Futurist Musings on the Implications of FOSS

As the impact of FOSS philosophy continues to be felt well outside the technical world of software creation, some futurist speculation becomes entertaining if not profoundly relevant. Dr. Francis Heylighen, founder of the Global Brain Group and the Principia Cybernetica, has written extensively on the useful conceptualization of the Internet as a global brain. “Society can be viewed as a multicellular organism, with individuals in the role of the cells. The network of communication channels connecting individuals then plays the role of a nervous system for this super organism, i.e. a ‘global brain’” (Heylighen 1996). Heylighen’s global brain model stems from a sophisticated analysis of the structure of the Internet and its use of hyptertext references, known more commonly as links, and their parallel with the associative memory characteristic of the human brain.

Theories of the planet as a global organism are not new, nor even always controversial in the scientific literature of the 20th century. Buckminster Fuller famously and influentially referred to our planet as “Spaceship Earth”, while James Lovelock provided a convincing scientific argument in the late 1970s that the planet can be seen as a large self-sustaining organism which he referred to as Gaia (Lovelock, 1979). The Gaia hypothesis, as Lovelock’s theory has come to be known, was not without its critics at the time, but 25 years later is has yet to be seriously debunked and has only grown in popularity. But perhaps the true godfather of the global brain concept is the obscure Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Some fifty years ago in his Phenomenon of Man, he writes, “Is this not like some great body which is being born - with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory - the body in fact of that great living Thing which had to come to fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness?” (Tielhard de Chardin, 1955) He referred to the global consciousness of this new “living Thing,” with its striking resemblance to Lovelock’s Gaia, as the “noosphere,” a term which has taken on significant importance in the intellectual analysis of the Internet (Tielhard de Chardin, 1955). Tielhard de Chardin’s writings have experienced rebirth in recent years, as the noosphere concept has been increasingly used in reference to the strong parallels between global communications networks and an organism’s nervous system (Kreisberg, 1995).