The first four topics re-write the talking points Howard sent to us. The points create an interactive middle ground between Howard's theory and the panel's response to Howard's book.

1) How does your idea of the Global Brain differ from either the PCP Group or the Gaia hypothesis? Does the Internet form a neural net on its own, or should we regard the planet as a superorganism and the Net as its latest expression? If the latter, then can information theorists recognize Deep Ecology?

2) Is sociality an accident of evolution? Do micro-organisms/atomic particles have language/communication? Is language/communication the basis of consciousness? Does Life = organization?

3) Is it inevitable that humans prey on one another? Does the technological Global Brain breed human predators?

4) How does a collective mind get to know reality? Can there be a reality outside of the collective mind? Could the Global Brain be in error?

The three following quotes come from the panel's reading of Howard's book. They express the ongoing concerns raised by interactions with previous Global Brain thinkers and the anticipation of meeting with Howard on July 29.

The first quote inspired us to create a "Plankton Node" in our virtual world.

1. "What struck me the most in the excerpt that I read was Bloom's emphasis that the punishment for nonconformity can be exceedingly harsh, even deadly. The process of creating systems whether it's a society or the technological Global Brain is not a pretty one. Bloom alludes to casualties of the nonconformists. He paints a pretty dismal scene -- conform or die. This is a very Social Darwinian stance to take. In that case, if what he says is true, we have a right to be wary of the Global brain, just as we are wary of conformity, mind-control, and social control, but the inevitable fact of the matter is: It's going to happen anyway, whether we want it or not. ("It" being the development of the technological Global Brain). So maybe what Bloom is saying is that we are all plankton (caught up in the tide of inevitable change which has been going on in various forms since the beginning. Remember in the PCP Group papers, they refer to people outside the global brain as mere 'plankton.'"

2. "Bloom's point that ideas generated by nonconformist subgroups on the outskirts of society may often become the meat of the mainstream is demonstrated by the way in which 'underground' material is absorbed by the mass media culture in record time (think rap and hip hop, fashion, etc.). When you speed up the historical clock, which is what Bloom is attempting to do, and turn history into a short subject film, instead of a microscopic epic focused on a few characters, you gain a fresh perspective on the flow of events. Once again however, we are presented with the notion of the Global Brain leaving earth, and via superintelligent nano-cyborg bacteria, becoming mega mind planet hoppers in outer space. What is it with these guys? With all the talk of connectivity and the importance of seeing both the individual and yet the larger picture simultaneously through the lens of balanced hierarchy etc., you'd think they'd see that, just like Dorothy says, "There's no place like home." I want to hear someone write about this identical material and say that there is a cosmos in a grain of sand. I am not talking Deep Ecology here, but rather asking for the logical conclusion of their own arguments. To me, the ultimate destiny of humanity is NOT about running around the cosmos as a transformer robot processor...Be here now, man."

3. "Bloom seems to have some issues with current critical thought: the word "Postmodern" is always followed by "Spartans" or "fundamentalists", as though those are the only postmodern modalities. He casts into this nasty mix a mish-mosh of the contemporary "dispossessed", and seems to want to terrify us with the sheer weight of their madness. For example, on page 225 he goes into a rather paranoid discourse about something he calls "old-style Southern males" (parameters please), and actually quotes the McJournalism of an ABC Weekend News report as a "statistic", that "43% of the murders in the US occur in the 16 Southern States"; that those males' testosterone levels shoot up to "almost 3 times the level of males in northern society". Excuse me? I can't read this with a straight face. These are the wacky statistics of someone with a serious agenda. And it borders on that territory which assigns itself to racial purity -- for all his argument to the contrary. His positive thesis, on the other hand, is worth a careful scrutiny, for it conjures up a Global Brain that includes all of the web of life, every bit of it. This is quite different from the Principia Cybernetica's G.B., which only includes that part of the web of life that has dial-up capabilities. So for Bloom, plankton cannot be left out: It has as much to say about how things turn out as the bacteria which create pheromones in our gut or the nuclear physicist at Stanford. He hasn't limited the arena of human knowledge and planetary benefit to the Internet and/or to scientific thinking. These are views I respect. But I can't stomach the baseless fearmongering and sensationalism that proclaims that only through violent upheaval and revenge of the terrorist downtrodden do we progress."