The Facebook Interview (revisited)

Recently, a Facebook friend named Adam Lee (pictured right) asked me a couple of questions about Facebook. Said he was writing an article on... well, Facebook! Thought I'd share my response with you...

Where do you think Facebook is heading?

Consider the unimaginable ways young people can find themselves becoming billionaires in the digital age: back in the mid-1990s Larry Page and Sergey Brin were 23-year-old computer studies undergrads at Stanford U when they stumbled on a new algorithm for a faster, more free-associating search engine called Google. Today each is worth USD16.7 billion.

Then there's Mark Zuckerberg who started Facebook in February 2004 as an interactive social networking website for the campus crowd while he was in college. I hear Yahoo! offered Zuckerberg USD1.7 billion for Facebook last year - and he turned down their offer. Last I heard, MSN estimates that Facebook is worth USD15 billion.

My point is: these youngsters have been able to turn a simple idea into a complex income-generating engine by identifying two basic human needs, viz., the desire for information and the desire to feel connected. These desires are very much in alignment with the incoming frequencies of the Aquarian Age (the Water Bearer symbolizes the dissemination of wisdom acquired during the Capricornian phase of introspection and consolidation, and the Piscean phase of dissolution and disintegration of ancient taboos).

Today more and more people regard a laptop or tablet (and now smartphones) as an essential personal accessory. Instant messaging, virtually free text-messaging, Skype and a whole array of connectivity tools has been facilitated by advances in satellite communications that would leave our grandparents scratching their bald pates. This is what I call the age of server-assisted telepathy when a planetary mind is emerging from the preceding centuries of technological development. Buckminster Fuller, thirty years ago, called it "accelerating acceleration." By this he meant that quantum advances in technology would soon hurl us beyond the gravitational pull of the tragic past into a comic/romantic future.

Take Facebook's burgeoning popularity: within two years just about everybody I know who owns a computer, tablet or smartphone is on Facebook. My daughters and their far-flung network of cousins are now on my Facebook friends list. For the first time ever, the separate realities of family and friends are merging in cyberspace. And I just saw an interview with Zuckerberg taped in May 2007 where he quoted the figure 45 million as the total number of Facebook users - that was almost 6 months ago. I figure at least 250,000 new users sign up every day. In June 2017 Facebook hit 2 billion monthly users, making it the world's largest virtual community.



Where is Facebook heading? Who da fuck knows? Right now everybody complains that they're wasting too much time on Facebook (and a few months ago I was bitching about the same thing too) - but the reason Facebook is distracting people from work is that they're having more fun just playing with each other in harmless ways (try throwing a sheep at me in real life!) Friends I hardly get to see in real life are poking, tickling, cuddling, and loving me - albeit virtually but it sure feels nice! Hotties I've long wanted to meet give me cheap thrills by appearing in my inbox and adding me as their Facebook friend. Faces I haven't seen in 25 years are suddenly among my Top Friends! Wow... why ask where a party is heading when it's in full swing?

What's in it for you in Facebook? What's your story?

I live a long way from the city. In my younger days I was a real party animal. For me Facebook is a 24/7 party without the hassle of driving 3 hours, finding a parking space, and worrying about not getting laid. On Facebook you KNOW you're not gonna get laid because it's all make-believe, all a buncha pixels - but you can let go and sink your virtual teeth into that plump backside on some hottie's profile photo without getting slapped (except virtually of course)... and you can bite five pairs of buttocks at one go if you like. This is something I've long dreamed of doing. I've stopped cursing Facebook. In fact I've just written Mark Zuckerberg a thank-you note. Hope he responds with a $50-million deposit in my PayPal account.

On re-reading the above in February 2018, the whole world has shifted into a different set of probable timelines. Recent revelations have unearthed the distinct possibility that digital megacorporations like Google and Facebook may well have been created by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an offshoot of the US Department of Defense). In effect, they could be products of the "Deep State" designed to effortlessly keep humans under electronic surveillance while our behavioral patterns are closely monitored by ultra-secretive agencies like the NSA, CIA, MI6, Mossad, ASIO and so on (ultimately these covert agencies transcend political ideologies and national boundaries and they all serve the same Central Nervous System (variously called Yahweh, Allah, God, Ialdabaoth, Artificial Intelligence, or the Archons of Fate). 

To me, Google and Facebook serve as useful tools - and tools are either benign or malevolent, depending on who uses them and towards what agenda. If you're paranoid, as many of my friends are who refuse to use social media and insist on sticking with email (even though they must realize that even text messages and phonecalls can be routinely intercepted and stored in gigantic databases like Prism (and now Palantir) - indeed, it is now known that software giants like Microsoft and Apple are ultimately extensions of DARPA and they all come with sneaky backdoors into their operating systems, allowing personal computers, tablets and smartphones to be turned against their owners as spyware.

[First posted 28 October 2007. Reposted 7 February 2018 & 30 December 2021]

My Pilgrimage to Bamboo River (Part 5)

The transition to 2010 was one of the most joyous New Year celebrations within recent memory.

I heard the fireworks go off from my bed in Ward 4A at the Sungai Buloh (Bamboo River) Hospital and felt fully expanded and exultant.

I had just been resurrected, reborn, renewed – after being in a life-and-death medical crisis for nearly a week, most of it spent comatose in Intensive Care.

