[iDC] One Laptop Per Child - MIT/Negroponte Initiative

[john sobol]

this is a short excerpt from the middle of my one-man show, 2 Million 
Years of Technology. The work is a poetic manifesto that illuminates 
the urgent need to build alliances between oralists and digitalists to 
help digitalists overcome the attempted literate colonization of the 
virtual sphere, and to emancipate oralists from the economic oppression 
of literate capitalism...i strongly support the OLPC initiative because 
i fear the monster in the box less than I respect the collective 
creative intelligence of the African and Aboriginal children using 
it...

_________________


it is impossible to overestimate the degree to which literacy has 
subverted, usurped, conquered orality

whenever and wherever oral cultures and literate cultures have met

they have fought to the death

and in every case

every single case

it is the oralists who have been defeated, destroyed, assimilated

because literacy is more efficient

and evolution rewards efficiency


it’s that simple

*	*	*

The truth is that we are experiencing

The end of uncompromised orality

The very end

In our lifetime

Of pure primordial oral consciousness

The original linguistic killer app

With which our species has shaped itself over 99.9% of its history

While we cram our ears with Britney Spears

Thousands of languages are dying

Each containing sacred songs, spells and secrets

Vocabularies that have unlocked for countless generations

the mysteries of self and space

Self and soul

Self and so much else

Magical consciousness

Shamanic wisdom

The ancient sounds of being beyond the bookish world

Lost

All lost

Never to return

It is a moment of epic significance for our species

And for all that

Largely unacknowledged

And utterly misunderstood

 
*	*	*

But even more remarkably

this extinction of orality occurs during the very same lifetime

As the birth of the next evolutionary killer app

the dawn of a new knowledge sharing tool

this epic conclusion occurs

alongside a beginning

of potentially vast evolutionary significance

Digitopia

The interactive internet

Currently linking a billion people around the world in real time

the next storytelling bomb

 

So, the three linguistic killer apps of human evolution

Are the spoken word, the printed word and the electronic word

The logos of the body, the logos of the book, the logos of binary data

And we are living today at the epic conjunction of these three eras, 
these three technologies, these three cultures

 

But in just a few decades

We - soft and grey

Will be the only ones left who remember

A time before the Internet

A time before home computers

Before everything

 

And then

What is lost

Will be well and truly lost

And the wisdom of the elders

Will either become utterly obsolete

Just another played out killer app

laid to rest on the slagheap of evolution

or

it will survive –

not unchanged

but vital

rooted

absorbed

 

yet here is the astounding irony of our age:

the literate hegemony

that has so quickly and completely established itself

and is so busy driving the last nails into the coffin of orality

is itself in deep shit

and things are only going to get worse for the literate capitalists

clinging to copyright

like a leaden life preserver

 

because just as the efficiency of literacy enabled the slaughter of 
oralists

pitted roaring tanks against charging horsemen

machine guns against machetes

pipelines against calabashes

so is the hyper-efficiency of this new killer app

about to massacre literate capitalism

at 100 gigaflops per second

 

welcome to the end of bluesology

the crisis of printopolis

and the dawn of digitopia

___________________

(excerpted from 2 Million Years of Technology)

By John Sobol
Copy with Love
www.johnsobol.com