November 1995
Beginner
502 pages
11h 11m
English
Content preview from The Future Does Not Compute
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Electronic Mysticism
This is Chapter 24 of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.
Cyberspace. Room for the human spirit to soar free. Earth surrounded by a digitized halo of information -- a throbbing, ethereal matrix coagulating into ever shifting patterns of revelation, and giving birth to a rich stream of social, political, and environmental initiatives. The individual freedom once sought only within the cloister or in the trenches is now to flow from keyboard, mouse and glove, electrifying the initiated with raw and unbounded potential for new being. An electronic New Jerusalem, its streets paved with silicon and bridging all cultural rifts, promises the healing of nations. Even the hope of personal immortality flickers fitfully for the first time through materialist brains contemplating prospects for DNA downloading and brain decoding.
And you, self-professed infonaut -- from whose jargon I have fashioned this vision -- you say you're not religious?
Athena's project
If we really must have our mysticism, then it seems a worthwhile exercise to take a brief look backward. For our myth-making ancestors truly did live mystically tinged lives. A comparison ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.