[xikrib]

I liked this. It can be read as a very timely articulation of the age-old human obsession with platonic ideals. The quest for 'the seamless flow of information' is so much like the quest for true democracy, spiritual enlightenment, immortality, a unified scientific theory, artificial consciousness, transcendence before it... In the end we always re-discover that our noble ambitions don't free us from our mortal and earth-bound bodies, and that makes us feel sad. We're not gods after all, we're monkeys who managed to self-evolve the hair off of our bodies and are, for the present moment, transfixed by programmable glowing rectangles ... Importantly, this failure to be anything more is what reconnects us to ourselves. Albert Camus comes to mind:

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”