doubling, the rise of Industrialism, the birth of Democracy -- and the radical supra-democratic heresies of socialism, anarchism, feminism...

Only six years for the doubling of information between 1967 and 1973.
Even then, nobody I knew personally had a home computer. Today everybody I know has a home computer.

We are in what Alvin Toffler calls the Third Wave -- Information Civilization. If Vallee is right about information doubling every 18 months, and Gordon is right about fractals increasing where information flow increases, then everything must become steadily more unpredictable from here on -- more "chaotic" in the mathematical sense.

That "chaos" may be expressed as breakdown and violence, such as we are seeing in the current rumble [Persian Gulf War, 1991] between Goddam Insane and Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog. In the doubling of information between 1900 and 1950, we went through a World Depression and two World Wars.
The "chaos" may, however, be expressed instead as a rapid acceleration toward a more stable and coherent world. After the democratic Revolutions of the late 18th Century, Europe settled into peace and steady progress for nearly a hundred years.
The "chaos" is most likely leading us to social transformations that none of us can foresee with more than foggy approximation. I think it will include economic collapse and economic recovery, space colonization, longevity, Bucky's World Energy Grid, and breakthroughs in nanotechnology that will literally make the most advanced scientific gadgets "as cheap as dirt."

Is this information-acceleration a Mandelbrot fractal, as Terrence McKenna claims? Will we reach a point in 2012 where information doubles a million times a second?

I don't know. But, just as the Persian Gulf War was an awful shock for those of us who dare to dream of a better world, I think there are other shocks ahead that will be even more disconcerting -- to those who think they can still "govern" the world by violence. In the first month of this war there has been more anti-war protest, world-wide, than any year of the Vietnam war... I don't know. I have no infallible crystal ball -- but the day I decided not to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1955, I committed myself to going along for the ride, however rough it gets. I also try, within my limits, to make a contribution that will add to the probability of Utopia and decrease the probability of Oblivion, for us all.





Back to the Stuff page