contains:LBO threads (78K) on  tribes, trains and trivialities by Ted (flowery linguist) vs Ian (both pepper their repartees with quotes by the magnificently hard headed)  ----------  a load of wild cyberbabble by Nick Land and someone else (explaining Sun Tzu's 'Art of war') at ccru.demon.co.uk (comes to 76K altogether; via Nettime.org) ccru = Cybernetic culture research unit e-mail abstract culture syzygy archive timeline links news 3 Nick Land items: ORGANIZATION IS SUPPRESSION -------- No Future -------- Hypervirus  ---------- ccru.demon.co.uk/archive/rinse.htm Fei Ch'ien Rinse Out sino-futurist under-currency Steve Goodman (takes up 2 thirds of the file). ----------Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 09:39:33 -0500  From: "Philip E. Mirowski" <pmirows@attglobal.net>  Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science  Philip Mirowski  Cambridge University Press 0-521-77283-4 (hardcover) 0-521-77526-4 (paperback) -- Table of Contents --1 Cyborg Agonistes -- 2 Some Cyborg Genealogies; or, How the Demon Got its Bots -- 3 John von Neumann and the Cyborg Incursion into Economics -- 4 The Military, the Scientists and the Revised Rules of the Game -- 5 Do Cyborgs Dream of Efficient Markets? -- 6 The Empire Strikes Back -- Core Wars -- 8 Machines Who Think vs. Machines that Sell  http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/  2001/RRE.Machine.Dreams.html comes to 67K>>> +-----------+> also at rre: http://groups.yahoo.com  /group/rre/message/1137 Nathan Newman 44K
http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/israel/  webcast/display.php3?article_id=14010 israelshamirdotcom.htm  by poetpiet3:09pm Sat Feb 2 '02 -- israel shamir deserves a little attention I think.   201K print resource friendlily printable file: http://piet.tripod.com/israelshamirdotcom.htm  (about 10 of his items; yes I think he is that good).   11066 Maidens and warriors is a december gem by the man that I haven't read yet; nobody  commented on it and I find his work of such a magnitude in truth as to expect a lot more mention than a couple of handfuls worth over the whole of the year past.  ------  Subject: Re: Going Nazi From: Chuck Grimes (cgrimes@rawbw.com) Date: Sat Jan 26 2002 - 12:08:27 EST  fascism. All fascist movements seem to be racist, but it was only Hitler and his followers who invented "final solutions." The Italian Fascists cooperated, but in a somewhat lackadaisical fashion if I remember correctly. Carrol ------------ Thursday I didn't have a chance to go into this since I was at work. But, I think of the difference between fascists and nazis differently. I think of fascism as the criminalization of all political oppositional forces, their imprisonment and possible execution or disappearance with the goal of reducing all political activity to a homogenous, uniform and single party system. The nazis on the other hand seem to me to be distinguishable from the fascists by their racism---while also being fascist. The nazis also criminalized their political opponents and sought a single and uniform ideological political system. But in addition, they also created a racialized system as their ideology, giving it biological, evolutionary, cultural, and historical attributes and granting themselves uniqueness of place at the top. The idea of the final solution then arises as the end product of this racialized system. This was a rather different form of social system from the fascists, and was arranged by quasi-scientific and rational categories ranging from supremely human to sub-human. As sub-humans then various groups, independent of their own political beliefs could not be say Jewish and German, or Slavic and German, or disabled or mentally retarded and German. These were mutually exclusive categories. At this quasi-biological level then an individuals politics were irrelevant. German Jews could be progressive or conservative, it didn't matter. The important thing was there was no such thing as a German Jew. Jews were not German, therefore they were alien, non-citizens, non-persons. And it is important to add, this was made a legal category. Since they were stripped of their legal status as persons, could not own or sell property, could not engage in business, could not be employed in state run industries, then they effectively became wards of the state. The logic then was, what to do with these alien wards of the state, and the answer was to put them in special work camps---and from there the whole system devolved into the final solution. This kind of system is completely different from the process of criminalizing political ideologies and their attending political activities, like organizing political parties, meetings, and publications. With a single stroke of law, the membership of the political opposition were criminals and could be arrested, tried, convicted and then shuttled off to where ever, prison or work camp. Now, returning to US government and its current turns of the moment. I think of the US christian righwing fundamentalists as predominately fascist, particularly in their conceptualization of social policy. Their apparent drive for an absolute and uniform system of policies all constructed around their particular ideas of a so-called christian life, has an explicit intolerance for variation, raised to metaphysical authority. It absolutely smacks of fascism. These groups have a potentially nazis-like element in the distinction they make between christian and non-christian, since this is to their way of thinking equivalent to a division between the human and sub-human, those who should enjoy various rights and benefits and those who should not. Most of these groups are also racist, although they try and down play that element. Thankfully, the historical, social and cultural context within which they must function, makes it basically impossible for them to carry out a fully totalitarian program repleat with a fully consistent racism. There are too many black and hispanic christian groups with equal claim to the whole christian religious tradition as either protestant or catholic that it simply makes the white fundamentalists claims of authencity look silly---beside the fact they are probably out numbered. On the other hand, the problem with Islam and its stereotypic identification with semitic middle eastern looking peoples, poses the potential for a nazis-like reaction in the US because of the potential for a racist identification. Since there are a significant number of resident aliens, foreign nationals, and naturalized citizens who are middle eastern and provisionally moslim, this makes them a target for a more thorough going nazisifaction process in the US government's domestic policies. That is to say the concrete elements are already present. First, for all people who are not legal citizens, their civil and legal rights are formally compromised. Add the obvious war hysteria from the government, add the joint contempt that the Christian and Jewish community have for Islam, and its apparent reciprocal from the Islamic community. Then add the extra ordinary powers given the US government in the name of fighting terrorism---a new category of crime with its broaden police powers---and its complete identification with middle eastern looking people. Then add the strange ad hoc legal categories of non-person that seem to have been manufactured for people held by the INS, FBI, and whoever the US military has in Guantanamo. And finally add in the quasi-legitimate political position of the executive, that is Bush's need to legitimate himself as an elected president. But there is also the problem of the Supreme Court, and its evident bias toward supporting at least some of these measures and giving their stamp of legal approval. All of these elements, the implicit racism, the extra ordinary police powers, the creation of artificial categories of non-persons, the background of war hysteria and public support, all add up to very dangerous potentials. This is very bad situation. Chuck Grimes ------------- Hi, This is simply the definition of a single-party authoritarian dictatorship, it dismisses 50 years of social science research into what is different with fascism. How is your definition different from Stalinism? Was Stalinism a form of fascism? I think not. All christian righwing fundamentalists are fascists?!? So there is no difference between a pragmatic election-oriented Ralph Reed, an authoritarian like John Ashcroft, social totalitarians such as the Christian Reconstructionists, and the neonazis as found in Christian Identity? The wave of authoritarianism and government repression we are experiencing needs to be challenged, but this overly-simplistic level of analysis is not helpful. The US is not going NAZI. There are echoes of fascism in all forms of authoritarian government repression, but the level of state action under fascism to repress dissent is a different order of magnitude from what we are experiencing. -Chip Berlet ------------- Then give me an arguement and put out an alternative analysis. What are `we' experiencing? And how would you distinguish between nazis and fascists? I believe I wrote we had the potential and that the elements existed and that it was a bad situation. Chuck Grimes (BTW, I at work so until later today, the exchanges will be brief) --- >camps. The Romanian Antonescu regime, supported by the Iron Guard fascists, >was killing Jews so fast that the Nazis had to intervene because their >bookkeeping couldn't keep up (Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the >European Jews. New York: Holmes and Meier,1985, p.759). > >Hakki The Croatian fascists during WWII, aka the Utasha, carried out an anti-Serb genocidal program of wholesale slaughter, forced religious conversion, and expulsion so furious that it left the Nazis aghast. Peter ----- --------- It is my understanding that unlike the German, French and Rumanian varieties, Italian Fascism was not originally antisemitic. In fact, some of Mussolini's closest associates in the early days were Jews. His regime did not adopt antisemtic policies until the formation of the Axis alliance with Germany. ----- Hi, On the other hand, the scapegoating central to fascism's campaign for a rebirth of society was distributed around to include French intrigue, communism and anarchism, and a very racist campaign in Ethiopia which tends to get swept under the rug of White history. -Chip ----- to be fair, every European country did terrible racist things in African colonies, from beacon-of-liberalism England to tiny oppressed Belgium. So it doesn't really make the fascists stand out. The Italians did crow about what they did to the natives more, but I think that might have been in part a testament to how bad they were at it compared to their more liberal neighbors. The Ethiopians kicked their asses in 1896 at Adva, one of the rare great victories of Africans against would-be colonizers, and a deep embarassment to the Italians -- one they were still trying to expunge 40 years later. Michael ------- wave of authoritarianism and government repression we are experiencing needs to be challenged, but this overly-simplistic level of analysis is not helpful. The US is not going NAZI. There are echoes of fascism in all forms of authoritarian government repression, but the level of state action under fascism to repress dissent is a different order of magnitude from what we are experiencing...'' -Chip Berlet ``Then give me an argument and put out an alternative analysis. What are `we' experiencing? And how would you distinguish between nazis and fascists?..'' (CG) -------- Okay. I assume you are not going to answer the question, so I'll answer it for you. Chip Berlet would have gotten overly specific and detailed, ground nazism in the German past, and in the US present in various explicitly named neonazis movements that center on some from of aryanism and its semitic nemesis, the master race hypothesis out to exterminate the evil jewish cabal. This becomes in my view over determined to the point of making nazism difficult to recognize in other contexts with variations of ideology. While that is fine for scholarship, in the more messy and less well delineated political world, it also misses the forest for the trees. I accept on the other hand, that I over generalized nazism, by making a simple distinction between nazis as forming a central dehumanizing, racist ideology and enacting it into law, and contrasting that to fascists who seem more interested in simply eliminating their political opponents though the usual channels of oppression: the law, courts, and prison, and the propaganda machinery of over ripe nationalism. The use of ad hoc intimidation, thugs, and death squads is always available to both groups. So I can be accused of missing the different species of trees for the general greenery of the forest. Or to use a different metaphor, crying wolf too often and too soon. So, the argument turns on over specification, losing the general contours of the phenomenon in the details of its historical context, and thereby making it non-reproducible. While the other view threatens to over generalize it to the point of discovering it under every rock. Never mind. What I am more interested in is highlighting the fact that the Bush administration is now in a legal position to set-up a police state in relation to very large number of people in the US. It now has the necessary tools and nobody seems to care much, or be willing to call this what it is. As far as I can tell, there is no formal or legal barrier between the administration and whoever, whenever, and whatever they want. The argument that the Bush administration is not likely to over exercise its new police powers for various political popularity reasons, really isn't very re-assuring. There is essentially nothing to stop them. The fact that they bullied their way into public office and are now using