/lit/ - Literature

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>Every new tool conceived in the course of history, although it may have been invented in the fIrst place by an individual, has rapidly become the instrument of all men; and not merely by being passed from hand to hand, spreading from one man to his neighbor, but by being adopted corporatively by all men together. What started as an individual creation has been immediately and automatically transformed into a global, quasi-autonomous possession of the entire mass of men. We see this from prehistoric times, and we see it with a vivid clarity in the present era of industrial explosion. Consider the locomotive, the dynamo, the airplane, the cinema, the radio-anything. Can there be any doubt that these innumerable appliances are born and grow, successively and in unison, from roots established in an existing mechanical world-state? For a long time past there have been neither isolated inventors nor machines. To an increasing extent every machine comes into being as a function of every other machine; and, again to an increasing extent, all the machines on earth, taken together, tend to form a single, vast, organized mechanism. Necessarily following the inflexive tendency of the zoological phyla, the mechanical phyla in their turn curve inward in the case of man, thus accelerating and multiplying their own growth and forming a single gigantic network girdling the earth. And the basis, the inventive core of this vast apparatus, what is it if not the thinking center of the Noosphere?

>When Homo Faber came into being the fIrst rudimentary tool was born as an appendage of the human body. Today the tool has been transformed into a mechanized envelope (coherent within itself and immensely varied) appertaining to all mankind. From being somatic it has become "noospheric." And just as the individual at the outset was enabled by the tool to preserve and develop his first, elemental psychic potentialities, so today the Noosphere, disgorging the machine from its innermost organic recesses, is capable of, and in process of, developing a brain of its own.

>I am thinking, of course, in the fIrst place of the extraordinary network of radio and television communications which, perhaps anticipating the direct syntonization of brains through the mysterious power of telepathy, already link us all in a sort of “etherized" universal consciousness. But I am also thinking of the insidious growth of those astonishing electronic computers which, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second, not only relieve our brains of tedious and exhausting work but, because they enhance the essential (and too little noted) factor of "speed of thought," are also paving the way for a revolution in the sphere of research.