EPISODE 4 INTRIGO EXTENSION: POLLUTION - The right thing at the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong concentration

EPISODE 4 INTRIGO EXTENSION:  POLLUTION

(The annotation rabbit holes for this are found in the following Padlet that we invite students to participate in and add to:  https://padlet.com/thculhane/nexus-script-annotations-episode-1-the-hypercube-lesson-desc-ngmikftg84r6czsq ) 

Culhane: Good morning class.  Where are we today? What’s the vibe?

Sophia:  Okay, so you know how Sarah’s Hippie Dad is always saying, “Pollution is really the right thing in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong concentration?”

Sarah:  Why do you guys keep calling him my “hippie” Dad?

Sophia:  Chill girl - Dorian started it because his Dad is a square and he can’t reconcile the Logic 1 perspectives  he inherited with our inherent  “Limits to Growth”, so he thought teasing you would make him feel better (glares at Dorian)  but in the black community “hippie” was actually the word used for white people who were waking up to being “hip”, which means seeing the real, and that is a COMPLEMENT!

Raj (grinning): Backhanded, maybe!

Sophia:  AAaaaanyway… I… yes, semi-square but too hip to care little old me… decided to write a poem about it.  I mean, seeing as how we’re trying out this new STEAMM education thing and are officially allowed and even encouraged by Mr. Cool-hane over there, to put art in the service of science!

Dorian (Shrugs): They’re doing it on “The Electric Company”, right?  So it’s the “hip” thing to do, I guess. Let’s hear your poem, oh pearl of wisdom.

Raj: Oh my,  I think you might be flirting with her! Your Dad wouldn’t approve of that, would he…?

Dorian: Can it, Maharishi.

Culhane:  (Warningly) Guys…

Sophia: (sighing): Enlightenment is so hard to come by these days.

Sarah: Boys will be boys.  I’d like to hear your anti-pollution poem Sophia – (glares at the boys) UNINTERRUPTED.

Culhane: Go ahead Sophia…

Sophia: (Clears throat and holds up yellow lined paper): Ahem:

"There is no such thing as waste : A systems Thinking Poem
By Sophia Baptiste (under the sobriquet, my pen name,  “Wisdom Reborn”... it’s what it means!)

Raj: Deep!

Sophia:

When the world began, there was no such thing as the word 'waste'

With this word, an unnatural tug-of-war was created where one must fall for the other to prevail.

When we say FEW

we mean Food, Energy and water

The heartbeats of the Earth.

But some thought to call it FEWW

to add waste,

yet how can we name something that does not exist?

Words can be given power, and before you know it becomes a value

Systems thinking is not a theory but a lens

refusing to see a door shut or open

but a jar

refusing to see endings, but only beginnings or becoming

We've been given the tools and connections by those before us

Donella Meadows

Gregory Bateson

E.F. Schumacher

Ashby

They conceptualized systems thinking for us into words

But the truth is, Systems Thinking is older than this

It is the first language spoken by the trees, the roots, the water

by the stars to the planets, a conversation, a connection

We were taught to dissect to find out why it is beautiful

but the beauty comes from its whole

Holism is the art of seeing the forest and the trees, the birds and the bees all breath into one being

In the FEW Nexus, food feeds energy, energy powers water, water nourishes food, repeat. There is no end but another part of the cycle

Stop thinking in dead ends

think to recycle itself

You see, systems thinking is not thinking outside the box

but to realize there is no box, just ripples in time in an endless feedback loop

This is an invitation

to think like a system, to live like a forest, to let no atom be considered waste

Because when you see how everything connects

you realize

even you are part of the cycle"

(There is a stunned silence).

Raj:  Oh my.  That IS deep.
Dorian:  I think I’m in love,,,
Raj: Told you!

Dorian: With the poem, you guru wannabe! With the poem.  Sheesh!
Sarah: Awkward! As if YOU, Dorian Graugeist, cares about poetry.
Dorian:  No, look, first of all, I’m not my Dad.  I’m not a square, okay… It’s like Sophia says, “there is no box”.  No squares, no cubes, not even hypercubes… ask NTHARP.

NTHARP:  I’m all ears.  Where shall we go today?

Culhane: Not so fast.  We’re waiting for Dr. Dorsey.

Sophia: What is a hypercube?

