From one point of view, all we humans do is communicate. We broadcast information about ourselves all the time, just as our planet broadcasts information into space. (Isn't there a better name than "space?" "Space" sounds like Greeks calling all the non-Greeks "barbarians." The Universe is teeming with life, and all we can call it is "space?")

But I digress.

All humans communicate, yes, but there are also men and women who call themselves "professional speakers." I am just back from a convention of two thousand of them. The National Speakers Association has been a tent for twenty-five years under which every conceivable kind of "professional speaker" comes to work and play.

Nick Carter, one of the great veterans of the speaking business, calls himself a professional communicator, not a professional speaker. By making that distinction, he captures the essence of life in the digital world.

The digital world is interactive, modular, and very much in flux, and because it is back-engineering the way we imagine everything, we see our selves as modular and transitory too. We imagine life as a kind of plug-and-play digital game. We build symbolic modules in our minds and live in those morphing modules even as our intuition tells us that there is a larger matrix of possibility from which they all emerge.

In a world of simulations, we achieve our goals by maintaining some consistency of artifact and design. We sustain a professional identity the way a business engages in branding. In a way that prior generations could not imagine, our intentions really do generate the landscapes of our lives. The primacy of intentionality extends far beyond tasks or projects to our selves and personas, the identities we present to the world. We become who we intend to become, and when we alter the matrix of our lives, when we move through any kind of dramatic passage or transition, we must build a symbolic bridge even as we cross the chasm to become the self we are imagining, adding modules to the modules of which we are already built.

Back to that great circus of "professional speakers." Enter the tent, the first thing you notice is that every single one of us is hopelessly neurotic. What a bunch we are, honestly. We traffic in symbols, nothing but symbols, and because we know that we're always dancing in the middle of the air, we pretend all the more that there's firm ground under our feet. We look around at all the beautiful people and compare our fluttering, anxious insides with the polished veneer of these practiced actors. We come together because we need one another deeply, but the minute we're together, we pretend we don't. We present images of accomplishment and success that would make even a Bill Gates doubt his vocation.

But then, that's all of us, isn't it? Isn't that life in a knowledge economy? What happens at that convention is what happens in the digital world. We can choose to believe the symbols or we can see through them to both the childlike fears and the real contribution of the people who invent them. We come back to both the digital world and that convention because every year we find more real connection, more modular structures to channel the flow of energy and information, and suddenly we discover that we have real friends in a world in which no one can know enough to make it alone.

Maintaining integrity in a world of simulations is, at best, pretty tricky. Integrity once meant "walking the talk," the congruence of action and speech. Now integrity means alignment of our selves and ALL of the digital images we create.

The worst mistake we can make is to confuse our presentations for the imperfect foundation on which they stand.

The story is told of a violinist whose notes were diced and spliced by an expert mixer until the concerto he had played a dozen times had been turned into one perfect performance. He was listening to the sound track with obvious delight and turned to a colleague. "Isn't that magnificent?"

"Yes," said his friend. "Don't you wish you could play that well?"

Our egos always airbrush our self-portraits. Our minds are like PhotoShop, making everything look better. The war between memory and pride, noted Nietzsche, is always won by pride. Session musicians are replaced by synthesizers, actors by their own more perfect digital scans. How can we believe those images represent who we really are? And yet … they do … because our images of ourselves are generated by interacting in and through the matrix of those digital symbols. Mental artifacts couple with digital ones. The simulation becomes the real landscape, perception becomes reality. The symbolic universe we inhabit defines our larger life in a way we can never escape.

"Professional speakers" had better become "professional communicators" and so had everybody else. The symbolic modules we construct are bridges between the thought of taking a step and the step itself, a Big Toy we can climb to the next level of self-representation and self-understanding. We need that bridge because we are headed for a cliff. The cliff is our extinction, the moment of our translation as a species into something else, something that we half-create and half-discover as we take control of our evolution, spread throughout the solar system and to the nearest stars, and become … utterly other.

Yes, we do need a better name than "space" for the gregarious universe. And a better name than "human" for what we are becoming. And a better name than "aliens" for the others we encounter. And a better name than "writer" or "speaker" for people who give names to emergent realities. Both the names and the realities have already been invented somewhere in the deeper matrix under us all. We ride a river of archetypal energy streaming from an underground canyon, rafting a whitewater river that is a dream, not ours, under a sky of multiple moons.

July 4 1998