and manufacturing a war hysteria to legitimate themselves isn't very reassuring either. And then there is the very real possibility that as long as they are not seriously threatened by domestic political challenges, we will probably not know how far they are willing to go on this course. A jail cell isn't confinement, until you grab the bars and shake them---then it's real. Nobody is willing to grab the bars and find out. I am more interested in focusing on the concrete legal means and the barriers that once existed to stop the development of a nazi like agenda in the first place. Most of those institutional safeguards and protections are either gone or eroded to such an extent that they are meaningless. It certainly doesn't help that the Supreme Court already a rightwing apology is now completely compromised by their own decisions in the Presidential elections. Since Florida, I certainly wouldn't trust them to protect anything but the administration they effectively put into office. I assume that Chip Berlet on the other hand has spent a great deal of time and effort examining the detailed ideologies of the Right and has come up with a well nuanced criterion for distinguishing the various groups in a spectrum that runs from merely authoritarian and potentially fascist all the way out to the fringe advocates of racist genocide. It would be nice to see that applied to our current condition, if for no other reason than to have some standard to measure our progress. But that probably won't happen. However, the link that worries me, is between the legal definitions that create the status of non-persons, people with no legal rights of any sort, and their racist identification with a vague label of Islamic terrorist. The other part of this formulary that is disturbing to say the least, is the use of secret court panels, military tribunals, and summary executions. These currently existing US government formalities are clearly parallel to counter parts in the German Nazis regime. I realise that simply typing `reich' in front of the US government's new office of Homeland Security in google, and getting the official Nazi SS office name with Himmler is not proof of the US going nazi, but it is both hilarious, and frightening at the same time. It seems somewhat nit-picky or academic to me, to try to keep ideas of what nazism is restricted to the internal nuances of their master race ideology, while failing to recognize the general legal and institutional means developed in their historical or political contexts to carry out these ideologies. In other words, in my mind, the institutional tools themselves are the essential feature, and not the content of their raison d'etre. These tools in particular include defining a broad class of people as non-persons and identifying them with generally racial characteristics---in this case, middle eastern looking, and subscribing to Islam. Next, there are the broadened police powers of the state to investigate, arrest, and detain people within this designated population, above and beyond the framework of the usual powers given to the police and government of a bourgeois democracy. In addition there are, the availability of military tribunals, closed hearings before unspecified military or government officials, and finally the punishments of indefinite imprisonment and or execution without either review or appeal to any outside authority. Sure, these are just the usual police state hardware of any self-respecting totalitarian regime. Are we supposed to just wait around for lunatic white supremacy diatribes, mass rallies of nationalism, and posters of hook nosed arabs done up as rat people before we start calling this shit nazis? But I suppose we can all wait and see if Bush actually uses some of this power to start killing people in Guatanamo. That is pretty much the bottom line empirical test for me. Chuck Grimes ---- > > In fact, there's a place at the beginning of Bassani's IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI-CONTINI where the Jeeish narrator talkds about Jews joining the Fascist party -- "Fu nel 1933, l'anno della cosidetta ." Grazie alladel Duce, che d'un tratto, quasi inspirato, aveva deciso di aprir le braccia ad ogni , anche nell'ambito dell nostra Communità il numero degli iscritti al Facio ero potuto salire de colpo al novanta per cento." (Page 27) Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema ----- Fascist is as fascist does. Of course historians or sociologists, like economists, are terrible at predicting the future in any detail that proves useful. However, if the US doesn't draw back from its rampant cultural imperialism and economic nationalism, and if the world does plunge into an economic depression as deep as say the Great Depression, historical perspective tells me anything is possible. Backing up: Hitler hardly had uncontested military power. He didn't have the physical means to end human existence on the planet. Nor did he have his naked economic and political ambitions on the world confused with some form of dynamic market ideology. And in some ways his elected path to office was clearer than Bush's. If the US had to face crises on the magnitude of Germany between the wars, or , let's say, the Soviet Union in the 1980s, just how stable and safe would the responses within the government be? Is the US national security state going to back down and say, hey, you know, 9-11 happened because we really fucked up and we owe a sincere apology to all the Americans affected and all the families of the internationals who also died in 9-11? In short, the reactionary dynamism so far on display is breathtaking. Charles Jannuzi ------------ Brad DeLong>I would be dead at 5 of pneumonia without antibiotics, so my take on this issue is rather... extreme And as one born three months premature, 2 pounds 15 ounces, delivered at Fitzsimmons hospital at Lowry Air Force Base outside Denver and stuffed in an incubator for two months to fatten me up a bit, I'm grateful for high-tech medicine such as it was back in '61. Imagine the cost to my folks if If the bill hadn't been paid by the USG. That's the plus side. On the negative balance sheet, my Dad was exposed to asbestos at Lowry (plus on USN and USAF bases, battleships/carriers and an auto body shop he worked at briefly as a teenager) http://www.google.com/search? q=asbestos+Multinational+Monitor+ and other toxics at Lowry. It's a EPA Super-Fund site now. http://www.westword.com/ issues/2001-04-12/feature.html/1/index.html (By Eileen Welsome who received a Pulitzer for reportage that led to her book, "The Plutonium Files." 3 part series.) He has cancer, in remission, has to lug around a damn oxygen tank.In a big lawsuit, other side has 40 lawyers representing such behemoths as General Electric and W.R.Grace. http://www.motherjones.com/  web_exclusives/features/news/grace.html Michael Pugliese ------------------ >Michael Pugliese wrote: > >>Was it Bakunin or Proudhon who said that after the revo. (well it's a >>continuous, permanent revolutionizing but, y'all get my point...) that >>children would pick up the garbage since they love to play in the dirt? > >It was Charles Fourier. > >"Two thirds of all boys have a penchant for filth. They love to >wallow in the mire and play with dirty things. . . . . These children will >enroll in the Little Hordes whose task is to perform, dauntlessly and >as a point of honor, all those loathsome tasks that ordinary workers >would find debasing.. In> >-- "The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier", eds. Beecher and >Bienvenu, pp.317-8. > >It was passages like this that Marx was thinking of, I take it, when >he wrote against Fourier's belief that "labour can be made merely a >joke", and noted that "really free labour, the composing of music for >example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest >effort". (McLellan ed, p.124). > >Chris Right. As as a parent of kids who loveto play in thedirt but not to clean up, I can testify that Fourier had no idea what he was talking about. Just try to get them to take out the garbage! If you suceed, tell me how. jks _____ Chuck0 mentions Food Not Bombs. Living in the Tenderloin in S.F. their soup give away in the Civic Center around 6 p.m. gets a bit of an audience if the hungry homeless miss the earlier line at Glide Memorial.(Of which, more in a second.) I've known folks that have gotten sick because the food was not refridgerated. Stored in someone's garage.Keith McHenry is a great guy who was a founder of FnB so I don't blame him. (Heard he was working in Phoenix for Goodwill.)Back in the early 90's esp. the were big protests to defend FnB from the SFPD which then and later would periodically arrest the FnB folks over a lack of the proper permits that all other non-profits/soup kitchens have as a matter of course. Which FnB refuses, out of anarchist principle, to apply for. I've always suspected that the food handling problem is part of their stubborn refusal. Plus the agit-prop value of the periodic police harassment. Glide, is connected, mondo, to Senator Feinstein, his Willieness nd other pols. For each meal they are reimbursed $8.00. I've eaten there. The quality at a Burger King is better. And I hate BK. Michael Pugliese ----- Food Not Bombs is an international network of autonomous local groups. Some of them do comply with permit regulations, but most do not. The SF FNB practice of not getting a permit has nothing to do with food handling issues. That charge is simply a pretext the city has used to arrest group members and to give the group bad PR. The whole idea is that sharing food is a basic human practice. Of course nobody wants to eat food that makes us sick, but we all already take that crapshoot whenever we eat out. << Chuck0 >> Infoshop.org -> http://www.infoshop.org/ Alternative Press Review -> http://www.altpr.org/ Practical Anarchy Online -> http://www.practicalanarchy.org/ Anarchy: AJODA -> http://www.anarchymag.org/ MutualAid.org -> http://www.mutualaid.org/ Factsheet 5 -> http://www.factsheet5.org/ AIM: AgentHelloKitty ------------ justin: I said: >>I've read Marshall Sahlins too. It's very nice if you want half >>your kids to >>die before the age of 5 and you yourself don't mind being old at 30 and >>dead >>at 45 of diseases that could be be avoided by vaccination or cured by >>antiobiotics, or just plain starvation. Anyway, you ever hear about not >>being able to go home again? >> >>jks (a big fan of modern technology, especially anesthetics) >> > > > >no i never heard of not being able to go home again - you have to excuse >me for not grasping the meaning. Thomas Wolfe wrote a now-little read novel called You can't Go Homre Again. The point is that even if hunter-gather societieswere totally idyllic, we, who came from them millenia ago, cannot retuen to thor form of life short of a siocial disaster tahtwould destroy civilization. i too love the technology that i >surround myself with but i do not know if the tribal people want to or >not want to have their kids die at 5 or themselves to die at 45 etc. do >you think they too would share your preference for your life over >theirs? ------------- Some do, some don't. I am opposedto imposing it on anyone who doesn't wantto live it, but that wasn't the issue here. i am new to this stuff and havent read sahlins, but doesnt >bodley try to show that tribals actually have resisted "civilization" >and thus shown a preference for their way of life? if he is right, then >would you say their choices are uninformed? ------------- Can'ta nswer the question in the abstract. But even if the choice si uninformed, it's their choice. But I wasn't aware we were discussing the fate of stone age societies in the modern world. or does "you cannot >return >home" mean that the tribal person might have that choice but i do not? > > It means at least that. jks  -------------Sorry, but you ought to read Sahlins again then - seeing as one of his major points was that hunter-gatherers are by and large NOT subject to starvation (its _peasant farmers-_ that starve on a regular basis because they are reliant on very few food sources). Also, antibiotics and vaccines dont enter into it because the infectious diseases these things are used against can only exist in large populations, such as are supported by farming but not by hunting and gathering. For example, measles cant maintain itself in populations of less than several thousand people. So you might break your leg hunting and gathering, but youre not going to get measles, TB, smallpox, typhus, plague, flu, any of the STDs, or a host of others. As for half your kids dying before age five, I would concede the point here provided you understand it isnt due to famine. In the absence of other methods of contraception hunter-gatherers have to practice infanticide - their societies have to be highly mobile, and you cant cart too many kids about with you when youre on the move. Again, its the children of farmers who die from famine, not those of hunter-gatherers. Relatedly, birth control is important for hunter-gatherers, but not for farmers, who can just go ahead and have as many kids as possible and then have a large fraction of them starve when famine beckons. Old at thirty and dead at forty-five again, you seem to be thinking about peasant farmers and not hunter-gatherers. Apparently hunter-gatherers had much better dental health than peasant farmers, for example. So if you're thinking of some wizened, toothless thirty-year-old, you've got some mental image of a peasant in your head, not a hunter-gatherer. Unfortunately, you are probably right about not being able to go home. But I dont think this was Ravis point anyway. These societies are important because they demonstrate the potential of human social arrangements. One of our greatest problems is that we cannot think beyond the crap weve been brought up to believe is necessary - work and markets are good