English Other Government / Politics

Hello everyone,

From the book Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman.


ELEVEN
Is God in Cyberspace?

There has never ever been a time when the human being was capable of doing something and yet, eventually, that something did not happen. That means one of three things: 1) the human psyche is going to change fundamentally (good luck with that!); 2) the worldwide social contract changes so that the “angry men” can no longer be “empowered” (good luck with that too!); or 3) ***boom!***
—Garrett Andrews, online comment on my October 21, 2015, column on NYTimes .com

Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our [expletive] problems.
—Comedian Samantha Bee, commenting on the Orlando massacre on her TBS show, Full Frontal, June 13, 2016

I have been on the road selling different books ever since I published From Beirut to Jerusalem in 1989. I’ve given several hundred book talks to different audiences. So what’s the best question I ever got from someone in the audience on any book? That’s easy to answer. It was at an event at the Portland Theater, in Portland, Oregon, in 1999, when I was promoting The Lexus and the Olive Tree. A young man stood up in the balcony and asked me this question: “Is God in cyberspace?”

I confess, I didn’t know how to answer his question, which was asked with the utmost sincerity and demanded an answer. After all, mankind had created a vast new realm for human interaction. (If the supernova is somewhere between Heaven and Earth, who is in charge there? Amazon or God on high?) The question seized me. So I called one of my most cherished spiritual mentors, Rabbi Tzvi Marx, a great Talmudic scholar whom I had gotten to know at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and who now lives in Amsterdam. I hoped to enlist his advice on how I should respond.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/boom

noun
a deep, prolonged, resonant sound.
the resonant cry of a bird or animal.
a buzzing, humming, or droning, as of a bee or beetle.
a rapid increase in price, development, numbers, etc.: a boom in housing construction.
a period of rapid economic growth, prosperity, high wages and prices, and relatively full employment.
a rise in popularity, as of a political candidate.

What is the meaning of "boom" here? Does it imply something negative like a sound of explosion, sounds of war?

Thank you.