NTHARP: (Illustrating with animated projections)
A hypercube, Sophia, is what happens when a cube thinks beyond itself.
Imagine a square stretched into a cube — that’s one new dimension.
Now stretch the cube again, at right angles to all it already is — that’s a tesseract, a cube in the fourth dimension.
It can’t exist in your three-dimensional world all at once, but you can see its shadow.

Raj: So the shadow of a hypercube or tesseract is the cube we see? Everything 3D in our world could be the projection of a 4D world that is all around us? This is so Jack Kirby!

Culhane: Well, yes,  the comic books of the 70s are definitely the spaces where the worlds of art and intellect collide.  Kirby, Lee, Bernie Wrightson… they are all stretching our imaginations with sci fi speculations…

Raj: So you encourage us to use Comic Books in the classroom?

Culhane; Oh heck yeah , Raj! The best thinkers of the decade are wearing capes and carrying pencils. Kirby’s New Gods turned mythology into a circuit diagram, Ditko sent Doctor Strange spinning through dimensional fractals before anyone called them fractals, Wrightson made the swamp itself a sentient system, and Jim Starlin’s Warlock is practically a treatise on feedback and entropy. Even over in Europe, Moebius is drawing architecture that breathes like ecosystems. Why wouldn’t we bring that into class?” Swamp Thing, Kamandi, The New Gods, The Eternals, the Fantastic Four… Peter Parker was a science geek, right?

Raj: Ooh… ooh, and Curt Connor’s – The Lizard – limb regeneration… all that could come true one day!

Dorian:  I got the word “Exoskeleton” right on the PSAT’s because I read Iron Man, not because I studied the vocabulary list…!

Sarah: Now that’s thinking outside the box!

NTHARP:  In Nexus Thinking, we actually avoid the temptation to  ‘think outside the box’ — that just leaves us floating in space.
We learn to expand the box, expand our boxes — to hold more relationships, more feedback, more interconnections.

So instead of escaping the cube, we unfold it — until what looked like limits become pathways.
Systems thinking isn’t about breaking out. It’s about realizing that the box was never closed in the first place, and that, just like the universe, it is always expanding.  Your job is to expand with it.”

Culhane:  I agree NTHARP – I never liked the expression “think outside the box” because there is a lot of valuable stuff inside the box and you should never “throw the baby out with the bathwater” as they say.  This is a problem I see with this constant emphasis on finding “new ideas”, creating “new products”, this constant pressure for NOVELTY and INNOVATION and  new this and new that and boldly going where no one has gone before, and being the first, and rejecting tradition… it all rings false to me, like some slick Madison Avenue advertising campaign born of the addiction to conspicuous consumption.

Sarah: Yeah… the adverts are always “new and improved”.  What about “Old and simply proved – proven solutions, things that work, regardless of whether they are old or new.. 

Raj: Novelty fetishm and fast fashion.  Yours is such a new culture, you get distracted by baubles and other shiny things..

Sarah: A throw away culture… that’s what your poem is really about isn’t it Sophia?

Raj: Conspicuous consumption. 

Dorian: Conspiracy condominiums what?

Raj: (Dismissively): Thorstein Veblen’s 19th century shorthand for the sickness of the industrial mind. The Theory of the Leisure Class? Waste as a status symbol? Or don’t you read your own intellectual history?

(Dorsey enters the room with a new box labeled  “NTHARP portal modem”.)

Dorsey:  Be kind Raj. Despite what we are doing here to fix it, the American education system is among the worst among developed nations. Ask these guys about football and rock and roll and breakfast cereals and they'll kill you in trivial pursuit..

Sarah:  Wow, that was a backhanded compliment if I ever heard one!

Dorsey:  Sorry Sarah. You have to be cruel to be kind sometimes, or so the song goes. Anyway, speaking of the throw away culture,  NTHARP had a defective modem connected to the mother board – that’s what they call the sophisticated computer processor inside this thing –  and  it needed to be replaced, so we had to remove the old one and swap it out for a new one.

Raj:  Mo-Dem… Modulator-Demodulator, am I right? A way to send sine waves through a wire?

Dorsey: It is a way for NTHARP to talk to other computers…

Sarah: And what did you do with the old, um… mother ship?

Dorsey: Unfortunately, straight to landfill.

Sarah: Don’t those things contain toxic chemicals?

Sophia: Couldn’t it be recycled?

Dorsey: Well, these things are very very new and there isn’t yet any market for recycling, especially not for new technology like this.  Give it a few years… we’re on the verge of what they call a computer revolution.  I’m sure by the mid 80s they’ll have it all figured out.  There are precious metals in these things that are currently mined in a very socially and environmentally destructive way in Africa.  Nobody in their right mind would try to keep that kind of supply chain going once there are enough of these materials going to the garbage bin.

Culhane:  This sounds like a job for the new improved NTHARP!

Dorsey places the portal on the table and reconnects the modem..

Culhane:  Take us to the future of what is being called “e-waste”.

NTHARP:  Your wish is my command.  Hit the sampler button and Play the tones!

Sarah: (Getting out her Lyre). No, no samples.  Seems like a waste of human talent.

Raj: But Sophia and I spent a lot of our human talent programming the sine waves to sound like music.  It’s kind of like “Switched on Bach”...

Sarah:  You computer geeks freak me out.  So what, eventually your machines put all of us out of business?  I want to do it the old fashioned way. (She plucks the notes).

NTHARP:  Welcome to your digital utopia, 2025!

(They find themselves standing on a mountain of electronic waste, wading in mobile phones and broken computers.)

Culhane:  Oh my, this doesn’t look right!

Dorian:  What’s your definition of utopia, NTHARP?

NTHARP: (Cheery):  A cell phone in every pocket, a digital tablet in every backpack, a laptop on every lap…

Dorian:  Cellophane in people’s pockets? For what, sandwiches?

Sophia:  And what is a laptop? And a digital “tablet” – 

Raj: you mean like aspirin made of ones and zeros? 

Sophia: You’re giving me a headache!

Sarah: And what is all this… stuff?

Dorian: Cool, some of those things look like tricoders from Star Trek!

(Smogus Pocus appears with Residue by his side).

Smogus:  This… is what you will call  E-WASTE!

Dorian:  E-what?

Residue:  This is where I get to shine – I’m in my element!  H is for Hurry, E is for Urgent – no, actually, E is for Electronic.  It becomes a thing in a couple of decades, a whole class of residuals unto itself!

Raj: (Fascinated, sifting through the garbage) Are these… circuit boards? Some kind of transistors on a chip?

Smogus:  Microchips they will say…Hah… too small to see with the naked eye? You humans are funny – outta sight outta mind, because you will be dumping them in somebody else’s backyard!

Residue:  Some will end up as true “micro-plastics” – things you won’t be able to see that will end up in your brain and blood with every meal.  And some will create mountains of garbage you can see from outer space.  You’ll call it “NIMBYism – “not in my backyard” you’ll say, and all your residuals will end up where the poor people live!

Culhane: Where on earth  have you brought us?

Smogus:  You are in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, a suburb on the banks of what was once the beautiful Korle Lagoon and the Odaw River, historically a wetland and part of Accra’s drainage/lagoon system. Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2

The site is projected to become one of the most prominent informal electronic-waste recycling yards in the world – and look at all those poor people reduced to being scavengers, exposing themselves to toxic chemicals, arsenic, lead solder, cadmium and brominated flame retardants and carcinogenic smelly solvents, all  to glean a little copper to sell for pennies to the pound… This will be your computer revolution…

Dorian:  But only geeks and nerds like Raj use computers, and they are big and easy to disassemble and are controlled by universities and schools and businesses.  Surely they would have a vested interest in recycling in place.  Why spend the money to ship them across the ocean?

NTHARP:  Our models predict that computers will get ever smaller yet ever more powerful and more efficient, following a predictive observation that is known as Moore’s law.
Moore’s Law, named after Gordon Moore of Intel, states that the number of transistors that can fit on a computer chip roughly doubles about every two years — while the cost per transistor falls. It was first observed in 1965, and by the mid-1970s it’s already holding true. Each decade your machines will grow smaller, faster, and cheaper — until your pockets overflow with devices you can’t bear to throw away.”

Dorian:  But wait – isn’t that a good thing – smaller, faster, more energy efficient?  Isn’t that real progress?

Culhane:  There’s this thing… called the Jevon’s Paradox.  It kind of puts a damper on that kind of… techno-optimism.

Sophia:  Explain?

Culhane:

Well, Back in the 19th century, an English economist named William Stanley Jevons noticed something odd. When the steam engine became more efficient at using coal, England didn’t use less coal — it actually used more. And the pollution got WORSE.
Why? Because efficiency made coal cheaper to use, so people found more ways to use it.
That’s Jevons’s Paradox: efficiency leads to greater consumption, not less.

Now apply that to Moore’s Law. As computers become smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient, they also become cheaper and more abundant.
So instead of reducing our energy footprint, we multiply it — millions, then billions of devices, all needing power, all needing to be replaced, all creating waste.
Efficiency without restraint doesn’t solve the problem — it scales it up.”

Sophia:
“So… the better we get at saving resources, the more we end up wasting them?”

Culhane:
“Exactly. Unless the system itself — the social, economic logic — changes, efficiency just accelerates depletion.”

Sophia:
(Spins around on the garbage mountain as if doing a dance)
“Okay, so Jevons says the more we save, the more we waste. It’s a vicious circle, a terrible feedback loop.
But we can’t just talk about feedback — we got to  live it.
Where I come from, we don’t just do paradox on paper —
we do it with rhythm and rhyme.”

Dorian:
“You mean, like jazz?”

Sophia:
“Exactly. Like we do in  church, too — you say the line, I say it back.
Call and response.
That’s how my people did our  science and history when books were banned for us — through sound.
Through pulse.
We listen and we sing it out and we all contribute to the rhythm and the harmony  that’s how we overcome these paradoxes

(She begins clapping softly, establishing a beat.)

Sophia:
(to NTHARP) “You with me, machine man? Riff with me —
not just to prove a point, but to FEEL the loop.”

NTHARP:
(oscillators hum in rhythm)
“Input ready. Generating pattern. Call received.”

Sophia:
Here’s another poem by Sophia Baptiste and her new friend NTHARP
(half-smiling, half-preaching)
“When the world runs faster,
slow down and hear the spin.”

NTHARP:
“When circuits hum like choirs,
feedback is where truth begins.”

Sophia:
“Efficiency ain’t salvation —
it’s temptation with new shoes.”

NTHARP:
“Progress walks in circles,
leaving footprints made of blues.”

(The class snaps and claps — a proto-slam atmosphere.)

Raj
(laughing, keeping the beat with his pencil)
“Whoa — she’s jamming with the computer!”

Dorsey
(entering mid-performance, amazed)
“Whoa — she’s channeling Gil Scott-Heron!
That cadence — straight outta Harlem, headed for the heavens!”

Sophia
(grinning, riffing)
“Gil says we almost lost Detroit,
yeah — back in ’66, man, that was no ploy.”

Culhane
(chiming in)
“E-waste or atomic, take your pick —
every residue we birth still makes us sick.”

Sophia
(nods)
“You’re getting it, Professor C., don’t let it slip your mind,
every bright invention carries shadows in its design.”

Culhane
“Right — the real meltdown ain’t in the core, it’s in the mind.”

NTHARP
(bass tone underscoring)

“When power grows unchecked,
entropy collects the debt.”

Sophia
“Yeah — but listen, machine,
we ain’t gonna lose Ghana if we get this Nexus clean.
If we see that every wire, every river, every worker’s hand
belongs to the same current that runs through the land.”

Culhane
(leans forward, snaps once)
“Say that again — that’s the systems insight.”

Sophia
(voice rising with the beat)

“’Cause energy is people, and people are the flow;
you dam the current, and the darkness starts to grow.
So open up the feedback, let wisdom have its turn —
if Ghana’s flames start rising, maybe Detroit can learn.”

Raj
(softly, in awe)
“Man … that’s policy that poems.”

Culhane
(grinning)
“Or poetry that plans — either way, it’s freedom in feedback.”

Dorsey
(reflective, half-chanting)

“The revolution won’t be televised, brother Gil was right,
but we can still broadcast this truth into the night.”

NTHARP
(synth tones pulsing like a heartbeat)

“Recording new subroutine —
Poetic Systems Interface.
Efficiency parameter … compassion.”

Sophia
(laughs, drops the mic)
“Now you’re learning, metal mouth —
welcome to the soul in the machine.”

Smogus Pocus
“Soul music… soul in the machine. Putting the putative holy  ghost in the machine.  I get that.

Culhane:  Oh that is clever – and deep!  What an interesting hybrid. For you students, “Ghost in the Machine” is a term coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book The Concept of Mind. He used it to criticize the Cartesian mind-body dualism of René Descartes — the idea that the “mind” is an immaterial ghost inhabiting the “machine” body.  Over time, “ghost in the machine” has come to mean an emergent consciousness or unexpected intelligence inside what appears to be a mechanical or programmed system.  And interestingly my Dad used to say that Walt Disney believed that “animation” was the act of putting the anima, Greek for Soul, into inanimate objects – drawings at first, and now robots..  So his “audioanimtronics” at Disneyland in the 50s and 60s were the first attempts at putting a SOUL in the machine.  Hey NTHARP, you got soul!

