A beautiful experience described by my friend Alexandros Pagidas:
“Given Facebook Connect, I get a notification that a friend of mine from the other side of the world, Levi Felix of Digital Detox joined Spotify, a Swedish startup. I click on his profile, knowing that if he has a playlist it will be chill, he does – love you bro – I play one of his playlists with music by an artist from South Carolina, Iron & Wine – exactly what I needed while casually reading great content at BothSidesofTheTable (recommended via another friend Max Marmer) . All that while being connected to the internet via a MiFi in the middle of nowhere in Greece, hearing the waves of the sea crashing by the shore. The 21st century is a pretty extraordinary time to live in. Love to everyone who is making it happen.”
Should we describe this as magic?
Alexandros:
I want to say yes, but I’m trying to avoid resuscitating terms that have lived past their lifetime. It’s for the same reason that I dislike using the term “tribe” in modern contexts. Max Marmer what Turquoise/Coral term can we use to replace the Purple “magic”?
Me:
Well, it is magic if seen from a certain perspective.
If the perceiver of a phenomenon or artifact is at a significantly lower level of development then the level of conscious development of the creator of the artifact, then to them it is “Magic”.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
– Arthur C. Clarke
But if you were to describe the phenomenon in your post at the level of conscious altitude of the artifact creators you could say what you are describing is:
The etherealization of the physiosphere and biosphere as it is transcended and included by the syntropic autopoetic emergence of the noosphere.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere)
Or, the technium discovering itself.
Or, humans transcending biology as we transition to the fundamentally new species of homo evolutis, where man and machine make love in heretofore everlasting communion.
(http://arstechnica.com/…/we-are-becoming-a-new-species-we-…/)
Furthermore, I don’t think the use of the words “magic” and “tribe” are bad. Purple (level 2 – aka tribal animism) and Turquoise (level 8 – aka collective integral) exhibit developmental rhyming or developmental harmonics. These words are useful metaphors to explore what we are moving into. Understanding a similar past gives us a taste of what is to come despite the future form not yet being fully manifest.