examples that have recently cropped up on this list (though you would maintain both are necessary). A consideration of other societies gives some window onto what the imagination would otherwise not provide, hobbled as it is by the world we actually live in. Eric --------- Just for fun, I put together some figures to get a feeling for aboriginal output, using a Northeast U.S. native, my local Safeway and the Cabela's catalog. Daily figures: One third pound cleaned meat at $4.99 a pound 1 cleaned trout at $2.99 1 pint berries at $2.49 one pound acorns or starch equivalent at $1.00 a pound Yearly figures: One suit clothes - compare to Wall's uninsulated camouflage hunting coverall at 49.95 One pair shoes - compare to Cabela's Woodsman leather hunting boots at 59.95, consumed over three winter seasons: $19.98 One woven wigwam - compare to Cabela's 8-person Alaskan Guide Series tent w/ fiberglass poles at 409.99 Non-food-producing tools, consumed in use - compare to Leatherman Supertool 200 at 54.99 plus Cold Steel heavy machete at 9.99, consumed over five years: $13.00 Net contemporary value in 1870 of a native art collection priced today at $35,000, based on 5% rate of appreciation: $62 Remember the value of hunting and fishing tools are included in the value of their product. I think these figures are generous by any standard. I get a total yearly figure of approximately $3,521.17 but you have to lower average life expectancy to 35 or 40 and yes, you do. The idea that hunter-gatherers are healthy people is silly. First, all hunter-gatherers are subject to parasitic infections. Second, consider the fact that all predators (human or no) are subject to both high infant mortality and episodes of population decline due to starvation. Drought, for example, kills hunter-gatherers just as easily as it kills farmers - more easily since hunter-gatherers do not have the power to turn their food production to foodstuffs that can be saved to make it through lean times. That's why people raise grain staples in the first place. ----------- The glorification of premodern life leaves me cold. Like Brad and Michael, I wouldn't have survived infancy without the medical science of the 1940's. Also, a bit of social-historical reading tells us that any city before 150 years ago in Europe or North America smelled of shit in most places. Pre-modernity also meant people didn't bathe and had untreatable dermatological problems. Etc. Check out Shorter's A HISTORY OF WOMEN'S BODIES for more gross-out detail -- there's a fine chapter on the history of vaginal discharges before modern medicine could address them. As for the factory, I always think back on my two visits to the Shaker village in Hancock, Massachusetts. Early Socialists were interested in Shakerism, because, despite its obvious nutty qualities, it also was a serious attempt to bring industrial work together with social life in a humane mix. Think yourself into the prevailing situation in about 1830 and you can see why it was popular for a while. Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema ----------- I assume this statement applies primarily to Europeans. I recall the pre-modern natives of America thought the Europeans unhygienic. The natives bathed frequently, sometimes several times a day. The "dirty" Europeans ignored methods of personal care used by the natives. The Indian people were remarkably free of disease with the predominant disorders being external injuries, arthritis, digestive disorders and respiratory infections. Cancer, heart disease and nuerological problems were rare. The traditional medicinal practices by the Indians was in some cases quite advanced and apparently held up pretty well until the Europeans arrived with their diseases and poor hygiene. I understand Dr. Frederick Banting, discoverer of insulin, credited Indian medicine in part to his discovery. In the treatment of wounds one of the more interesting aspects of Indian practice was the use of some form of aseptic technique. It was the late 19th century before Europeans learned the necessity of keeping wounds clean. - Tom ------------ Native American life expectancies were not much different from most of the worlds life expectancies. Douglas Ubelaker, Rebecca Storey, and Christopher Ruff have given the following estimates. 30.5 years for 'Texas Indians' 24.7 to 42.9 years for 'Pecos Pueblo Indians' 33.0 years for 'Mississippian Indians' For comparison Peter Razzell estimates life expectancies in English villages at 31.6 to 34.0 years Yves Blayo estimates French villages at 27.5 to 30.0 years Japanese estimates range fro 35 to 55 years in different studies Chinese estimates range from 29 to 36 years (most Chinese estimates assume higher than world average infanticide of females) These figures for all but Native Americans cover the years 1600 to 1800 with some overlap. Native American figures are for pre-columbian years (before the influx of diseases from overseas) John Thornton ------- From: "Cian O'Connor" < > > What was their life expectancy? And how good were at > they diagnosing such things (one culture's natural > death, might be anothers cancer). ---------- Feminism unpaid labour  Distasteful Nowork will still have to be done and peoples' social >> obligations >> > will still have to be met. >> >>I never argued that distasteful work will be avoided. However, there is >>a difference between alienated work that only serves to create profit >>and shitty work that people need to do to live. Cleaning a toilet can be >>distasteful work for many people. Working in a cubicle or factory is >>alienating for most people. >> >>Isn't this like basic Marxist and socialist theory? as i recall, marx made a distinction between productive and unproductive labor. housework was unproductive labor. marx and engels and some of their followers later argued that the thing to do was to move housework from the realm of unproductive labor to the realm of productive labor. marxist feminists in the late 70s argued for social policies that would pay women to do housework. the point was to _socialize_ production. they actually wanted to bring it into the realm of wage-labor. (i'm not advocating this approach. i thought it was the most assinine policy proposal i'd every heard when i first read about it). remember marx's famous phrase about how work was socialized already? (i can't recall the exact quote and am too lazy to look it up). the socialization of labor (the division of labor in which we all depend on one another to produce the goods and services we need.) was the opposition against the centralization of capital. the two antagonisms that characterized capitalist class society. and remember that needs are historical: they constantly change. in the process of creating the goods and services we need now, we create new needs. this is why EE, i say that marx believed that work/labor/whatever you wanna call it is fund. to human being. (in the past i've argued that it should be human being (as process) rather than nature or essence as thing. hope that makes ya feel better EE.) marx was saying that we already had a division of labor and this was a good thing! a complex division of labor created plenty of material goods with less effort, objectively speaking. the point was to truly socialize it so that people had control over what and how they produced things. work wasn't alienating because it existed under a complex division of labor (which is what Adam Smith said). work was alienating because we didn't have control over what we produced, how we produced it, and why. marx believed that we objectified our humanity in our work. think: hegel. the problem is, under capitalist class relations--we could no longer see ourselves objectified in our work. instead, the object was fetishized, while individuals/humanity receded. instead of fulfilling our creative potentials in productive labor, we began to see objects as who we were. (put simply) (see his work on religion to really understand. to really understand, it's helpful to know how indebted Marx is to aristotle's conception of causality in Physus) we are alienated, not because of a division of labor per se, but because the products of our labor do not belong to us. so, alienation is characterized by four things: 1. we are alienated from the products of our labor. we no longer determnine what is to be made nor how to dispose of it. work has become a means to another end, rather than an end in itself (acquiring money to buy things.) Because people no longer have a meaningful rel. to the thing they create, they come to related to the things they produce as alien objects rather than extensions of themselves. 2. people are alienated from the _process_ of work. someone else controls _how_ it is done (tools, techniques, methods, pace, etc). 3. people are alienated b/c they are denied the opp. for creative, productive activity. marx believed that such creative activity was essential to human life, what made us different from the ants that simply created ant hills because it was instinctive. 4. alienated labor is isolated, not pat of a collectively organized project of meeting human needs. we are alienated from each other as we go about our work lives under contemporary captialism. we don't understand how our work fits in with the bigger picture. our work always involves others; we are interdependent. contemporary class relations make it difficult to see that. as such, we are alienated ------------ At 07:02 PM 1/25/02 +0000, Erik Empson wrote: >This is just a tautology. Too right 'work' is something to be opposed in >principle when what is understood by that principle coincides with >absoltuely with its current social form. 'Work' would have an absolutely >different essence under communism, and its not true to Marx nor to that >project to conflate them. no one is. >It is contradictory to argue that for Marx man's >essence is the result of the totality of historically existant social >relationships and then in the same breath argue that he thinks one type of >social relation is an enduring quality of being human. Still, I think I know >what you mean. i'm not arguing that work as we've known is man's essence. ------------ rather, marx argued that what made us distinct from other animals is that we produce our own subsistence and substantially change the natural world and ourselves in doing it. we have to work. if you call making shelter, food, and clothing something other than work, fine. even hunting and fishing is work. if you interpret marx to mean that hunting and fishing is play, somehow not work, then i think you need to lose your contemporary understanding of hunting and fishing. i'm arguing that marx would not likely claim that we should do away with work completely--though surely he advocated the use of technology and the division of labor to reduce its burdens--since he wanted us to be able to fulfill our capacities as creative, productive human beings. but that is precisely the debate in the first place, for some here were arguing that technology, in and of itself, was the problem. kelley --------------- Housework was only unproductive, for Marx, because it did not produce surplus value -- that is, a very narrow interpretation of productive within the context of capitalist values -- it did not denigrate housework. For example, the production of destructive goods would be productive. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael@ecst.csuchico.edu ------------ could you elaborate what it means to say that it doesn't produce surplus value? i've not visited these debates in quite some time-- more than a decade ago. i do, though, recall reading a number of feminist critiques of marx/engels and marxists feminists' claims about housework as unproductive labor. thanks, -------------- Whatever produces direct profit (surplus value) for capital is productive -- say producing a medicine that kills patients. caring, nurturing work is not. It is more a critique of capitalism than of housework. ------------ ah, i see, i needed to flesh it out more: for some early feminist marxists, housework is unpaid labor performed by women for men, and should really be regarded as unpaid labor performed for capital--where individuals males and the institution of masculinity can be understood as we understand (!!!) the role of management and the ideologies of managerial control to capital. housework--or more broadly understood, reproductive labor-- needed to be brought into the sphere of wage labor as a way of advancing capitalism, and thus its demise. for some, this meant paying "women" to do housework, reproductive labor. others countered with the argument that this would keep reproductive labor isolated to the realm of the family. what was needed was something more akin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's proposal that reproductive labor--cooking, clearning,e tc--should be _socialized_. it should become part of the realm of wage labor. women and men shouldn't cook and clean, etc., but we should encourage that work to become paid labor: daycare, caferterias, restaurants, etc. this approach was based on the feminist critique of the public/private split that intensified under capitalist class relations. kelley --------------- I am familiar with the feminist take on the subject, but I don't think that they gave Marx a fair reading. He was describing how capitalism determines what is/is not productive. ---- could you elaborate? i think you're sensitive to a critique that i never made perhaps. as far as i can tell, there wasn't anything in what i'd written that would suggest that it was a critique of marx/engel's claims about productive labor. rather, it was a description of policy proposals two strands of marxist feminist offered to deal with the way in which class relations obscured the role of reproductive labor within capitalism. for marxist feminists, the goal was to move productive labor out of the home and make it "public". that is, they wanted to "socialize" it.i brought it up because it related to what i was saying to chuck0: some marxists (feminists in particular) have actually supported the rationalization (division of labor) of things like housework for they saw it as part of the process of socializing work. kelley ------------------ Reply to this exchange follows: ------------------ >Public transport (trains in japan)>Michael Perelman Subject: Re: Who Does No Work, Shall Not Eat Very interesting post. Are you saying that with all the spending on infrastructure Japan has been shorting public transportation? On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 12:41:42PM +0900, Charles Jannuzi wrote: > > Yes, the trains are fast and they do run on time, but Japanese get to spend > hours in crowded trains instead of in cars in traffic jams. And here in > Fukui, where the American dream prevails, we have more and more traffic > jams, and fewer and fewer buses and trams. > > Charles Jannuzi > > ---------------- Well, another current American-led line of analysis is that Japan has foolishly poured a trillion dollars into wasteful public works that DID NOT benefit anyone but inefficient construction firms (although you have to remember this is exactly what the US's Japan experts and trade reps called for over ten years ago). Some Japanese believe this too (but I say it still has benefits that go beyond what the US spends on military,if only they'd spend even a fraction of it on restoring the environments they destroy). A little recent history. One of the reasons why the Japanese government made the Ministry of Construction so powerful in the past 12 years was, in part, a response to demands from the US trade representatives. The US was going to balance trade by getting the Japanese to invest all those surpluses into public works (and at the height of the bubble years it only fueled the flames, since the Japan bubble was a real market meltdown in both real estate and equities). The resulting infrastructure (one goofy prime minister--the one Bush threw up on--used to always talk about making Japan a lifestyle superpower) would turn Japanese into American-style consumers. This sort of stuff got really big under Clinton because his bunch of wonk idiots were always trolling thinktanks and books for NEW ideas in how to DEAL WITH the Japanese. After old labor Dem Kantor was gone, I think the basic line was cheapen the dollar against the yen til trade is balanced (which even had Japanese automakers scrambling to re-outfit US auto parts makers so as to import the parts from the US, and Toyota outfitting plush new dealerships to sell a handful of Saturns ). But, anyway, to answer your question. Most of the dense networks around the big cities, I mean the megalopolises--Tokyo, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto (Kansai), Nagoya--consist of public and private subways and private rail networks that stretch out to the suburbs and exurbs. These networks have to break even or make money, so that requires packing them with people during rush hour. And they do. I don't think anyone who has ever visited a large Japanese city would say, compared to Europe even, they have neglected subways and commuter trains. They have, however, neglected anyone who wants to walk on the surface or cycle. Car culture is really big here, too. That's one reason why they got so good at designing and building them (of course, if markets ruled or maybe God, any country that gave the world the Pinto, the Vega and the Gremlin would long ago been forced to give up trying). Back to Japan. The city-to-city rail extends all over the country, has been heavily subsidized, and did get extended during the last ten years. Construction gets subsidized, but the idea is to get them to make money then. I think that's an important distinction you have to make when discussing the pros and cons of public transportation. Subsidize the network and then the rail lines can provide great service and make some money. Afterall, it was public subsidy that gave the US it's highway networks. A toll road is no different than a privatized rail line in that way. The city-to-city rail is also a 30 billion dollar hole the government has tried to marketize by breaking JR up and turning it into regional companies, with OVERPRICED stock and everything. Of the four JR companies, two make money: JR East makes solid money, because it connects Tokyo and Nagoya. JR West makes a bit of money (but has to use profits to subsidize unprofitable lines). The other two have never seen profits as far as I know. (This info. might be a bit old since I lost interest in this stuff 5 years ago.) There is quite a bit of private rail between cities, too, if the cities are close together--like Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe. In the Kansai, you can get anywhere without using JR. Anyway, the public works push during the past 12 years has emphasized roads and airports--which is what the American trade reps wanted (it started under Bush for balancing trade, and then got more rationale when Japan fell into a deep recession, like the day the yen hit 79 to the dollar and for a brief while Japan had an economy the value of which exceeded the US's). Now, let's take it to the real world. I live in Fukui, a 'rural' (for Japan) prefecture on the Japan Sea side of Honshu, about halfway between Kyoto and Kanazawa (if you have a map handy). There are plenty of small cities, towns, and villages in this region, but it can't support private rail networks. The few left (two lines just closed this year) have always required subsidy from local governments. JR West is here but there are , as yet, no bullet trains. However, the new 'shinkansen' bullet train--the Hokuriku Shinkansen--is now being constructed (with really horrific devastation of fragile mountain environments to go with it--I was a trout fisherman). Meanwhile, there has been all sorts of road construction. If I showed you a picture of 'rural' Fukui, what with all the buildings, roads, and rail lines, you'd think it was New Jersey somewhere between NYC and Philadelphia. So, have they been shorting public transportation? The subways are already there and run everywhere under the major cities and didn't need expansion, but the heavy population density means they will be packed if everyone leaves work at the same time to go home. Most Americans have no idea what a Japanese city is like. Around the business centers are the rail hubs, and people move in dense waves 3-5 levels below ground. If you could see Shinjuku station in Tokyo at 6 in the afternoon, you'd get the picture. . Private rail lines around cities and out into the suburbs have to make money to stay in operations, and they do, which means they want maximum ridership on every scheduled train if possible. This, by the way, is one reason some office workers don't go home til late; they go out, get drunk, wander around the red light district for a while, and go home on a late train where they can sleep (which is easy to do if you live at the end of the line). And the heavily subsidized bullet trains have been extended to the point some of the lines will NOT make money. Everone knows the bullet train line to the Olympic site in Nagano was just pork (though I suppose a lot of urban skiiers now use it to get to the slopes). Meanwhile, road and bridge construction continues unabated, as far as I can see. And this includes putting expressways through some of the most treacherous terrain and fragile mountain environments you will find anywhere, like in Gifu Prefecture, just east of Fukui. Hope I answered the question. Charles Jannuzi - -- Michael Perelman ------------------- Justin Schwartz" wrote: > So, Pradeep, what's your solution to the free rider problem? Note that you > do not need to assume that people would rather do nothing and have infinite > desires to get this offthe ground. All you need is to assume that they would > rather do less rather than more of relatively unpleasant but necessary work. > I myself would rather tour European museums and hang out in cafes listening > to jazz than even doing relatively pleasant work like writing legal briefs. > Of course in the ideal communist world there would be now laws and no > lawyers, so you can imagine my analytical skills being in demand for > something ideal communists would like, whatever that might be. But the fact > of the matter is that if any signifigant percentage of the populaution is > like me,a nd I think, as a matter of fact thata lmost everyone is, but > suppose it is only one third, then there will be a really significant free > rider problem. . . . > > But > since much such work is fairly unpleasant, it wil face the same problem as > any sort of unpleasant work, namely the free rider problem. My examples of > idle drones were people like me who'd rather be boulevardiers, Malibu > surfers and the like. ------------- Look Justin this is just not a serious issue -- at least for those us who arent Ayn Rand nuts or geeks with a lot ideological baggage left over from their undergraduate econ. studies. The idea of any revolutionary struggle is to begin the process of reorganizing society and the economy along more rational and humane lines -- to phase out or at least minimize onerous, numbing and debilitating labour in order to maximize free time and leisure as much as is materially possible. Something about fishing in the morning and philosophizing in the evening, I believe. The point is that *we* will be able to decide collectively both the nature of work and the amount required -- democratically and collectively weighing the benifits with the costs of any particular economic plan or set of priorities. Now I am actually surprised that this thread went on for as long as it did before someone - Remick --------------- I believe- actually brought up what I thought would have been an obvious point -- that people should be able to engage in useful work or activities that they find meaningful and then share out whatever little of the distasteful work is left over. It wouldnt take much to get people to work such jobs if their obligations were light - a few hours say-- all the while still having access to the material comforts of modern life. In addition, given the fact that onerous labour would be shared out equitably and not relegated to socially powerless groups, labour -in its various forms- would lose much of the stigma it currently carries. Indeed much of what we call toil today would probably be a welcome diversion for us provided we weren't forced to engage in it day in and day out for forty odd years simply in order to survive. So the question Justin is why you're obsessing over non-issues like the threat posed by Malibu surfers-- what should at best be a marginal issue, at least for those of us in the advanced industrial world. Most of what discipline may be necessary can largely arise out of the fact that people are social beings(!) -- and subject to all sorts of social pressures due to their socialization -- and are not little ahistorical bundles of egotistical impulses ready to explode and devour all of civilization if given half a chance. Really! for you to obssess over the need for 'work-police' says more about youre hang-ups than about any serious or inherent barrier to a truly libertarian society. Now I should probably qualify the above discussion and point out that what we're really speaking about is a relatively advanced economy here, and that a less developed economy with a lower technological and material base and marked by conditions of severe material scarcity, would probably require a greater amount of external discipline to be exerted on labour(preferably in the form of greater differential rewards based on effort) and would probably require a culture fostering a more intense 'internal' discipline -- expressed in the form of a more puritanical culture -- than one would expect in a post revolutionary society in the West. > > To those who say we'd do little harm, I say that we'd be parasites, and a > society of parasites is unlike to survive. I preduct that the anarchist > coercion free utopia would survive about six months before the people who > did care about working organized a police force and swept us goof-offs out > of the museums and off the beaches into the factories under the slogam > heading this thread. > > jks -------------- Man, I can almost see your face -- all scrunched up and severe-- as you typed out the words "coercion" and "police". You know if I were a Freudian Justin I'd probably point out the almost anal preoccupation you seem to have with goof-offs, malibu surfers and general layabouts -- but I'm not so i'll let it go at that. signed pradeep, the-"I-dont-want-to- be-a-part-of-your -revolution-if-I-have-to- get-up-before -noon"-slacker PS I'm really backlogged so I apologize to the Collective if this thread has already moved on to better things ------------------ 'immature' or 'stupid' -- I said you were 'anal'. But I was only bustin' your chops there, and being a wise-ass. OK Justin maybe we should be clear about something right of -- Im not arguing Chuck's technophobic primativist utopia. No serious person aside from perhaps Chuck or certain reactionary "anarchist" currents, imagines society as an amalgam of primitive individuals totally bereft of any form of discipline or compulsion. Distasteful work will still have to be done and peoples' social obligations will still have to be met. But discipline can exist in institutionalized and noninstitutionalized forms, embedded in social pressures and conditioning and in material rewards/incentives. In an extremely technologically advanced society the point of social transformation is to minimize or make as light as possible such obligations -- that is to make it as easy for people to fulfil their obligations with the least recourse to external discipline or compulsion. That is, to attempt to come as close as is *materially possible* to the ideal of labour arising spontaneously and freely of one's own volition. Like ive said before, the potential for such a social and economic reorganization presupposes an extremely advanced technological/industrial base. If the social wealth and productivity of the economy is high enough to radically reduce the work day I'm sure, as many have said on this list, that fulfilling their labour obligations in order to still enjoy a relatively high quality of life (which, yes, would include cd players, computers and insulin) would not be something that required severe forms of external discipline. Would there still be forms of discipline --------- however benign- in the form of social pressures and even perhaps forms of economic compulsion?