Updated 6 months ago
Mark Twain could have written this in 2024. This would be a perfect preface to a Neuralink documentary. Musk fans would anachronistically point to his use of the N word in Huckleberry Finn as proof of his free speech cred.
Clemens was a visionary – if alive today he might have been somewhat of a Ben Franklin-style psychedelic Substack Zippie, or at the very least, an adventurous literary eccentric in the tradition of Tom Wolfe or Kurt Vonnegut:
“This age does seem to have exhausted invention nearly; still, it has one important contract on its hands yet – the invention of the phrenophone; that is to say, a method whereby the communicating of mind with mind may be brought under command and reduced to certainty and system. The telegraph and the telephone are going to become too slow and wordy for our needs. We must have the thought itself shot into our minds from a distance; then, if we need to put it into words, we can do that tedious work at our leisure. Doubtless the something which conveys our thoughts through the air from brain to brain is a finer and subtler form of electricity, and all we need do is to find out how to capture it and how to force it to do its work, as we have had to do in the case of the electric currents. Before the day of telegraphs neither one of these marvels would have seemed any easier to achieve than the other.
While I am writing this, doubtless somebody on the other side of the globe is writing it, too. The question is, am I inspiring him or is he inspiring me?
I cannot answer that; but that these thoughts have been passing through somebody else’s mind all the time I have been setting them down I have no sort of doubt.”
I first came across this while viewing a form letter Robert Heinlein wrote to fans:
