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17 New Persp. Q. 18 (2000)
From Cyberspace to the Noosphere: Emergence of the Global Mind

handle is hein.journals/nwpsp17 and id is 18 raw text is: The homeland as a space of the good life is increasingly less easy to find where, by accident of birth, each one is. In the next century, therefore, the homeland will be permanently reinvented, no matter where one is, through the art of knowing how to live and through intelligent alliances with others pursuing the same idea of happiness. A From Cyberspace to the Noosphere: Emergence of the Global Mind DAVID RONFELDT & JOHN ARQUILLA ARE TWO OF THE MOST INNOvATIvE THINKERS AMONG THAT INCREASINGLY RARE BREED WE USED TO CALL DEFENSE INTELLECTUALS DURING THE COLD WAR. THIS ESSAY IS EXCERPTED FROM A REPORT, The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy, RECENTLY PREPARED FOR THE NATIONAL DEFENSE RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF THE RAND CORPORATION. THEIR PREVIOUS WORKS INCLUDE The Advent of Netwar (1996), In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (1997) AND, WITH GRAHAM AND MELISSA FULLER, The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico (1998). SANTA MONICA-Noosphere is a term that comes from the Greek word noos for the mind. It was coined by the controversial French theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1925 and disseminated in posthumous publications in the 1950s and I960s. In his view, the world first evolved a geosphere and next a biosphere. Now that people are communicating on a global scale, the world is giving rise to a noosphere -what he variously describes as a globe-spanning realm of the mind, a thinking circuit, a stupendous thinking machine, a thinking envelope full of fibers and networks and a planetary conscious- ness. In the words of Julian Huxley, Teilhard's noosphere amounts to a web of living thought. According to Teilhard, forces of the mind have been creating and deploying pieces of the noosphere for ages. Now, it is finally achieving a global pres- ence, and its varied compartments are fusing. Be- fore long, a synthesis will occur in which peoples of different nations, races and cultures will develop consciousness and mental activity that are planetary in scope, without losing their personal identities. Fully realized, the noosphere will raise mankind to a new evolutionary plane driven by a collective coor- dination of psychosocial and spiritual energies and by a devotion to moral and juridical principles. However, the transition may not be smooth; a global tremor and possibly an apocalypse may characterize the final fusion of the noosphere. Although this concept is essentially spiritual, and far less technological than notions of cyber- space or the infosphere, Teilhard identified in- creased communications as a cause. Nothing like the Internet existed in his time. Yet 1950s-era radio and television systems were fostering the emer- gence of a sort of 'etherized' universal conscious- ness, and he expected astonishing electronic computers to give mankind new tools for think- ing . Today, he is occasionally credited with antici- pating the Internet. Indeed, the gestalt of Wired magazine evokes the creed that an electronic membrane covering the earth would wire all hu- manity together in a single nervous system, giving rise to a global mind. John Perry Barlow, a cofounder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, observes that what Teilhard was saying can be summed up in a few words. The point of all evolu- tion to this stage is to create a collective organism of mind. With cyberspace, we are essentially hard- wiring the noosphere. 18 ® WINTER 2000 The world first evolved a geo- sphere and next a biosphere. Now that people are commu- nicating on a global scale, the world is giving rise to a noosphere - a globe- spanning realm of the mind, a thinking circuit.

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