By Richard Thieme

In “Islands in the Clickstream: Telling Time by a Broken Clock,” I said:

All organizations are morphing into forms appropriate to the digital world. In retrospect, we will see our current structures the way Christians see remnants of what they call “pagan” myths in their stories.

The miraculous is another name for that which is unpredictable from inside the old model. Trying to understand what’s emerging using old words or images is like telling time by broken clocks. We are riding a ship on the river of time as the ship is being built. It will take time to finish that ship, and when we do, we will already have been becoming something else.

A friend responded:

“On the Mayflower, the Pilgrims brought over a printed copy of the Geneva Bible. On the good ship Digital, what form do you suppose the ‘Bible’ will take?”

Not only scriptures but all significant texts will morph into dynamic forms that are interactive, modular, and fluid (like this one)… self-modifying structures that respond to responses from all who engage with its multitude of faces. Everyone encountering that 3D space or fractal narrative will change and be changed by it.

Real canons are open evolving and free … including canons (we see now) that seemed to be fixed in print but which in fact evolved in the consciousness of readers, changing every time they were read.

Sacred digital space will look more like a flowing mobile than a straight-line text, except that the nodes of the mobile will be mobiles too. But as I said, printed texts are like that too (we see now), the text rewritten by each reader’s experience: our linked modular minds the framework of the text which flows like electric words on a sign through the bulbs of our brains.

By Richard Thieme

Back in the good old days of a Spain ruled with an iron fist by General Francisco Franco, everyone who mattered always knew where everybody else always was.

Every means of transportation was watched by two members of the Guardia Civil, the state police known for their three-cornered patent leather hats. On every train, every bus, a pair of the police searched the crowd for “special” faces.

I rode a train one day from Cordoba to Grenada and found myself in a compartment with two Guardia Civil. I had lived in Madrid long enough to carry on a conversation. Nobody else in the compartment spoke.

One of the police suddenly asked if I knew why they must be so vigilant. I shook my head. A moment later, he was sitting next to me, showing me a book he said they studied every night. The book consisted of photographs of heads, shot stabbed crushed or beaten.

“This is what the enemy will do,” he said, “if we do not remain vigilant.”

When I returned to Madrid, the street door to my apartment was locked. Because I was a foreigner, I didn’t have a key. I clapped for the serreno.

The serreno was responsible for several square blocks. He had keys to the outer doors. When my door was locked, I clapped and clapped, the sound of my clapping echoing down the late night street. From wherever he was – usually inside one of the “closed” bars – the serreno came running to open the door.

His real job was to report anyone out of the ordinary to the state police.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation recently proposed a regulation requiring insured nonmember banks to develop and maintain “Know Your Customer” programs. The regulation would require each nonmember bank to develop a program designed to determine the identity of its customers, the sources of their funds, and the normal and expected transactions of its customers. Banks are to report any transactions that look suspicious.

We were always safe on the late night streets of Madrid. The Guardia Civil, who questioned criminal suspects, were always assigned far from home, lest sentiment interfere with their work.

Nor does sentiment interfere with surveillance cameras in city centers, biometric identifiers, or the work of the FDIC. Privacy always dies for good reasons, always in the name of security and safety.

And unlike the serrenos in Franco’s Spain, we don’t even have to tip.