From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,alt.politics.homosexuality,rec.arts.books,alt.news-media
Subject: Re: Morally good hypertext
Date: 22 Dec 92 20:00:35 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Followup-To: rec.arts.books,alt.news-media
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie


minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) wrote:
> dyer@spdcc.com (Steve Dyer) writes:
>> msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris) writes:
>>> "Next time you see a lie being spread or a bad decision being made
>>> out of sheer ignorance, pause, and think of hypertext."
>>>                             -- K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_
>>> ...I wanted to comment that this one sentence epitomizes everything
>>> that irked me (and still irks me) about K. Eric Drexler's book.
>> It worries me terribly to think that I might have to read Drexler's book
>> to see if it's as bad as the quote promises it to be.
> Hmm.  I have a feeling that something's wrong here.  First, it is a
> seminal, important book.  But this particular sentence doesn't make
> sense out of context.  Drexler is expressing the hope that at some
> point in the future, when you quote someone about something you will
> automatically include a pointer to the portion of text that you're
> quoting from -- so that a reader can effortlessly refer back to the
> source!

Anyone who's been watching techie culture via the net for as long as Steve
and Mike Morris have could have supplied that context for themselves.  It's
a standard cliche of techie-think, implicit in Vannevar Bush's essay of
1948 and explicit in Ted Nelson's book of around 1970.  I'd be surprised if
it was new to a significant proportion of the readers of the newsgroups
you're posting to.


> Otherwise (if I'm right about this) this very thread may be providing
> a instance of precisely what Drexler was trying to say.  If we were
> using the sort of global hypertext systems that Drexler favors, the
> unchecked spread of such misunderstands would not be so rapid!

This, like the Drexler quote it elaborates, is a prize example of the
politics-in-the-subjunctive that techies so love.  We *know* how the global
media machine uses the information available to it; the ruling elite can
lie in their teeth for years on end and if it's politically inconvenient
will *never* be called on it (some may recall a certain retired actor at
this point).  And you expect transnational communications corporations to
make universally available a technology that would get them caught out
lying?  Like every Joe on the planet being able to action-replay the US
President and click to fact-check what he said?  Flap... flap...  flap...
oink. oink.  (Or perhaps it might be more appropriate to recall the family
aircar, as airbrushed by the Drexlers of the 50s; maybe the present-day
Drexler somewhere suggests nanotechnically engineering that out of pork?)

Book recommendation: Raymond Williams, "Television: Technology and Cultural
Form" - on what makes technologies fly or plummet, and how little the state
and the market care about techie subjunctives.

-- 
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
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