Now I felt bubbly and sparkly and ready to go… anywhere!

My brain was processing data much faster than usual. I suddenly realized that, between yesterday and today, an entirely new reality option had blossomed. My neural circuitry had been cleansed of gunk and my biocomputer had had a complete systems upgrade.

Whilst a great number of earth humans remain locked in step with the analog world, millions others are now fully functional in the digital universe where information that used to occupy gargantuan libraries can be compressed and stored in a flashdrive smaller than a lipstick.

In the analog world it’s hard work storing and preserving master prints of films, for instance – takes up row and rows of shelves and each film will take up at least two reels weighing several kilos.

In the digital world you can store hundreds of full-length feature movies in a portable drive the size of your wallet. Not only that, you can then compress the data and upload these movies on some videostreaming site where millions can access it either for free or for a small fee.

My adoptive grandfather, holistic visionary R. Buckminster Fuller, was two or three generations ahead of his time. He had speculated on all these possibilities at the midpoint of the 20th century when computers first began to be used for academic research and Macintosh inventor Steve Jobs was but a gleam in his father’s eye.

Bucky spoke excitedly about “more-for-lessing” – achieving greater results with less effort through the savvy use of interactive, interconnected, self-regenerating synergetic circuitry.

You can see how this works via replication: millions of manhours go into initial research and development of new tech, but once the prototype is finetuned and tested, it can be endlessly replicated till the cost of an Intel chip is far lower than that of a chocolate chip cookie. That's why computers that used to cost $10,000 can now be sold for $500 - and yet pack 50,000 times the data processing power.

As Bucky figured so many decades ago, there are actually far more than enough resources to support all life on earth without any necessity for energy competition and conflict.

Lack and poverty can be made obsolete, Bucky realized. They continue to exist only because that makes certain privileged classes feel more fortunate. Old habits die hard. In the digital age, feudal power hierarchies exist only on the inertia of a cruel and murky past.

In recent days more and more people have been dropping Buckminster Fuller’s name – as a result of having attended self-regenerating workshops like Money & You (a program largely inspired by Bucky’s monumentally innovative work).

Perhaps not many actually understand what Bucky was on to – but not wishing to appear slow to others, they have been nodding in agreement. If you truly understood what the man was saying, you’d be floating several inches above the ground in ecstasy, celebrating the end of drudgery, slavery and the unnecessary evil of having to “earn a living” according to the dictates of a top-heavy dinosaurian power structure.

Wide awake in the hospital ward, I had spent hours paying tribute to all the innovators and creative geniuses who have ever touched my life and inspired me. From Walt Disney, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Orson Welles, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Anton Wilson - to Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Zappa, John Lennon, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and Bobby McFerrin – we are the fortunate heirs to infinitely vast riches of the imagination just ripe for the havesting.

Don’t forget scientific pioneers like Leonardo Da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Faraday, Graham-Bell and Steve Jobs. Try spending 30 minutes thinking about all these great humans whose work has contributed to making our lives so much easier and potentially more meaningful than those of our remote ancestors who had to constantly worry about mere survival. You’ll undoubtedly begin to feel a profound sense of gratitude for your rich genetic, cultural and spiritual heritage.

Although I have always gravitated towards the arts and humanities, my interest in scientific research and technological innovation keeps me more or less up to date on what’s happening at the cutting edge. When printed circuits appeared they made it possible to miniaturize and transistorize, so that once bulky equipment became more and more portable.

Look at the clutter and tangle of wires and interconnectors in an analog recording studio or film set – and compare it with the tidy elegance of a digital device like Apple’s iPad.


The new generation of Intel chips have achieved superconductivity through the medium of ionized air itself, thereby formally ushering in the Aquarian Age wherein the Water-Bearer symbolizes universal dissemination of life-enhancing information through the element Air, which represents Intelligence itself.

The three most ubiquitous substances on this planet are water, air… and the biomagnetically supercharged gravitational force we infuse with emotional content and call LOVE. That's right, folks - that ambiguous four-letter word we have so glibly tossed around to sell chocolates and roses every Valentine's Day holds the key to our ultimate liberation from what James Joyce called the nightmare of history.

Love - the vital, emotionally-charged gravitational force which holds planets in orbit around suns, and suns in orbit around galactic centers - and which is the underlying basis and reason for Creation itself - is actually all we need. The Beatles were right.

It makes sense that we swiftly phase out the use of fossil fuels (and I include enriched uranium in this category). Apart from the obvious benefits of harnessing solar and wind power, we can derive all manner of power from water simply by learning to control the separation of hydrogen from oxygen.


As we proceed further into the Aquarian Age, our collective thought fields will prove to be a force that can be harnessed like a team of horses. By consciously attuning and harmonizing our collective thought fields, we will attain a telepathically coherent communityhood wherein petty ego conflicts are transcended and our wills focused like a laser to swiftly manifest desired goals.

If we replace our pre-programmed tribal fears, hostilities and suspicions with affection, mutual attraction and profound love for one another – imagine the vast power at our disposal.


That, folks, is the way forward: the path to limitless abundance, beyond lack and scarcity, beyond hunger and homelessness – and existential angst. It is NOT a pipe dream. It’s the blueprint of a New Heaven and a New Earth, restored to pristine health and beauty - and gladly supporting and nourishing all the lifeforms that call her home.

[Part 6]