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12:4

(In »Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity«)

The Internet is of course the fourth dimension in the universe of language. If we had asked someone a hundred years ago how that person would perceive a world where billions of people and trillions of machines are intimately, communicatively, entangled with each other at every moment, constantly communicating, this fourth dimension of language would hardly have been called anything other than magic. The Internet has such dramatic consequences and thereby entails such a radical revolution that we must also regard this phenomenon as a fourth dimension in relation to three-dimensional physical space. Global geography is being rocked to its foundations because of the radically truncated distances on the planet – this applies both to human and mechanical players – that the Internet entails. And every time this magic appears, it means that a new hope is born. It does not require any unrealistic superfluity of historical insight to understand the human need for utopias. For without utopias, there are of course no visions, no ideals in common to strive for; and without visions there is of course no hope, at least not in the form of any concrete formulation that can constitute an objective for how society should be organised. To long for the utopia is therefore not to wish for the impossible; it is rather to understand the importance of thinking the magical, that which today seems completely impossible, as something that is tomorrow’s most necessary, beautiful and actually most reasonable possibility. So what then does the road to the utopia look like?