Dangerous Minds pal Jason Silva—you may know him from Current TV—sent me this epic rant, caught on video recently. He writes, “I wanted to share this video not as an empirical scientific presentation, but rather an imaginative interpretation of an idea that captured my imagination. The goal was to share an enthusiastic reflection on a wild hypothesis. This is what I would call a moment of ‘ecstatic awe.’”

Terence McKenna wrote in Food Of The Gods that language is a synesthetic technology that allows us to encode information in sound patterns and transmit it wirelessly through time and space. It is, in essence, the first information technology. He believes the catalyst may have been the boundary-dissolving effects of psychedelic mushrooms ingested by early hominids. It’s a wild idea, but it inspired this expository discourse.

In Tron, the main character longs for a reality of his own construction:

“The Grid. A digital frontier: I tried to picture clusters of information as they flowed through the computer.. what did they look like? Chips, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see.. And then… One day… I got IN.”