From: jessec@yang.earlham.edu
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern,alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: Singularity (Gordon's idea)
Date: 6 Nov 92 23:54:42 GMT
Organization: Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:

>[...]
>
>Under these circumstances, large corporations will simply
>lose control of their people.  In fact, they are already
>beginning to.  It's becoming a banal truism that most
>high-technology projects are administratively managed by
>people who have no idea what the project is about.

   This also means that those affected by the project will be less able to 
find those responsible for it.  The privatization/decentralization of 
power means less and less accountability.

>As the
>situation advances and workers catch on, the latter will
>simply do their own thing for personal, not corporate,
>profit.  Similar problems are going to arise for other large
>institutions like the government; they are going to lose the
>means they require to control people except in gross
>physical ways.

   But the "gross physical ways" will still work, in so many instances.

>In addition, many of the presently
>effective categorizations of people ("race", "sex", "job",
>"career", "property", "record", "status") may simply become
>unintelligible.

   I can see this as a possibility-- William Gibson's universe is just 
such a place, in which traditional cultural lines have been seemingly 
blurred beyond recognition; sort of the world suggested by Michael 
Jackson's "it doesn't matter if you're black or white" video, for which 
someone once nominated him as the premier cyborg of our times, having 
opted for the surgical transcendence of both race and gender.

>The ensuing situation can only be described as anarchic in
>the sense of lacking central mechanisms of control; but it
>will not necessarily be chaotic.  However, it might be; it
>is very hard to get people to think in anarchistic terms.

   My own prediction is that while the "center" will be diffused, or 
hidden, or somehow reconfigured, power will not evaporate, and in fact it 
may be concentrated.  No, "concentrated" is the wrong word, because it 
implies a person into whose hands the power would fall, i.e., a center.  
Rather, power will disappear from human hands altogether and become 
increasingly hidden within the system.
   Alvin Toffler sketched this process in *Powershift*.  One example that 
he gave was when John Sununu avoided releasing some data to a group of 
people demanding it under the Freedom of Information Act simply by 
transferring it to computer storage, a medium he claimed was not covered 
by the Act-- an arbitrary legal dodge, but something about it is symbolic 
of what I'm imagining will happen to power.  Toffler also talks about the 
use of computer models to support various kinds of propositions in the 
government and in corporations.  The assumptions about the world (such as 
an assumption about how fast a chemical breaks down ozone) that are 
encoded into the model drastically affect the results of any questions 
addressed to it-- but they are invisible.  It would take painstaking and 
expert work to find the lie in the model that produces a fictitious 
result.
   The positive vision of anarchy, of the demolition of hierarchy and 
hence of power, is not what I think we're headed for.


   --Jesse.