such is implied in Marcus Moltz original question , which prompted the above response by john heron. marcus says;

“we know that the level of consciousness of the people taking advantage of the web in their own understanding can be very very different (don’t forget, please, that besides your website and other honorable exceptions the Internet is the most important collection of boring nonsens, gossip, ads, porn, and hidden communication between global terrorists the world has ever seen). What’s integral or spiritual about that? It’s common but not a commons.â€?

‘spirituality’ is indeed an ‘organizer of collective behaviour’, as various religious collectives have demonstrated by putting themselves into the service of the ONEness of their choice, … which, as Marcus Moltz infers, comes in more than ONE flavour.

thus, cyberspace is an organizing milieu for both ‘idealist’ and ‘naturalist’ ONEnesses, … the GOD of the ‘idealist’ religions of christianity, islam and judaism (as has influenced western civilization) which is ‘beyond this natural world’ who is the CENTRAL seat of ‘arbitration’ of ‘what is right’ and what is wrong’ and solicits our cultivation of the ‘good’ and our eliminating of the ‘evil’. then there is the ‘Great Spirit’ of aboriginal religious traditions which inhabits (permeates) Nature and which is also found in the naturalist traditions of buddhist, taoist and vedic belief systems.

it has been pointed out that when idealists clash, destroying the very ‘hostspace’ we live in is ‘not a problem’ since our ‘eternal habitat’ is seen to lie ‘beyond nature’, while the naturalist believes that ‘nature is everything’; i.e. it is the sacred space that includes the spirits of ancestors together with the physically incarnate generations. for this reason, ‘naturalists’ are not nearly so nonchalant about doing injury to their homebase.

meanwhile, cyberspace is a ‘participative medium’ that facilitates the amplification of our existing human faculties, and thus it can facilitate the amplification of idealist initiatives on the part of ‘those who know best’ to ‘purge the world of evil’ at the same time as it can facilitate the amplification of naturalist initiatives that orient to ‘sustaining health and harmony in our shared, sacred living space’. and/or, at the same time, it can facilitate the amplification of our capacities to serve ‘economic utility’ (to let ourselves be organized by the pleasure found in the consumption of goods and services).

marshall mcluhan’s vision was that global media such as radio and television (and presumably cyberspace had it ‘arrived in his time’) would help to get us out of the ‘rut’ of thinking in the ‘idealist’ terms of ‘euclidian space’ (absolute ‘centric’ space) and restore our ‘naturalist’ awareness of inclusion in finite and unbounded shared living space. mcluhan says;

“If he’s [western man] civilized, he’s living in Euclidian space — closed, controlled, linear, static — abstracted from the world around him. Like language, it is an attempt to manipulate as well as interpret the world. … The Euclidian world or the mechanical world has become so familiar and comfortable to modern Western man that he views everything outside his windows as wild, “Let’s go into the wilderness for a hike, “ he’ll say to his kids — meaning nature. … Euclidian thinking is a way of retreating from all of the material universe to create a small manageable environment which one can ultimately control. It is per se an abstraction and characterizes all human artifacts, from the baby crib to the windowless skyscraper. … Euclidian thought emphasizes the mechanical and is focused on the creation of hardware. IT IS BASICALLY CENTRALIST IN ITS TENDENCIESâ€? [caps for emphasis are mine].

while cyberspace has been developing far beyond mcluhan’s ‘dreams of media’, his remarks on where the western psyche is tending to come from are nevertheless fully applicable. the western ethic is one of ‘making things happen’, assertive accomplishment within centrally controlled euclidian frameworks. the fundamentalist collective (p2p or otherwise) that is convinced they know ‘what good is’ and that seeks to purge the world of ‘evil’ is putting itself, physically and spiritually in the hands of a CENTRALIZED ONEness that operates on the basis of ‘control’, … ‘making things happen’, … ‘making the right things happen’.

our natural living space (acoustic space in mcluhan’s terms) doesn’t even come into this ‘idealist’ thinking. this manifests in our continuing orientation to ‘make-it-happen’ development of technology such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, genetically modified foodcrops because ‘it works’ in a small centrally managed local environments (on the farm, in our body). but such idealism fails to comprehend and account for the fact that ‘what we do’ transpires within a finite and unbounded cyclically self-renewing nature-space rather than in the empty and infinite euclidian space enclosures like those we check it out in (e.g. ‘the laboratory’), … and our euclidian western civilization is now witnessing many ‘back-reflections’ from our shared-space natural commons’ that highlight the realities that euclidian ‘idealism’ forgets (e.g. the destruction of fisheries and sensitive ecosystems, persistence to increasingly toxic levels of pharmaceuticals and pesticides which were never designed to participate in natural confluential renewal cycles, atmospheric and weather effects etc.).

spiritual ONEness has come in a CENTRALIST form in western idealist (euclidian) civilization and the implied center, to believers in christianity, islam and judaism, is ‘beyond nature’. this leads to behavioural orientation that is ‘centralist’ = ‘make-it-happen’ according to one’s local idea of ‘what’s good’ within a local managed/controlled environment. such controlling tactics intensify the need to enclose and control (to alienate from nature, as in ‘gated communities’ quanantines ).

those ‘who know what’s right and good’ are busily using cyberspace to develop tools for defensive warfare and surveillance if not pre-emptive strikes against ‘presumed evil others’ (e.g. nano-technology development), spiritually guided by the ONEness of a centralist GOD-beyond nature. for THEM (at the same time as for other spiritual ONEness flavours) cyberspace will be facilitative in the sense of a ‘global spiritual-integral commons’.

mcluhan was optimistic that modern media could restore our naturalist awareness that we are are all included in a common space. his idea of ‘the global village’ was not that of a collective unified by an idealized center beyond nature that would destroy the earth, if necessary, in ‘making the right stuff happen’ (purging the earthly world of ‘evil’).

p2p does not ‘get rid of’ ‘centralist organization’ where, as in the euclidian space paradigm, the centralization is virtual or ‘ideal’. mcluhan’s hope was that we would undergo a paradigm shift from using euclidian space as our framing-of-choice to instead using non-euclidian ‘acoustic’ space;

“The imagination is most creative in acoustic space. Acoustic space has the basic character of [the surface of] a sphere whose focus or ‘center’ is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere. A proper place for the birth of metamorphosis.� [i.e. acoustic space is a space wherein we become aware of our simultaneous mutual interdependency].

to conclude this comment, cyberspace appears to be a tool or technology of the ‘media’ or ‘commons’ genre. like radio, it is nothing without human participation (e.g. listeners) and like radio, it has the property of being able to amplify existing human faculties/capacities (communicating, learning, waging war, surveillance etc.). as marcus moltz suggested, it is a tool that can amplify the power and speed of both our wise and unwise initiatives.

in the hands of naturalists, it can restore our sense of inclusion within a common interdependent hostspace and give us a sense of shared destiny as in ‘mitakuye oyasin’. in the hands of idealists, … well, woody allen nailed that one;

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness [enslaved by evil others]. The other, to total extinction [mutual annihilation]. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. “