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that organized religion itself is the fertile playground of the disingenuous if not the malevolent. But, the evolutionary successes of religious systems offer lessons that we would all be better off to learn explicitly. We well know from experience that any method or mechanism derived from scientific pursuits can be misused, and yet we thrive on them in the face of this prospect. The social methods and mechanisms that have been honed through older evolutionary processes are no less double edged. It is better that we fully understand the risk and benefit equation as opposed to confusing the field of discourse through ignorance or simple indifference.

During the course of this book, we have attempted to do a bottom up survey of people and computers, encompassing a bit of how each works and a bit more about the mechanisms each has developed over the course of their evolutionary progression. We started this endeavor with the suspicion that religion figured into the mix in a central fashion; certainly with respect to people, but also with respect to computers. In particular, we were impressed with what we perceived to be a connection between the mechanisms of religion and the mechanisms used in our particular field of computing; to wit, secure systems grounded in secure cores, the base of personal electronic devices and their next mutation, the transcendent personal device. In this final chapter, we’d like to offer our assessment of at least some of the lessons that we think we’ve learned in the course of this journey. We set out with the intent of trying to better understand where we thought computer systems would tend to go given the evolutionary pressures that got them to where they are today. We’ve gone somewhat beyond this original goal by offering some considerations on not just these mechanisms, but on the social interaction systems within which these mechanisms function. That said, perhaps we should start this beginning of the end by relating the somewhat eccentric ponderings that set us off in the first place.

Stalking the Wily Metaphor

In our first chapter, we discussed the concept of contextual communication. We now recognize that this is an endowment of the mind’s ability to conduct metaphorical reasoning. We will borrow from Christine Brooke-Rose’s A Grammar of Metaphor the following example by the XVI^th Century poet Edmund Spenser:

The lodestar is a metaphor that reads on two levels, at first as the guiding star of the protagonist’s life, and then as the saving grace in the storm that is love. For the second level to work, the first level metaphor must be reversed in order to reach the broader context of the storm, which then brings a global metaphoric context to this extract of the poem. Our journey that produced the book began with imagery that suggested metaphorical context and here at the end we will again make use of such imagery and context in a parallel presentation of religious and computer systems. Similarly, the final book of the Christian Bible, Revelation, makes extensive use of imagery and metaphorical understanding. We have therefore adopted this as the title of our final chapter. A writing that has become a virtual icon for the field of apocalyptic literature, Revelation exemplifies many of the characteristics of social ecosystems that we have discussed in the pages of this current book. It is often an excellent illustration of the systems we’ve discussed as well as an example of the power found in them. It is a masterpiece of contextual communication. It offers

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