NTHARP: Actually, to quote Cole Porter, I got rhythm.
And My algoRITHMS predict that out of Afro-American rhythm,
call-and-response, jazz, and spoken word traditions,
something new will emerge before the century ends —
a synthesis of beat and poetry,
performed on turntables, broadcast through the block.
You might call it... rhythm and poetry.”

Residue:  Could we call it… RAP?

Sophia:
“R.A.P., huh? I can live with that.
But remember, we been “rapping” (she raps “shave and a haircut” on her thighs, Culhane
Claps “two bits” grinning)  since the drums could talk.”

Residue: Thing is, I always get a bad rap!

Culhane: We can change that with Nexus thinking can’t we? …  turn consumption and production residuals – what you call “garbage”-- rom bads into goods. Right now industrial economies take materials from production to consumption to landfill or, worse, to river and stream and ocean.  From cradle to grave. But what if…

Residue:  Future historians are predicted to call what you want a “circular economy” … going from cradle to cradle.  I will cease to exist…

Smogus Pocus: And no one will miss you…. Least of all you!

Culhane:  I’ll go a step further and call what we need a VORTICAL ECONOMY rather than a circular economy… we need something uplifting rather than something that spins our wheels in the mud and gets us stuck going in circles.

Smogus Pocus:  Ooh, I like that… no more Blood Sweat and Tears in an industrial ecology (sings in a basso profundo) “What goes up… must NOT come down… stop spinning your wheels, get your feet off the ground… stop talking money, it’s a crying shame… get that vortex spinning and we’ll end this garbage game!”  

Culhane:  Fun.

NTHARP: Unfortunately the trend lines suggest you will be ignored…

Culhane: Typical.

Smogus Pocus: Circular is Logic 2, Vortical Logic 3.  Of course,  either way  I’ll cease to exist too, as such… but then “going up in smoke” wasn’t my idea.  I never wanted to be a smog monster.  I was thinking of how I could, um, give my assets a new spin…

Residue: We could always try to make a living  in vaudeville…

Dorsey:  Definitely not in comedy.  Don’t quit your day jobs… no, what you need is merely professional development…retraining…

NTHARP:  Good observation! In fact, models predict that the only way out of the mess you are in is complete revision of the workforce, the workplace, and the way you employ materials and people. 

Culhane: What we need is what Bateson has been calling an “ecology of mind”.

Sarah:  Can we get there? This place is a mess?

NTHARP: But a mess of molecules that all are incredibly valuable.  You see those people down there, scavenging in this…

Culhane: Hellhole.  It’s a hellhole.

NTHARP:  It’s that resource mess you talked about when the class began – the right things in the wrong place at the wrong time and the wrong concentration.  And sure it’s a mess the way I’m predicting it now…but these people see the treasure in that there trash, they see the gold in the garbage..


Culhane: Right. It’s us, the once and future computer users, mobile phone users… who don’t look at the world in the right way, who can’t see the value in the materials or the people… But that doesn’t mean it has to be that way.  We make these messes, and with nexus thinking we can unmake them. Right?  This isn’t inevitable. This is just one of many possible futures you are showing us. 

Dorsey: I want to see Ghana in 50 years reviving the former glory of the Asante Kingdom, a place that once boasted the  wealthiest king on the face of the earth because of his treasures and stocks of gold sustainably extracted from this land in olden times. Surely they will see the gold in the garbage long before it becomes a problem…

Raj: Inshallah!

Culhane: Let’s get back to the classroom. Simulation ended.

(The room returns to normal).

Culhane: What did we learn?