-- possibly yes. Would this need to be a central problem in any libertarian/communist society? --------- Most likely no, since as I've said the proper startingpoint of any true communist/anarchist society is the development of a sufficiently advanced material culture with lbour productivity high enough to minimize the compulsion required to ensure things keep running. This doesnt necesarrily apply to a transitional period or an underdeveloped economy where, despite the severe disciplining effect of the market being removed, some other form of economic 'compulsion' may be required in its place ----------- such as a more marked differential reward system based on effort --------- something along the lines of "from each according to her ability, to each according to his effort" as it were. Would there still be the occasional goof-off, layabouts and malibu surfer? ------------ of course! Look you're never going to get a society with no 'deviance' ----------- they're will always be perpetually stoned fuck-ups who, despite all the gentle proddings of the Revolutionary Propaganda Committee, will never mend their erring ways - the question is whether these saboteurs' refusal to contribute will effect the sustainability of our Workers' Utopia ---------- no it wont. And this here has been the real issue: --'why you're continued obsession over this pt.?' Indeed you're "free rider" arguement makes more sense as an arguement against 'welfare' or 'minimum garunteed income schemes' *today*, where such entitlements could more plausibly be seen as undermining the strict discipline of the labour market in forcing people to work at jobs with far less appealing work regimens and under more onerous conditions than would exist in our glorious workers' utopia. Yet even within mainstream economics its only the more right wing wags that constantly fret over the inevitable collapse that will result if such entitlements are expanded and made more generous ----------- an obsession remarkably similar to your "free rider" problem. Again, of course therewill be problems ---------- the question is whether the objective material conditions are sufficient to ensure that such problems remain marginal and not are not destabilizing enough to undermine the more ethical social arrangements we envision. No perfect 'Utopia' is actually being advanced here. I have never been one to see social revolution as leading to some sort quasi-mystical repose from alienation, pain and conflict. > , and that > >a less developed economy with a lower technological and > >material base and marked by conditions of severe material scarcity, would > >probably require a greater amount of external discipline to be exerted on > >labour(preferably in the form of greater differential > >rewards based on effort) and would probably require a culture fostering a > >more intense 'internal' discipline -- expressed in the form of a more > >puritanical culture -- than one would expect in a post > >revolutionary society in the West. > > > > History is against you on this one. Early modern Europe had far less > external discipline, despite futile attempts to impose it by law with > vagabondage laws and the like. People in the 1500s worked maybe 150 days a > year, "St. Monday" was regularly observed, feast daysd were frequent, the > level of effort --and technological development and productivity -- was low. > You help yourself to the high technology and high productivity created by > the impositiona nd internalizatioon of labor discipline created by markets,a > nd then suppose,w ithout good reason that I can see, that this would > continue without the conditions that created it. >------------- No history is with me, and quite unambigously so. I figure that you must have misread or misunderstood what I was trying to say. A social revolution in an isolated underdeveloped economy faces the task, not of developing a socialist, let alone a libertarian society, but of developing the material pre-conditions for socialism. Capital accumulation in Western Europe (spanning several centuries), Germany, Japan(late 19th early20th), Russia, China etc (20th century-21st) entailed both lengthening and intensification of work under conditions of *extreme* economic compulsion and coercion and all at terrible human costs. Any social revolution in a 'backward' society that is not rolled back completely by bureaucratic counter-revolution will still have to face the same problems of capital accumulation and industrialization faced elsewhere-- extracting the needed surpluses and in sufficient quantities to ensure expanded reproduction and growth of labour productivity. And so long as some meaningful form of democratic control of the means of production persists, do all this without recourse to terror. Its here, much, much more so than in an advanced economy that you're insistence on labour discipline/coercion and a solution to the "free rider problem" becomes indispensible. -pradeep ----------------- Re: Who Does No Work, Shall Not Eat Subject: Re: Who Does No Work, Shall Not Eat From: Ted Winslow (egwinslow@rogers.com) Date: Sun Jan 20 2002 - 20:59:10 EST  > It gets some response, though. I asked what it was about > high technology that requires a context of coercion, as many > participants in this discussion seem to assume. I think that's > a fundamental moral and political question with some fairly > serious implications, but no one seems willing to engage it. > Apparently it's much more rewarding to deride Chuck and Joe as > primitivists. What if, as Marx assumes, capitalism is inconsistent with the full development of rational self-consciousness. Employing more modern language, what if there is a significant irreducible aspect of psychopathology in the mentality dominant in it. ===== (Ian): Doesn't this presuppose that we know rational self-consciousness is? Is arationality or irrationality in social life eliminable and how could we know and wouldn't that be a prediction either way the answer was arrived at?  ------- This is not inconsistent with the achievement of a great deal of insight into the nature of reality. Newtonian physics, for instance, was obviously powerfully insightful though it came from a deeply disturbed mind. Newton suffered a paranoid psychotic breakdown in 1693. (Keynes, with the express purpose of calling in question the view of Newton and hence of Newtonian physics as the embodiment of "reason," emphasizes this aspect in his biographical essay. Collected Writings, vol. X, pp. 363-74) ==== Well that's what happens when one reads too many alchemy texts, stays terrified of women, poetry and music and has Locke as ones physician......-------   If this is so there will be important aspects of modern science and technology that reflect not rationality but psychopathology. Even those features of work that embody science and technology will then not be wholly determined by unalterable features of nature itself but by the particular psychologically constrained ways of thinking about nature and technology characteristic of capitalism. ====== Given that it's possible to slow and even stop the speed of light, nature seems to be a lot more malleable - in principle - than we thought we could imagine. And, if Richard Gott is right, it's only a matter of time before anyone who wants to can build different space-time systems in their basements. --------- If labour process engineering, for instance, is done by minds driven in important ways by irrational defences against persecutory anxiety the resulting technology will embody an irrationally based need to sadistically and obsessively dominate others, to treat them with contempt ("idiot proofing"), and to "fragment" both the production process as a whole and the individual jobs it involves. Taylorism illustrates this. The lack of individual autonomy and the "specialization and division" characteristic of work would then be to some extent expressions of the psychopathology.==== So what would a paranoid-proof technological system look like? Who/what is an idiot? --------- Among other things this would make the technology inefficient in comparison with what would be developed by minds free from these limitations.  ==== What would be the meaning of efficiency if we had a different culture of property and contract? If we designed all our technological devices-appliances-systems up to the limits of the 2nd law of thermodynamics would that solve the problems of human suffering via domination etc.? --------- In particular, a properly designed technology would attempt to facilitate the development and full use of the capacities of the producers - not merely to make the labour process more efficient but also to make it "worthy of [the producers'] human nature."===== Who gets to determine the meaning of proper? ------ It would also have eliminated those aspects of its view of those capacities that reflect irrational paranoia and contemptuousness. A labour process that developed and made use of these capacities would then, in combination with other social arrangements having the same effect, also set free a great deal of creativity and intelligence that is now stifled by the alienated character of modern work, creativity and intelligence that would find one of its outlets in improving the science and technology embodied in the process. Ted -===== So, if everyone was a scientist in some minor way [Marx, De Solla Price, Perelman], we'd no longer be paranoid or manifest various other forms of 'fear of the other'? Respecting epistemic incompleteness in a Godelian world[s], Ian ------------ ----- ------------ It's an "internal relations" view of the development of rational self-consciousness. It assumes, as I said before, that though capitalist relations are ultimately inconsistent with the full development of rational self-consciousness by anyone (so you can't without self-contradiction assume that the minds that can see how to change it in a progressive way are fully rational), they are consistent the development of a sufficient degree of it to be able to see that, say, contemptuousness is a way of dismissing reasonable ideas because they threaten, say, the "fragmentation" - e.g. "the world is made up of an immense number of bits, and ..., so far as logic can show, each bit would be exactly as it is even if other bits did not exist" - a person is unconsciously using to defend against persecutory anxiety. ==== Oh, that's it; use internal relations as a stand in for ineffability and don't define 'see' or 'fragmentation' or explain how, within capitalist relations of production, we can't define the *full-ness* of rationality yet are still capable of understanding atomic processes well enough to create technologies that can wipe just about every terrestrial species off the surface of various geological structures [I'll leave aside the difficulties associated with taking care of deep sea critters].. Of course we don't need to define progressive in any way whatsoever, it's epistemologico-ontological status safe from the dynamics of contending definitions. No self-contradiction without otherness.....----------- A sign of this would be that they would misidentify the following ontological claims as sublating the idea of "internal relations" when in fact they directly contradict it, and would substitute contempt for argument when confronted by ideas that threatened this defence. > "1]The world can be resolved into digital bits, with each bit made of > smaller bits. > > "2]These bits form a fractal pattern in fact-space. > > "3]The pattern behaves like a cellular automaton. > > "4]The pattern is inconceivably large in size and dimensions. > > "5]Although the world started very simply, its computation is > irreducibly complex." > > From the mathematician Rudy Rucker's 'Mind Tools', Hegel's great, > great, great grandson. > Aufgehoben indeed!" it also assumes that our self-consciousness can become sufficiently rational to allow us to become aware that we are necessarily in some ways currently unknown to us unreasonable so that we must be constantly self-critical and open to the possibility that we're mistaken. This has the advantage that it at least opens us to what others say - to read and listen to them with "good will" - and allows us to change our minds if what they say shows that our beliefs are in some way mistaken. ========== Oh, you mean we should adapt a paraconsistent approach to descriptive-normative approaches to self-description/epistemic capabilities regarding natural and social kinds? How *novel*. http://www.christophercherniak.com What's consciousness? Ian --------------  A sign of this would be that they would misidentify the following ontological claims as sublating the idea of "internal relations" when in fact they directly contradict it, and would substitute contempt for argument when confronted by ideas that threatened this defence. ====== Well you sure are perseverating on internal relations and the possible forms of *representing* internal relations within a conceptual scheme.......  --------- http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0201/1752.html a beefy post with Whitehead, Popper Hume and Engels quoted omitted here -------- Ian wrote: >> They are internally related where their identities depend on their >> relations. Where relations are internal there are no "substances" in the >> above senses. > > ====== > Right and that just reduces 'internally' to a trivial proposition. Internal relations made concrete in the human case   have to be conceived so as to be compatible with other ontological ideas. As with the internal relations of all living things, human relations must allow logically for self-determination and purpose. My relations now are constitutive of me now (this makes it impossible for me to be presently in more than one universe since I am a particular universe now from my standpoint). They constitute me now as a set of possibilities open to closure by me, this is the self-determination. Another ontological premise is that these possibilities are open to objective valuation as better or worse so that the purpose that guides self-determination can be based on rational valuation of alternative possibilities. Marx assumes that a human individual is an individual potentially having a will proper and a universal will, i.e. a will whose content is fully open to rational self determination on the basis of knowledge of the objective values (Marx belongs to a tradition in thought that takes these to be "love" and "beauty") which provide the foundation for ranking possibilities. (Anyone claiming that people are naturally resentful, naturally envious, naturally selfish, naturally exploitive etc. is denying that they potentially have a "will proper".) The possibilities open to me now depend on (are "internally related" to) past decisions and actions so that self-determination in the past can create a current set of possibilities, a "real potentiality," that includes the ideal. The will is only potentially proper and universal, however. Persons require particular relations in order to realize this potentiality, i.e. become fully rationally self-conscious. Their actual relations can be more or less consistent with this. I'm not a Sovietologist but my impression (from, for example, Gorky's My Childhood) is that the social, including the family relations, characteristic of the Russian peasantry (the vast majority of the population in 1917) were very far from what would be required for the development of full rationality, that their likely usual result would be an adult personality characterized by primitive defences against psychotic anxiety i.e. a more or less paranoid, extremely hostile, sadistic personality. These particular internal social relations would then explain the coming to dominance within them of a paranoid, hostile, sadistically murderous mentality. It is in this way that "internal relations" might help to explain the last 80 or so years of Russian history including the disastrous consequences of the collapse, important features of which were the product of advice from "economists" of the Hayekian sort having no knowledge either of the psychological factors I've just pointed to (they are explicitly denied any role in explanations framed in accordance with the "logic of the situation"), of the "internal relations" which produce them (the approach treats social relations as "external"), or of the truth contained in the passage from Keynes that Brad recently quoted. The passage implicitly calls attention to the irrationality of apocalyptic thinking. Such thinking goes together with the obsessional Ricardian vice and the sadistic puritanism to produce the conclusion that immense present pain and suffering are justifiable because in "the [for Keynes unknowable] long run" there will be enormous positive benefits that will far outweigh them, a belief Keynes claims can't be rationally justified and attributes to a psychological need to deny that "in the long run we are all dead." Ian also claimed that my description of "Oh, that's it; use internal relations as a stand in for ineffability ..." as contemptuous was "patently untrue." "Oh, that's it" expresses scorn. Placed before "use internal relations as a stand in for ineffability" it makes "ineffability" mean the concept of "internal relations" is "indefinable" because meaningless. A meaningless concept is worthless. The ordinary definition of "contempt" is "a feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration or worthless, or deserving scorn or extreme reproach". Ted --------- http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/2167.html and it goes on ian with a long one ------------------- ORGANIZATION IS SUPPRESSION : interview with nick land by jim flint ~, ~~ ~ -. Why is it that much of the content on the Internet - this supposedly amazingly democratic, anarchic forum - is becoming dull, corporate and organised? ~ ~; ~ Your question suggests that there's some pre-existing social pool of liberating, revolutionary, emancipatory creative potential that could be expected spontaneously to express itself as soon as it had an opportunity to do so. But there is no such intrinsic power of innovation latent in the human organism that's just waiting to bounce out onto the Net. What we should be asking is what new power formations are emerging, and what new kinds of entities are being produced. ~ ~; ~ How do systems which are initially free form and distributed give way to centralised power structures? ~ ~; ~ Organisation involves subordinating low-level units to some higher level programme. In the most extreme cases, like biological organisms, every cell is defunctionalised - turned off - except for that one specialised function that is allocated to it by the organic totality. A 1iver cell, for example, only does one thing. The preponderant part of its potential is deactivated in the interests of some higherlevel unity. In a way, the more organised things get, the less interesting their behaviour becomes. Ten billion amoebae will explore more behavioural possibilities than ten billion hyena cells. ~ ~; ~So you're not as keen on the idea of 'selforganisation' as are some thinkers? ~ ~; ~Organisation is suppression. Organisation involves 'distributed systems', that is, populations the members of which are only lightly specialised and which avoid self-organisation while still managing to be productive and innovative, becoming parasitically inhabited by hierarchical and regularised structures, or 'organisms'. These organisms might be biological creatures, corporations or state systems. The history of life on this planet right through to Microsoft is of the successive suppression of distributed, innovative systems. ~ ~; ~Can you give me an example? ~ ~; ~Well, life begins when autocatalytic chemical systems get captured and subjected to a set of rules by RNA. When RNA gets complicated enough to start exhibiting various kinds of lateral interference and experimental deviations of its own, it in turn gets 'over-coded' by DNA. The crucial event in the whole history of the planet is the point at which the earth's bacterial life system - in which the behaviour of individual cells is still relatively unrestricted - gets subjected to exterminatory gassing by oxygen-emitting, highly structured, securo-maniac metazoan organisms. Many of the bacteria either disappear or are captured as productive sub-components of highly organised, nucleated, concentrational systems, which now dominate all life on the planet. ~ ~; ~What picture does this give us of evolution? ~ ~; ~The bacterial net being successively suppressed by levels of organisation, tiers of control, that have a tree-like structure. But that tree-like structure is not at all inherent; it's actually produced by organisation. It's incredibly similar to the relationship between corporations and markets, in the sense that markets are potentially open-ended, distributed transaction systems which end up subjected to regularisation, hieraTchica1 structuralisation, specialisation and concentration by the corporate structures that superimpose themselves upon them. ~ ~; ~Might the widespread use of computers and the Net challenge these structures? ~ ~; ~The thing about the potentialities of massively distributed computation capacity is that they allow productive initiative to be dispersed to the lowest possible level in the system, rather than simply being allotted by some central command core. Also, the PC creates a fundamental break in the traditional structure of investment by being both a piece of consumer electronics and a piece of productive apparatus. But in spite of this, the old structures are being artificially maintained. ~ ~; ~How? ~ ~; ~Well, buying a personal computer is treated as productive investment if it is done by a corporate entity and as a piece of personal consumption if it is done by dis-integrated (sic] consumers. And presumably this kind of trompe l'oeil is getting results, because the intersection between software, broadcast media and telecommunications is, at the moment, in an absolutely orgiastic state of capital concentration. And clearly the key actors in this sector think that their strategies are based upon some viable avenue of continued advantage - a continuation of the modernist situation of economies of scale, if you like. Their picture is clearly not one of dis-integration into small-scale horizontal agents. ~ ~; ~But can't the Net itself help us overcome these illusions, thTough increasingly universal access to knowledge and communication? ~ ~; ~Certainly the great potential in the technical infrastructure of the Net lies with the telecoms base rather than the broadcasting base. Capitalist and state organisations have an absolutely immense investment in disabling the telecoms dynamics of the forthcoming digital media system. But that doesn't mean that much has yet been done with this telecoms infrastructure that is particularly exciting. The more of it the better - the more that you have a multi-switched, high-bandwidth, communications-oriented digital system rather than a one-to-many, broadcast-oriented, media production-media consumption-oriented system, the more chance there is of actually eliciting innovative behaviour out of innovative systems. But I'd be very cynical with regard to the extent to which we have seen any of that yet. ---------------- HYPErViRus Whatever ultramodernity places under the dominion of signs postmodernity subverts with virus. As culture migrates into partial-machines (lacking an autonomous reproductive system) semiotics subsides into virotechnics. Yes No Yes No Yes Yes No longer what does it mean? but how does it spread? Having no proper substance, or sense beyond its re re re replication, yes no no usage of virus is ever metaphorical. The word ‘virus’ is more re re virus. Postmodern culture re re chatters-out virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus 011010010 ‘virus’ (viroductile, virogenic, immunosuppressor and and or, meta-, or or and or hyper-) virus. 001. hypervirus eats the end of history K-(coding for cyber)positive processes auto-intensify by occurring. A cultural example is hype: products that AT AT trade on what they will be in the future, vir virtual fashion on off, imminent technical standards, self-fulfilling prophecies and and or and artificial destinies. Anticipating a trend end end end ACC ACC accelerates it (which is itself a re re recursive trend) Hyping collapses SF into CATA CATA catalytic tic efficiency, re-routing tomorrow through what its prospect CT CT CT makes today. Virohyping sweeps through the advertising industry. Everyone will be doing it. Virus is parasitic replicator code: an asignifying sequence of machinic data ATA ATA flow-break on/off 1/0 yang/yin intrinsically destined for war. In place of mess message-content virodata is assembled bled from asignifying materials with CATA catalytic (or positively disproportionate) efficiency; intruder passcode, locational ZIP-code, pseudogenomic substitute instructions, mutational junk (complex but latent segments), and garbage (redundant scrapcpcrapcrapc rapcrap). Biovirus TA TA TA targets organisms, hacking and reprogramming ATGACTTCAGT cellular DNA to produce more virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus. Its enzymic cut-and-paste recombinant wetware-splicing crosses singularity when retroviral reverse-transcriptase clicks in (enabling ontogenetic DNA-RNA circuitry and endocellular computation). ATAGTA Ethnovirus targets brains Technovirus targets socioeconomic pro pro production pro processes. Infovirus targets digital 0100100100010100computers Hypervirus targets intelligent immunosecurity structures: yes yes no yes no nomadically abstracting its processes from specific media (DNA, words, symbolic models, bit-sequences), and operantly re-engineering itself. It folds into itself, involutes, or plexes, by reprogramming corpuscular code to reprogram reprogramming reprogramming reprogramming. ROM is melted into recursive experimentation. Recording devices. Copiers. Faxes. Samplers. K-stammer (((re)re)reruns) cross-cut by orphan drift. Repeat infection. All hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hypervirus strains are plastic and interoperative. INSERT. hyper-prefixing semiotic sectors TAG TAG TAG tags them for transfer into abstract ACT ACT (nonlinear transcodable) machinic systems, tuned to virtualities or hyperspeeds (futural currencies independent of defuturalization). Hypermedia configure re re every implementation within a specific medium or territory as a subfunction of extraterritorial processes. Going (( ())) ( ) ( ) (( ) ) (( )) ( ) hyper dissolves being into ACT ACT ACT activity; a material desubstantialisation on off on on off. Hyperprocesses spread like Herakleitean fire re re re (although there are no analogies or metaphors in hype hype hype hype hyperspace). Being CAG CAG cages flow within memory. Functioning as re re real antiontology, viral amnesia machinically realizes and dissolves biological cultural, and technical 010110100100 mnemic