From: jessec@yang.earlham.edu
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern,alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: Singularity (Gordon's idea)
Date: 8 Nov 92 20:35:41 GMT
Organization: Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:

>| 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.

   Urgh.  This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night... (at least 
metaphorically.  When I have to sleep, I *sleep*. :-) Adrienne Rich wrote 
a rather scary poem once reflecting on the fact that not only can you have 
your words taken from you, but that someone eventually *will* appropriate 
your words for their own ends.  Texts taking on lives of their own.  Shudder...

>| >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."

   It would be interesting to consider, in this context, the role of 
terrorism.

>| >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.

  This reminds me so strongly of a passage from Thomas Pynchon's 
*Gravity's Rainbow* that I am forced to quote:

   [A medium speaks on waking from his trance...]
   "It's control.  All these things arise from one difficulty: control.  
For the first time it was *inside*, do you see.  The control is put 
inside.  No more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces'-- to veer 
into any wind.  As if...
   "A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could 
*create itself*-- its own logic, momentum, style, from *inside*.  Putting  
the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened-- that you had 
dispensed with God.  But you had taken on a greater, and even more 
harmful, illusion.  The illusion of control.  That A could do B.  But that 
was false.  Completely.  No one can *do*.  Things only happen, A and B are 
unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable..."

>|    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 Middle English form of the word "authority", "auctoritee", referred 
even more directly to its associations with writing: authority came from 
authorship, from the ability to produce and cite texts.  Now that 
electronics are displacing print as the dominant mode of communications, 
"authority" is being destroyed.
   What might the consequences be of this demolition? Or if it is not 
demolition but transformation (a promise held out by the enthusiasts of 
hypertext, i.e. the Xanadu group), transformation into what?

>|    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.

   I beg to differ about the nature of "fundamental human needs", but I 
agree that for various reasons (which I see as historical rather than 
biological, as you seem to imply), it is extremely difficult-- and 
crucial-- to *imagine* how we might interact without power or hierarchy... 
and, I would add, to perform these acts of imagination without instantly 
sealing them off from reality by making them utopian exercises.  No need 
to add to the world's burden of kitsch.


   --Jesse.

"There is a Hand to turn the time,
 Though thy Glass today be run,
 Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
 Find the last poor Preterite one..."

		--Thomas Pynchon
		*Gravity's Rainbow*
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