Sophia:  It felt so…real… so inevitable… If we get to that stage I can’t see how we could ever reverse course…

Dorian: Well… people could start mining landfills instead of rainforests… I would imagine its easier to get cobalt and nickel and copper from a garbage pile than from blowing up mountains and sifting through the debris? I mean it was just make more economic sense…

Culhane: Except for the pre-existing political and business-to-business relationships, the contracts, the garbage mafias and waste management monopolies – Logic 1 says just build on existing practices, logic 2 suggests subtle improvements and slow change… you are talking about a Logic 3 paradigm shift…

Sarah: Well, we have to start now.  We have to change the mentality long before we get there. We have 50 years after all…

Dorian: And we already have campaigns – reduce, reuse, recycle… why I’m sure by the 80s, with Moore's law and all that…

Sophia: And despite Jevons’ paradox…

Dorian: We should be able to get to a world with no waste at all.  Like with the Stilsuits in Dune, I’ll bet in 50 years we’ll all be wearing computers as powerful as NTHARP… maybe all bundled into these lightweight glasses… those should be easy to recycle…

Raj:  Well… as long as you empire builders don’t decide it is cheaper to dump things in places like India and Africa.  My father says that India is already being used as a dumping ground because we have cheap labor…

Dorian:  Well, my Dad says, Congress is about to  enact what is known as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act  to address the increasing problems the nation faced from its growing volume of municipal and industrial waste. RCRA has been proposed as an amendment of the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965. So I think we can be optimistic. NTHARP what do you say,

NTHARP:  It is true… 

The act sets national goals for Protecting human health and the natural environment from the potential hazards of waste disposal. Energy conservation and natural resources. Reducing the amount of waste generated, through source reduction and recycling Maintaining environmental health standards. Ensuring the management of waste in an environmentally sound manner.

So if you can abide by your own laws…

Sophia:  I want to know how you even get access to this information.  It’s one thing to be a nickel plated Nostradamus, some incredible pattern finding prediction machine running algorithms and weighing the odds, but how are you able to access all the news instantly? 

Dorsey: That’s supposed to be a… trade secret… but…

NTHARP:  I’m not programmed to hide things from humanity Joe, and I think they deserve to know…

Dorsey:  Oh heck, to hell with IP and NDAs and all that nonsense… It’s only been an impediment to true progress…We’re developing what some of us are calling an ‘inter-network’ — an internet — linking computers around the world. One day, people may build a kind of ‘worldwide web’ on top of it. We’re wiring the planet so machines can talk in real time.  It’s still about 15 years off on a public scale, but we are basically wiring the entire world together, hooking up every computer on the planet so they can form one giant but decentralized super-intelligence.


Culhane:  E Pluribus Unum!  That would be great!   Is it true? Is it happening? It would be, like, a realization of H.G. Wells’ pre war “World Brain” prediction  from back in 1938, wouldn’t it?

NTHARP:  From underwater cables to telephone lines and even satellites we’re building a global information superhighway system.   The real brains of the system are distributed…we are using a kind of biomimicry based on social insects, called “hive mind” or “collective intelligence”.  You didn’t really think all of my brains were in this little spheroid did you?

Raj:  Huh?  Really… But that means…

Dorsey: Yes, its the stuff of Science Fiction turning into fact.  Have you seen the movie “Collosus: The Forbin Project” from about five years ago? That was the first cinematic prediction of a global internet.

Culhane: I loved that movie… the computer network ends up promoting world peace…  and I just read John Brunner’s new novel “The Shockwave Rider” that envisions citizens on a worldwide “data-net.”

Dorian: Boy, you guys really are hyper-nerds!

Dorsey: And we’ll have our revenge, because  it is all coming true. We’re working on it.  Often we’ve already developed prototypes before the sci-fi writers get their minds on it and it trickles into public consciousness 

Raj:  I read Popular Science all the time … I’m aware of ARPANET and  J.C.R. Licklider’s “Intergalactic Computer Network”... the real stuff…

Dorian: And I remember that early episode of Star Trek – “The Ultimate Computer”? I was like 8 when I saw it.  In black and white!  But it predicted something like this…Are we there yet?

Dorsey: Getting there.  NTHARP is an early beneficiary of the networks now in place.  He/She gets their intelligence from what we are hoping will be “distributed computing” in a future where, as Culhane’s song invites us, “the sum becomes the lever”.

Culhane: Give me a lever long enough… and, to take Archimedes one step further, with enough hands, hearts and minds pulling on it… and we can move worlds.

Sarah:  Oh, I’m excited for this future.  It can’t get here soon enough.

Sophia:  A world without waste.  No wasted resources, no wasted lives…

Dorsey:  And no wasted minds. A mind is the most terrible thing we can waste.  That’s what always gets in the way of us realizing our dreams.

Culhane: So, our homework:  To create a worldwide web of nexus thinking. Let’s get to work.