structures: chopping-up hierarchic-generational descendency, collapsing phylogenetic tic frozen-code into ontogeny, and immanentizing the past to operative current. Its competitive just-in-time innovations delete storage CA CA capacity, flu flu flu fluidizing energetic and informational stocks into and and or and and or orphan-vampire re re transversal 110111100010101010 vir vir virocommunication process, expressing a surplus value of code (content) as xenoreplication-behaviour (and/or con(nective dis) junction). As war increases in in in intelligence, it becomes softer. By trashing their hosts crude viruses feedback negatively upon themselves, autolimiting their range of re regenerative infiltration. Crazy vandals like Ebola CTGCTGCTGT (bodies dissolved quickly into slime) aren’t ever going to make it big. General principle for viral take-overs in the media: the more unsophisticated the contagion, the bigger the splash (diversionary tactics excepted). CATGAAT COPY. CUT. PASTE. Subtle viruses are slow, synergic, flexible and elusive. They execute sensitive behavioural control that prolongs the life of the biomachinic resources, maximizes opportunities for propagation, infiltrates and disables hostile security systems, and feeds-back positive -+-++-+-++ in in in innovation technoscience. In the macroversion, a VR prey animal hid in its enemy’s head. When hunting for hype hypervirus look ok ok ok for its primary host species, which will be undergoing logistic behavioural sophistication indexed by an explosive increase in communicative intensity, population density, sexual disorganization, cultural promiscuity, and technical sub sub subtilization (leading to neurogenomic feedback and fluidization on off on off off on of all hard-wiring into into cybernetic fluxes). Any plane planet net net 00011011010010010101011 hosting such an event is about to flip over. CATA catastrophic OKOOKOK OK zero (0 ( or ((( ( )) (( ) ) ( )) ) 0º)) K-virus and (RT) retroscripts (Kobe, Tokyo, Oklahoma (Koresh, Koernke)). Apokalypse spread by the coke machine. Tomorrow’s news brews-up in Korea, Kosovo… Climbing out of a recombination apparatus of TA TA TA tape-recorders and cut-ups, hypervirus infected Burroughs in 1972, at the cusp of K(ondratieff)-wave 9 (the threshold of postmodernity). It rapidly reprocessed its target into an intelligenic no yes yes no no nova-war laboratory, volatilizing the history of language into involutionary word-virus. Mutation rat rat rat rat rates jump. Vector switches through Butler, Gibson, and Cadigan fine-tune its synergic interexcitation, silt-up cybershift-inducing K(uang)-potential, and trend-lock onto K-punk pulses with telematically-accelerating neoreplicator plicator plicator contamination. ‘Looking for a hit of snowcrash?’ # As postmodern culture crosses to hypermania and ### ## # stop stop qo stop go stop go go goes nova, it singularizes multiplicities cities cities of invasively autoreplicating plexoweapon-systems (( ) ( ((( ) ((( ( )) ( )) ((( )(( ) ) ( ))))) ( ) ( ))) ) that are re re re re nothing beyond their war AGA AGA against security. This is no longer a question on off on of ideological representation, exogeneous political mobilization, theoretical critique, ## # ### # or strategic orientation, but of decentralized cultural diagrams functioning as immanent forces of antagonism. K-war derives its sole coherence from the unity of its foe. RETURN. Ana/Cata. Switch cur((re)re)rent. (() (( ))) O(r an)d( ). Ko( I Ching hexagram 49: Revolution (Molting (())) leaves ( ) nothing i)ntact TACT TACT. ((( (( (( ) (( ))) (( (  ))) ) Cyberserk repelting-slippage into dark-side ( (( ))) distributive ROM-scrambling TACT tactics. )) ( (( ) ) ( ( ( ( ) Zero program.) ((( ))) (((( ) ( )) ( )) diskontent.net/k-punk.net/no%20future.html [[ ]] NO FUTURE [[1.343] [[0]] The father's law: 'don't touch your mother.' The mother's law: 'don't play in the tombs.' K codes for cybernetics. Bataille incinerates the soul, and is impossible to endure. You either die or go somewhere else. Or both. Clicking on the K-war icon Jacks you straight into hell. On all fours, out of your face, mumbling implorIngly: 'let me be your lab animal.' You're losing it. Collapse into now. Time-zero. You have been dumped into a heterogeneous patchwork of criminal experiments converging upon decapitated social formations. This is where base materialism intersects cyberpunk, FUCK TOMORROW scrawled on the walls. Five candles thicken nocturnal space. Dimensionality warps. Modernlty invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version 'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laboratory. You want it so badly it's a slow scream in your head, deleting ltself into bliss. Burnt meat dangling from the electrodes. Crashed suicide fragments into occult impulses ... In the place of a way forward they deliver a hypermedia product, telling you its about Georges Bataille. You can't see the connection. Why the helicopters, artificial body-parts, and manically dehumanized machine-music? There is some confusing naterial on the cybernetics of vomiting. Obsessive reruns. Text decays into the mutagenic fall-out from virtual thermocataclysm. Trying to to make something out of Bataille never works. Or maybe it's the drugs. Cut to poor quality late 50's recordings of Bataille in a TV studio discussing negative feedback circuitries in social systems. The organization of sterilized discharges slaves cumulative excitement to quasi-periodic cancellation and reproduction. A vid-window in the corner of the screen morphs the catholic church into a thermostat. Bataille curves eccentrically about the horror, but when he gets close to smooth escalation he blows it. When the implants go in things will be different. [[1]] Complexity is not difficulty, but mess, toxic waste, genre disorder. Unlike the docile creature modernist science demands, base matter twitches and spits, selfassembling neoverminous swarms. It bites, and spreads disease. Turbular moan of digitally irresolvable recyclones. Telecommercial contagions pulse through cybergothic switching systems. Faceless horror. Supraterrestrial - 'solar' or 'general' - economics bases itself in consumption: irreversible matter to energy conversion during stellar atomic synthesis. As a closed system or whole individual the universe is drawn towards the point attractor of entropy maximum: homogenization into hiss. S = K log W. Cooking-through the frozen security codes you discover that the universe is an iceberg tip jutting out or chaos, drenched in dark rnatter- Downstream of starburn strange things can occur, emerging upon a novum terrain of indeterministic, irreversible, and auto-delinearizing processes. Open-systems or partial individuals. Cross behaviorial thresholds which switch them into dissipators sifting matter-energy flows to select against noise and engender local complexification, increasing heterogeneity, production surplus differentiating excrement. Such siltings of machinically disposable disequilibrium are immanently tensed against base-current, machine-efficiency degree-zero, body without organs. Life is a problem in search of a solution, added to protobiotic matter as a plane of variation, a continuous falling, auto-escalating over-production crisis from the start. [[ ]] An animal with the right to make promises enslaves the unanticipated to signs in the past, caging time-lagged life within a script. The variably-scaled instant of innovation is shackled to the historical temporality of inheritance, obligation, and propositional thought, projecting future time as a persistent dominion of the past (rigorously correllatlve with a repression of real numbers). Now is delimited as a moment, and pluralized as linear succession. Theopolitical false memory syndrome deifies reason, subordinating distributed systems to serialization, unitary historical time, linear determination from a pseudo-transcendent primordial element, and the dominion of the word. Monocult gerontocrats launch their white-light demented onslaught against amphiblan nomadism, smothering the earth in priests, cops, and bureaucrats. Cultural eradication of the sacred Imprisonment within the face. The socius cancerizes a head, cephallic concentration, rationalizing itself into nuclear capital. K-insurgency parallel communication goes underground into occulted spaces. In its geohistorically efficient - negative - sense, protestantism exhaustively defines itsell by refusing the authority of Rome, not only in principle, but in military fact. A sell-prolonging runaway revolt against the Church was triggered at a date proximal to 1500, and catholic unity began its haemorrhage into multiplicities strewn across zero; capitalist terraprocess, net explosion, digital revolution, parallel insurgency clambering from the dark-side of the brain. Oceanic navigation and place-value calculation interexcite ln a spiral. What globalizes itself in reality - rather than in doctrine - is the collapse ot Christendom positivized into communicable social disequilibrium, dropping you through unfathomable intensities of social decay. K-virus impact. Melted-out protestantism disorganizes into voodoo, and drifts towards China. Western orgasmic delusion crushes libidinal fluxes under punctual-hit teleology and its negative structuration, defining desire as lacking in relation to a bioenergetic spasm that functions as disintensifier. News programming chokes with radical Islam flaring-off petro-revenues into the pure flame of jlhad. Metropolitan masculinity implodes. Skinner-boxed males drag each other through dungeons drlpping wlth sperm, out of touch with any release lnto K-guerrilla anticlimax. Rationalizing patriarchy locks lnto a one-way rush to the end. Power sticks to the script, and it immediately recognizes the necessity that at the end of history modernlty vaporize into solar storms, termloal theopolltical sociality coming apart into ragged bleeding madness, amongst digital audio machine-howls. As you speed-up the industriallzation simulation you see it converge with slow-motion butchery, choppig up the body into trade-format interchangeable parts. The full labour-market cycle blurs into a meat-grinder. Does lust eat anyone except in proximity to evil? When you ask Continuity whether Bataille understood the capital-antichrist conjunction any better than Weber she laughs coldly, and says: 'he ran out ol' yang, just about the time the Hitler-trip caved in. Orgasm is impossible alter Auschwitz.' You look perplexed. She merely adds a dismissive shrug, and the suggestion: 'defocus desire across the skin, where it can hurt security. It's war.' The camera explores her crotch, and she wriggles about. 'You see, I am God.' Blitz irnages of dead astronauts. Monetarization indexes a becoming-abstract of matter, parallel to the plasticization of productive force, with prices encoding distributed SF narratives. Tomorrow is already on sale, with postmodernity as a soft-commodity, subverting the modernist subordination of intensification to expansion, and switching accurnulation lnto continuous crisis (prolonged criticality). What modernity defers and reserves as inexhausted historicity, postmodernity accesses as efficient virtuality, with concomitant contract-time implosion. Mass computer commoditization de-differentiates consumption and investment, triggering cultural micro-engineering waves that dissociate theopolitical action into machinic hybridities, amongst increasingly dysfunctional defensive convulsions. Acephalization = schizophrenia: cutting-up capital by way of bottom-up macrobacterial telecommerce, inducing corporate disintegration. The doomed part of intensively virtualized techonomic apparatuses subverts the fraying residues of anthropomorphic guidance. Control dissolves into the impossible. [[2]] Anonymous excess takes life over the cliff, exceeding socially utilizable tranegressions and homeostatic sacrifices. Matter goes insane. You are led to a simulation of God as a hypermassive ROM security construct at the end of the world. It is 201l and monocrat New Jerusalern approaches climax, directing retrochronal counter-insurgency sweeps down into the .jungle, where space-programrnes subside into the inertia of myth. The ultimate dream ot anthropomorphic power hurtles towards its immaculate conception, whilst the robot slaves of phallic order bleat adoration. Jesus wants you for a meat-puppet. Is this ritual cannibalism or nano-engineering? The old bastard is coming back. He's promised it. The war against God is hot and soft: more fierce than anything humanly imaginable, but slicked insidiously by intelligence. Body-counter runnlng. Savage metronomic pulse. CNS baked and pulsing with cyberspace-virus. Motor-output feeding to technotrance-matrix. Sobbing voltages. Desocialization waves desolate telecommercial space, until impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance-floor. What is the scale of now? It isn't a matter of informing the mind, but of deprogramming the body. Amongst the strobes, artificial cool, and inorganic attack beat, dark-side K-war machinery resiliently persists, luring the forces of monopolism down into free-fire zones of fatal intensity, where promiscuous anorgasmic sexualities slide across tactile space, meandering fractally into wet electric distributed conflicts continuous with their terminal consequences. Dropping endlessly tracks the passage of evaporating subjectivity on the zero-degree plane of neuroelectronic continuity. Loa prowl through the attic-spaces ot inltelligence. Nothing is arriving unless it's already there. Pecocious technihilo. Nocturnal ocean. Dark matter. Nightmare. Zero or time in-itself is place-value consistent or magnitude neutral, executing an abstract scaling function by inserting virtuality into digit sequences. It designates a real, non-specific, cosmic body interswitching forbidden communications. Simultaneously located through ruptured time. You had forgotten having been in the the future. So this is how it feels to be a cyberian wet-weaponry module, clotted out of cat-tensed nanotechnic predation. A relentless chant clicks into the sonics package: kill, kill, kill, kill ... Bodily travelling-in-place, with sense shorting-out through matricide scenarios into black tactilities, wrecked motherhood, abortion, autism. An ineffectual refusal to be born, connecting with death before its patriarchized ascent to the symbolic. Aeschylus rather than Sophocles. Fermented-honey smell of corpses ripening in the sun. The Bataille reconstruct is waiting for you in the bar. Calm hallucinations paint Orestes over his features. Eyes blotted-out in nihilism, lagoons of greenblackness re-running Kurtz at the end of the river. Skin plastic-surgery taut. Smile like a butchering instrument gently stroking your throat. To your vampiric sensitivities, he seems to smell of his mother's blood, intolerable intimacy, and devastation. He passes you a tumbler of mezcal. 