You did hear me point out that I'm not in fact a Marxist, right? I don't depart from the canon, I make off with it. In fact, I'm not a Marxist any more than Marx was. I am also a historically-oriented social theorist, with a set of concerns that take their root in political economy and technology. I'm no philosopher, as my co-author was no computer programmer at all. Neither of us follows one another's doctrine, of which there isn't any. We are thinkers and politicians who are part of the long struggle for freedom of thought. I think the idea we call "Marx" along with the idea we call "Darwin" and the idea we call "Freud" are the greatest intellectual achievements of the period from the French Revolution to the First World War that we call the Nineteenth Century. Comprehending the implications of those ideas is what it means to have attained intellectual culture in our time, from my point of view: being "against" one of them makes no more sense than being "against" Isaac Newton or Pablo Picasso. But I'm not a Newtonist or a Picassist, either.

I didn't say increasing the quantity of intelligence was important for increasing class consciousness: I said it was important for solving the myriad hard problems that collectively constitute the problem of subsistence. I said that from my point of view there is no point of investment of social force where one can achieve as many advances as one can here. I was then and I am speaking of advances on the problem of subsistence: how, as I said, to make a human population as large as the carrying capacity of the planet itself live without poverty and deprivation. I think, as I said, that the point of attending to the brains growing within the network is that the brains thereby liberated think about the problems of survival and welfare of the people around them. By multiplying the quantity of human intelligence we multiply the intelligence devoted to human survival and welfare, which does not scale by quality, but by quantity. These are the things I said, and which I think. Perhaps you think something else, and that would be the place for us to resume the conversation. The rest of this schematic below doesn't seem to be responsive to what I said at all, wherever it comes from.