Lawrence Hagerty wrote The Spirit of the Internet at the height of the Internet Boom near the end of the last millennium. Subtitled Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness, the book does exactly that. However, the speculations are based on a lot of reading and careful examination of the way people think. I was particularly impressed by the connections he drew between people's eyes and their thoughts and the technologies they use to make it all fit together.

One of the key concepts that Hagerty builds off of is the noosphere, "an organized web of thought surrounding the Earth's biosphere; a sphere of mind encircling the planet; the collective consciousness of the human species." This web was shown the author by Teilhard de Chardin in a book published posthumously in 1950 titled The Phenomenon of Man. The idea is that ideas will eventually encounter other similar ideas, resulting in a cultural convergence of thought. Hagerty is of the opinion that this is happening on the Internet in real time in sort of a meta-dance.

There is much green thought built into the book in kind of peek-a-boo ways. There is also much use of religious metaphors and language. In one chapter he talks about how the Internet is connecting all the countries of the world together in a seamless web. In another he talks about how just governments obtain their powers from the consent of the governed. This is all tied together by bridges like chaos theory which are carefully annotated and referenced, making the book something like a hyperlinked web node of remarkable detail.

The very least you can get from reading this book is an understanding of how the Internet boom managed to sweep along so many people in a cloud of emotion that was somewhere between religious awe and a feeding frenzy. Many sound bites from people like Terence McKenna and John Perry Barlow that got me are between the covers, right where they fit in the development of Hagarty's arguments. If you enjoy discussing the practical implications of philosophy, you will get lots of useful material from The Spirit of the Internet.

Tian Harter

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