As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself". One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with. Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century. Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. The rhythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries. The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin, electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness. | 
