From: gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern,alt.cyberpunk,talk.politics.theory,alt.society.anarchy
Subject: Re: Singularity (Gordon's idea)
Date: 7 Nov 92 15:32:26 GMT
Organization: mydog in exile

| 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.

jessec@yang.earlham.edu writes:
|    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.

Absolutely.  There will be little or no accountability.  This
is already beginning to be true on Usenet; you may recall the
various threats of lawsuits raised by silly people for 
"slander" in days gone by.  On reflection, everyone realized
that you can't prove that anyone said anything.  Consequently,
there can be no verification of text through reference to
the authority of its author.  Consequently -- just as the
"postmodernists" have observed -- texts will -- must -- stand
on their own and have a life of their own.  And much of what
we do is text.  The law, for example.

| >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.

Right.  But they will lose legitimacy, and become muggings.
Remember what was said about the Los Angeles police in the
recent riots?  "They act like just another gang."

| >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.

I'm glad a few people understand Michael Jackson.  He
may not be a great artist, but he does see that there
is an Edge and that we are not approaching it, it is
approaching us (if there's a difference).

| >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.

Yes, the totalitarian possibility.  But only if the system 
can control itself, which I doubt -- I see no evidence of
it whatever.  Lack of control does not mean evil will not
be done, however.

|    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.

True.  But, as noted above, the lying text will have no
more authority than the "true" one, or the one which
aims at the truth, anyway.  This, too, is happening now.
In the recent Alar controversy, none of the interest
groups involved was able to control the discourse.

|    The positive vision of anarchy, of the demolition of hierarchy and 
| hence of power, is not what I think we're headed for.

Power and hierarchy as we know it are already being
demolished, but it is not necessarily a "positive" or
favorable vision; the power and hierarchy simply expressed
fundamental human needs for domination which have not
been "solved."  If P & H disappear, then these needs will
no doubt go wandering the world in search of new homes.
This is why the development of anarchistic theories of
social practice are important -- or at least interesting.
-- 

 )*(    Gordon Fitch    )*(    gcf@panix.com    )*(
( 1238 Blg. Grn. Sta.,  NY NY 10274 * 718.273.5556 )
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern,alt.cyberpunk