Civilizations Are Creatures

[zengrifter]

Civilizations Are Creatures

By Kevin Kelly | Technium

Civilizations are creatures. They are organisms that live very long and that spread very wide over the surface of the earth. Civilizations are beings that consume energy and produce ideas. These ideas materialize as cities, institutions, laws, art, books, and memories. A civilization may persist for thousands of years, evolving constantly. Compared to fleshy animals, or even the wet tissue of the human mind, civilizations are the fastest changing organisms on the planet.

Today’s civilizations differ from those in the past by their greater degrees of complexity and their greater speed of transformation. Over time civilizations have progressed from amoebae-like blobs with few strands of intelligence to complex multi-nucleated creatures with many spans of adaptive learning. Western civilization today possess an embryonic memory. It is called a library.

For a civilization to survive ten thousand years requires a ten thousand year storage function -- a ten thousand year library. This is not the only thing a ten thousand year civilization needs, but it is a vital need. A 10K library is the embryonic stem cell for a very long memory needed to steer and sustain a society over that very long time period.

...continued here - http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archiv...izations_a.php