To me, Hackers are alot like the "Bard's", and "Priest's" of the ancient mystery traditions. Travelling the known world sharing information, news from far away lands, stories of people serviving against the odds, legends of ancient kings, and there adventures, or the myths of god's. And just like the farmers, and vilagers of a 1000 years ago, the general public of today, like to here a good story, mythologised or not. To the farmers of a 1000 years ago, most of the lore spread by the travelling bards, and the priest of the temple's of old, held a lofty "elitist" type position in society, as most of there information was too complicated to understand, that is, what common farmer has the knowledge base to understand the mathmatical philosophy of "Pythagoras", or understand plainly the intricacies of the symbology, and metaphore of the ancient "cosmologies", few if any! To most they were just interesting stories, as with the mythology of the god's, the common (wo)man, does not want to here the detailes of what god's really are, and what they do, they only came to understand these abstract constucts when they were translated into forms more reckonisable, (i.e.) when they developed "personalities", and the god's became more like the common (wo)man, and there invisible cosmic activities where given forms like the day to day chores that the average farmer had to perform. > And as to the "net", to my mind, the network is a physical manifestation of what (we in magickal circles) refear to as the"ethyric plan", or the "near earth raelm", being a spiritual world that mirrors the physical, that is, every thing that exists in physical space/time, also exists on the ethyric plane, and vice versa (though one must know how to use the tools necassary to work in the ethyric) just like the net, and the tools we use to work with it. I see the net as being a modern continuation of the "great work", which is the age long goal of uniting the physical with the spiritual, for now we have the tools that allow us to unite as one unified group of individuals as no other tool in the history of our tiny little world ever has.
Slashdot Mirror
To me, Hackers are alot like the "Bard's", and "Priest's" of the ancient mystery traditions.
Travelling the known world sharing information, news from far away lands, stories of people serviving against the odds, legends of ancient kings, and there adventures, or the myths of god's.
And just like the farmers, and vilagers of a 1000 years ago, the general public of today, like to here a good story, mythologised or not.
To the farmers of a 1000 years ago, most of the lore spread by the travelling bards, and the priest of the temple's of old, held a lofty "elitist" type position in society, as most of there information was too complicated to understand, that is, what common farmer has the knowledge base to understand the mathmatical philosophy of "Pythagoras", or understand plainly the intricacies of the symbology, and metaphore of the ancient "cosmologies", few if any!
To most they were just interesting stories, as with the mythology of the god's, the common (wo)man, does not want to here the detailes of what god's really are, and what they do, they only came to understand these abstract constucts when they were translated into forms more reckonisable, (i.e.) when they developed "personalities", and the god's became more like the common (wo)man, and there invisible cosmic activities where given forms like the day to day chores that the average farmer had to perform.
>
And as to the "net", to my mind, the network is a physical manifestation of what (we in magickal circles) refear to as the"ethyric plan", or the "near earth raelm", being a spiritual world that mirrors the physical, that is, every thing that exists in physical space/time, also exists on the ethyric plane, and vice versa (though one must know how to use the tools necassary to work in the ethyric) just like the net, and the tools we use to work with it.
I see the net as being a modern continuation of the "great work", which is the age long goal of uniting the physical with the spiritual, for now we have the tools that allow us to unite as one unified group of individuals as no other tool in the history of our tiny little world ever has.
end.