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Teilhard's popularity is both understandable and puzzling. One can
certainly see the attraction to someone who believes with religious zeal
that information technology is the key to progress. It is all the more sig-
niicant that his major work appeared in the 1930s and '40s, well before
the personal computer and the Internet. 8 Nevertheless, the Jesuit priest
was steeped in controversy that remains today. His work as an arche-
ologist was questioned as he was either a perpetrator or a victim of the
hoax discovery of the Piltdown Man, one of many fraudulent “missing
links” that appeared in the twentieth century. Moreover, his writing got
him into continuous hot water with religious authorities who wondered
what the noosphere, a term they knew to have come from the work of
the nineteenth-century Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, had to do
with Catholicism or even Christianity. After all, Vernadsky was favored
by Stalin, who awarded him the Stalin prize in science in 1943. And
yet, Teilhard's work appears to preview so much of what comprises the
cornerstone of current myths about the information age and now cloud
computing. It speaks to those who see communication visionary Marshall
McLuhan's (1989) image of information as the global nervous system of
the human race, who view computer guru Ray Kurzweil's conception of a
networked world approaching the dream of immortality in what he called
the age of spiritual machines, and who see in these machines not just the
instruments to create material abundance, but the key to salvation. Teil-
hard created the spiritual foundation for what might best be called a cloud
of knowing , something that is conjured with each new IBM commercial
hymn to its SmartCloud. Kurzweil inspired a quasi-religious reading of
information technology with his arguments for a computerized version
of immortality, as science develops the capacity to save the essence of an
individual's intelligence and spirit in a storage device. Related to this is his
work on the “singularity” or what amounts to a technological superintel-
ligence, which Kurzweil believes is achievable in a few decades. It also
bears a striking resemblance to Teilhard's religiously inspired noosphere
(Kurzweil 2005).
The Cloud of Unknowing was meant as a spiritual guide to a life that
aspires to oneness with God. But it can also be read as a secular text with
the supernatural understood as a metaphor for the perfect machine, the
perfect algorithm, or the wisdom derived from a rich understanding of
knowledge and information made possible by technologies such as cloud
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