What you know isn’t nearly as important as your ability to find it.
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We, my family and I, have had some version of broadband in our homes since 2001. I was fortunate to have come upon an R&D job that put me in front of a T1 line and that story was written. I can probably said that my three month stint annoying our cable company to get it into our neighborhood was paramount creating the city wide roll out. I had to do it. I had to have that power in my hands daily. Most people believe that money, position, connection represents power. I never bought into that, my time, dating back to card catalogs at the library taught me well; power is in knowing. It is preparation and presentation. It is expression and illusion. Raw data, information from sources, is just a launching pad of pure development. Development of our wisdom, of our essence.
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I don’t believe, and my years helping others has proven this, the vast majority of people just don’t get the internet. That can’t grasp the sheer power of learning, of knowing. Yes, there are down sides but there are down sides in getting out of bed as well. You don’t worry about that do you? The truth is information is what we do. We perceptual creatures. We learn whether we like it our not. It is an utter violation of our existence and an impossible situation- to not learn. We can soak up data faster then we can get it-potentially. In fact, if you are not drinking from the well- well, your dead. Amusingly, to this day, I have people even as they are updating their status on Facebook, wax poetic about the evils of the internet. I still laugh at them. To say information is evil is akin to saying the sun is just a ball of gas. Really, really- are you missing the point.
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We are living, breathing cognitive machines. Even while we sleep our minds are sorting, analyzing, and equating daily inputs. It never stops. Our five normal senses, I don’t discount unknown perceptual skills, take in terabytes of data daily and then makes sense out of it or at least tries to and then store the irrelevant data that we don’t need at the moment. Although I think it is just thrown into a buffer until the data becomes relevant. It is a master programmer. I’m not saying it is perfect but if you compare humans with any other creature on this planet you realize that we really have something here. I’m not getting into evolution versus creation it is frankly unimportant and ridiculous. We have what we have and it doesn’t matter where it comes from, what does matter is what we do with it.
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Think about it this way since we are able to learn, we are able to improve, to progress to make leaps in evolution that other creepy crawlies creature cannot. Instinct, still there in the lizard brain, takes a back seat to reason, logic, and analysis. Well, it should. The only class struggle we truly have in this world, now; some use their brains and others sit on them. Don’t laugh, you know it and I am not afraid of offended the seaters because they don’t use the internet, or the library, or more then three neurons a day and will never read this anyway. Yes, seaters those that believe their head is for crooked hats. Those that seem to be on a reverse evolutionary trajectory. Searching not for expansion of themselves and their species but content to stroll through life with the gusto of a rabidness Neanderthal looking for a soft lap to assault. Procreating, dosing, doing everything they can to escape life instead of extending it. You, mister or misses reader, know at least one and have driven through pockets in your town where they congregate. I often tell people that throw about their prejudices they only thing I can’t stand is stupid people. Race doesn’t matter, nor sexual preference, religion you name you grouping or collection; the only thing that bakes my biscuit or the perfectly healthy normal human you has less sense then a mop and less sense then an ant.
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You laugh, but you know what I mean.
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That is about choices. I have seen what the mind can do. I have seen people with learning disabilities, physical brain deformities grow and flourish and become intelligently powered people. Savants that seem lost in time and space play piano like a master, strip life down with mathematics, and do things that “normal” people can’t. The mind is exhaustively amazing. I respect those that learn, grow, expand themselves and those around them. I respect those that show signs of modern explorers pushing the boundaries of the world they live in; developing better worlds they want most to live in. Sadly, we are the minority, a dwindling class of progressive pioneers.
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Our minds are gifts. The type of gift that gives and grows. Moving us slowly towards something or somewhere. We need to know, to become more then mechanical biological puppets in an environment. We have to learn. That is what we are born to do. Some evidence says it begins while still in the womb. I’m no doctor but I read it somewhere; see, see. We have the sum total of human experience at our fingertips, literally, we can forge new associations across a spectrum of data from countless eras, cultures, and disciplines. We can face problems, obstacles, and uncertainty with passion and expression and create worlds we cannot even imagine. The sum total of human experience is right there; a keystroke away, down the street at the library, warming under the light of curiosity. We are designed to be explorers, learning machines, pushing the boundaries of what we experience into a codex of possibilities. To push us to some age beyond even the consideration of science fiction.
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Information is power. Data properly gathered, considered, and recombined can toppled the known issues that face us and prepare us for the unknowns still to arrive. It is the power to beat ignorance with a club and fanatically pursue uncertainty till its demise. I was once told, well several times, I am a genius my thought is always the same, “by what measuring stick.” I love learning, exploring, broadening the reach of my knowledge base into useful wisdom for the moments that flow through my life. I have learned to accept that I am a polymath in so much as I have such a broad range of subjects that enthrall me but the price of that acceptance is this society doesn’t know what to do with a polymath. I am in good company, as history has declared, we are here on the heels of those that did not limit their capabilities and their push to make the world a better place by asking ‘what-if’.
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My favorite is being called an “alien”.
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I am a know-it-all as long as I have the Internet under my fingers but I am wise only as long as I see the information I declare, in this moment, will serves me. Genius is only an expression of associated cognitive ability. Bringing together data in unique and elegant ways. Genius is independent of any test- IQ or otherwise. Genius is found in the ability to make things bigger, bolder, and more lasting in an environment that seeks to box it in and limit it to what is worthy of compensation and mass consumption.
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Is a genius on the basketball court worthy of a label that fits Einstein, Edison, or a host of names that push the boundaries of knowledge and created new worlds for everyone. We won’t go into academics versus athletics my soap box is tilting. Genius is a function of data, imagination, passion, and an all consuming desire to change the course of human experience for the better. To lift us all one more step beyond the hunters-gatherers from which we spawned. Information beings the process that perpetuates itself with consecutive never-ending always expanding pursuit because as more people get involved the further along the road to tomorrow we get. Information becomes leveraged, growing with compound interest, becoming more valuable with each new iteration. More valuable then gold, more powerful then governments.
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Information, data, has a life all its own. Just as life was once breathed into our species, we now have become the creators of a our own life growing beyond its originally purpose. Let it grow, be involved in its perpetuation. Feed it, nourish it. Make it greater than any one person; share, collaborate, and expand. See where you can take any little sliver of data and then pass it on and let someone else take it from there. It is the grand design, learn and grow.
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We call this new creature- the Internet.