A: Exactly. While we know that other cultures see things differently, it's difficult not to believe that our way of constructing reality is right. And obviously superior. The same goes for the little differences between us, differences amplified in cyberspace (or contact-space) inversely in proportion to the lack of a conversational context. How can we know what we're hearing when we don't know who we're talking to?

Q: Say what?

A: Put it this way. Insufficient bandwidth, an absence of real earth-time context to provide recognizable cues make it difficult to understand. Add differences in background and temperament and you have the makings of a real mess.

Q: What do you mean by temperament?

A: Different ways of perceiving, framing things. Like the Myers-Briggs.

Q: What's that?

A: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is based on Jungian personality types. It's popular because everybody using it feels validated. Each person in a group can see how everyone else contributes.

Q: Is that important to you, that everyone see that?

A: Yes. The group works better that way.

Q: Like Capricorns learning to live with Leos?

A: Right. The MBTI is like a horoscope for intellectuals. Instead of the stars, it locates why we do things in our genetic heritage.

Q: What's your temperament?

A: I'm an ENFP, an extroverted intuitive feeler. I see the future more clearly than what's right in front of my face. Visions are more real to me than chemicals in a test tube.

Q: And you think that's better than being, say, someone who makes things work? Someone who sees why a satellite won't work, say, if it's missing a few bolts?

A: Not better, but that's how things come to me. Dilbert thinks the fact that a pager is pink is irrelevant. I think it's clever. When the chips inside are identical, packaging matters. Marketing = product when we're selling perceptions. In the digital world, that's what there is. Diplomacy. How we present ourselves in symbols.

Q: You like to "network" too, I imagine?

A: Absolutely. Hanging out in the Web is the name of the game, even if it goes nowhere.

Q: Why would someone want to go nowhere?

A: Well, there isn't really nowhere to go, there's always somewhere. Like divination. The Web is a meaningful network of symbols that if nothing else displays ourselves for all the universe to see.

Q:

A: Anyway, I was talking about networking with a typical representative of the dominant culture here in the upper Midwest, an STJ if ever there was one. He said, "Sorry, but that sounds like a woman.

"Someone asks me to lunch," he said, "if I don't know by the time we're eating what they want, I get angry. The thought of meeting just to have lunch - just to "connect" - makes me nuts."

Q: Of course it does. So what's your point?

A: Don't you think that's interesting? Oh. Well, it's kind of a game, see, just getting out there into the Web. Start when you want and not be behind, quit when you want and not be ahead.

Q: Then how do you know who wins?

A: Everybody wins.

Q: Huh. Alice in Wonderland. But the Net's exploding with commerce, ways to make money. It does matter how it gets built, who gets what.

A: I won't argue with that. The rewards appropriate to knowing how to do whatever are always exactly that, the appropriate rewards. Meanwhile the Web is becoming the air we breathe. To me, that's what matters.

Remember the robber barons. For a generation, the men who built the railroads looked like they were going to own America. By the end of their time, though, the infrastructure had been built, most were bankrupt, and something brand new was being born. But the railroads were in place. That's what mattered to the next generations. Where is the Soviet Union now and the Space Race?

Q: So what will matter to the "next generations?"

A: [faraway look in his eyes] I don't have a clue. All I know is what's happening now.

Q: And …? What do you see?

A: I see only the obvious.

Our religions, the symbol systems we worship instead of God, are cracking and about to explode. The molten flow will coalesce into different shapes of beliefs, new gods rising in the steam. The shape of the global economy itself will pull political realities into the next century after it, like civilization bootstrapping itself, and what we call nations will be tribal identities or neighborhoods. The earth is our cradle, and the contact with other life that has already happened will quicken in our consciousness when we see what's right in front of our eyes. We'll re-invent and engineer ourselves and then be able to understand a little bit more where we came from and why. Maintaining social order will matter more than anything else. In the name of security and efficiency, we'll sell our freedoms for a mess of digital images. We'll invent more sports to keep people off the streets. We'll manage the aftermath of catastrophe. Humankind will move through a zone of annihilation in which everything we thought ourselves to be - everything - is called into question. We'll think we are losing our Mind, only to emerge on the other side when we least expect it. As we come to recognize our collective Self, what we call psi will become an integrated aspect of knowing. And what we call culture, when we have encountered deeply the way the alien races think, the way they construct their millions of years of non-history, will invent itself as an image in our minds seen through their eyes the way, for example, Hawaiians imagine Hawaiian culture in the reconstructed image of the European mind.

Q: Well. As you say, that's all happening now. That's nothing new. That doesn't give me any answers.

A: No. It's nothing new. It's just a digital monkey chattering to itself.

April 25 1998