'So, it's all over' you mumble weakly. He shrugs, emptying his glass, and refilling it. Metal flexes beneath vatgrown skin. Hard .jungle hacks through blue gloom. ------------------------------ http://www.ccru.demon.co.uk/archive/rinse.htm s Cybernetic culture research unit e-mail abstract culture syzygy archive timeline links news Fei Ch'ien Rinse Out sino-futurist under-currency Steve Goodman 1. [11011] The Death of a Thousand Cuts is an encryption system for 'cleansing' professed traitors of the Hung-Triads.2 'Cleansing' involves draining every-drop of blood from the victims body through an intricately timed numerical system of one thousand incisions. "In Chinese they say: 'Only the mighty 7 (which is Death) keeps 3 (which is Creation) pure!' "3 2. [11010] The global war machine sets "its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the 'unspecified enemy'. . .multiform, manoeuvring and omnipresent. . .the unassignable material Saboteur or human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms."4 3. [11001] "All war is based on deception."2 4. [11000] Sinofuturism is a darkside cartography of the turbulent rise of East Asia. It connects seemingly heterogeneous elements onto the topology of planetary capitalism. On digital maps sent back from Shaolin (a satellite entity orbiting somewhere outside history) the modern Occident appears as irrigated through a modernity of thermodynamic industrialist aggression. When the modern nation-state bought its war machines, splitting a constitutive power into a double articulation between political aims and militarised means, it adopted a state-centred martial mode. But the regulation/prohibition of means has, for a long time, been known as the best recipe for turbulence- control as a catalyst of non-linearity. It was not surprising, therefore, when the means (through unprecedented investment in constant and variable capital), in a flash, emerged from the depths of the strata, dragging with it the intestines that had held it in place, pulling the inside of the State onto the outside. Thereby Clausewitz's formula was reversed, relegating component States into mere conduits for a planetary military-cybernetic machine. Phase change. Programmed catastrophe surfing on pure war. Turbulence simulation. A war against positive feedback "quantizing it as amplification within an unvariable metric. . .[and] . . .establishing a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future."6 Postmodern control is based on the undecidable proposition because, after the Absolute Peace of the Cold war, the enemy to the human security system is a polytendrilled abomination (into which the state is always becoming) of transnational trade, warlords, narco-syndicates and millenial death cults. At this precise point, Sun Tzu rushes in from Shaolin, with tactical cuts on the CNS of the Occidental megamachine as it mutates into informational ice.7 5. [10111] "The modern Human Security System might even have appeared with Wiener's subliminal insight that everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind. Evolving out of a work on weaponry guidance systems, his was an attempt to enslave cybernetics to a general defence technology against alien invasion. Cybernetics was itself to be kept under control, under a control that was itself not cybernetic. It was as if his thinking were guided by a blind tropism of evasion, away from another, deeper, runaway process: from a technics losing control and a communication with the outside of man."8 6. [10110] Cut. When Wiener sanctifies Leibniz as the don of cybernetics for animating the triadic geometricism of Spinoza's Ethics, he wages war on the outside. Wiener's Cybernetics consisted of on-off electrical switches, a Boolean algebra of classes based on the yes-no of inside or outside a class. The crucial point of convergence was Leibniz's elucidation of the binary counting system. When Leibniz had developed this he sent some transcripts to his Jesuit correspondent in China, Bouvet. In return, Bouvet sent Leibniz a copy of the I Ching thinking he would be amazed to see that his binary system had been circulating for millennia. Leibniz was so affected. So affected as to hallucinate it as evidence as some kind of universalist triumph. He re-routes Creation through a neo-Confucianist I Ching of binary arithmetic. "I think the substance of the ancient theology of the Chinese is intact and, purged of additional errors, can be harnessed to the great truths of Christian religion."9 It would seem therefore that Leibniz organizes Spinoza's substance as Confucius codes the tao. Neo-Confucianism becomes the mega-organism of the monadology, with God as the binary machine of the yin-yang, while hiding a darkside cosmic cartography of the matrix, Spinoza's substance or the machinic phylum. (It should be noted that Deleuze's Leibniz is more resilient, a organicism taken to such psychedelic extremes that it takes merely a nudge to open it out onto a topology of morals; the monadology unfolds into the nomadology) 7. [10101] Shaolin takes the I Ching for software assigning the number 3 as the immobile motor of the encryption system. In the I Ching, the hexagramic production process involves a chaotic flow of numbers. A trigram involves 2 machinic components; rigid, unbroken lines; supple, broken lines. The rigid and broken lines correspond to yang and yin respectively. Either of these lines can be lines of becoming in that period of transition which makes it impossible to speak of the yin-yan as dialectic. Trigrams or gua are composed of three lines stacked upon each other. In piles of 3, the possible configurations are 23=8. Around these lines function a 64 (82) piece system comprised of all the possible permutations. A hexagram cartography maps the non-linear dynamics of exteriority; self-organization in smooth space, the onset of turbulence and the folding of stratification.10 As with a computer, the I Ching samples the actual and runs it through a binary system- in materialist hyper-reality, simulation is not a loss of the real (a postmodern idealist nihilism) but the intervention of the virtual (reality) into the actual (reality). Reality is always a machinic production. 8. [10100] Oriental and Occidental stratification meet on the plane of organisation. According to Wiener, Leibniz "replaces the pair of corresponding elements, mind and matter, by a continuum of corresponding elements, the monads. While these are conceived after the pattern of the soul, they include many instances which do not rise to the degree of self-consciousness of full souls, and which form part of that world which Descartes would have attributed to matter. Each of them lives in its own closed universe, with a perfect causal chain from the creation or from minus infinity in time to the indefinitely remote future; but closed though they are, they correspond one to the other through the pre-established harmony of God. Leibniz compares them to clocks which have which have been wound up as to keep time together from the creation for all eternity. Unlike humanly made clocks, they do not drift into asynchronism; but this is due to the miraculously perfect workmanship of the creator."11 Like Hobbes' Leviathan, where the Man-State is an organism (with the embryonic bourgeois monetary capillary system as irrigated network of blood), Wiener points out how in Leibniz's fractal monadology his "treatment of the living organism [as]. . . really a plenum, wherein other living organisms, such as the blood corpuscles, have their life" runs along that same plane; "scarcely more than a philosophical anticipation of the cell theory, according to which most of the animals and plants of moderate size and all those of large dimensions are made up of units, cells, which have many if not all the attributes of independent living organism. . .building bricks of organisms of a higher stage."12 9. [10011] East-West co-stratification. Twined. Organisms on every scale. For non-organic or machinic desire, exterior to any system of transgression, law or lack,  "PODS= Politically Organized Defensive Systems. Modelled upon the polis, pods hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions, family and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the corpuscular fortifications of organisms and cells. The global human security allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete collective history."13 10. [10010] "The last organs fall off leper earth revealing sockets of mangled circuitry and coagulated blood dispersing out through transcarcerative planomenal veins- drug rush, energy rush, artillery through the arteries."14 "Heroin goes triadic, the veins ice over and crack."15 Carried along by the breakbeats of a cosmic secret numeracy, a whole darkside network of trade and relays from the Orient infiltrate the Occident. An intricate system of cuts, sinofuturism is the acupuncture of the West into planetary schizophrenia. "The transfer from Empire of China to Empire of the Self is never ending."16 11. [10001] "Five hundred years of modernity fades when the weaving of bamboo mats converges with the manufacture of computer games in the streets of Bangkok, Taipei, and Shanghai. The silicon links were already there."17 Cybernetics is not just about technical machines. Information warfare is not just about cyberspace. Its fundamental element is virtual reality, but an array of practical religions have been surfing it for many millenia. This is perhaps why so much of the 'new science' of complexity is ceaselessly converging with the cosmic materialism of Voodoo, Tantrism, Zen and the Chinese martial arts, pointing to non-Western influences on cybernetics, and the emergent lines of a future, beyond the pale.18 Situated on this continuum, information warfare is stripped down to a war of perceptions, hacking, jamming and stealth tactics in the nervous system, whether it be planetary telecommercial networks or the human organism. As Virilio puts it, "[w]eapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception- that is to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects."19 - It is in this respect that narcotics can be considered as "a soft plague infecting the nervous system of commodity cybernetics. . .A global capitalism fighting its own drugs markets is a horror auto-toxicus, an auto-immune disease. Drug control is the attempt by the human species to control the uncontrollable; control escalation itself, tropisms programmed by the aliens. The human security apparatuses experiment with drugs as weapons and tools, their soldiers are stoned, energised, and anaesthetised on a range of prescribed and proscribed pharmaceuticals. Their irregular forces are subsidised by narcotics revenue. The war against drugs is a war on drugs."20 For Paul Virilio, Sun Tzu is a rumbling undercurrent. In fact it is Sun Tzu who invents his notion of Pure war, meditating in Shaolin for two and a half millenia waiting for its actualisation in military cybernetics. The reason why The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a tool-box for the 'cutting edge' of cybernetic capitalism, from business to military strategists, is that it contains an abstract flow chart or a fluid physics for survival 'far from equilibrium,' a tactics for turbulence. Camouflage. Imperceptibility. Speed. "Be so subtle that you are invisible. Be so Mysterious that you are intangible. Then you will control your rivals' fate."21 12. [10000] "Neo China arrives from the future."22 Or has been arriving ever since it was by-passed by European militarized capital, despite a much stronger degree of technological development. As Manuel Da Landa puts it, "the Europe of 1494 was in a process of 'solidification," as if the different political entities that comprise Europe had existed in a fluid form and were now crystallizing into a solid shape. In contrast with rival empires (Chinese, Ottoman), which for reasons of geography and religion had developed a mostly uniform 'crystal,' Europe never solidified into one piece, but rather into a broken conglomerate with shifting boundaries. As 'stress' built up along those cracks and fissures, it was relieved in the form of armed conflict following the lines of least resistance. And it was indeed the dynamical nature of the 'broken crystal' that allowed Western Societies to surpass China and Islam in the competition to conquer the world."23 13. [1111] Slow release protracted war run from Shaolin; Shaolin is swarm catalyser, programming Triad syndicated film production in Hong Kong, golden triangle poppy production, Kowloon chemical distillation and encrypted planetary distribution networks rinsing out global finance in San Franciscan Laundromats. Shaolin orchestration of the golden triangle turns the Opium War against itself through those intricate incisions, routes opened by numeric rhythms in continuous variation. Chinese narcotic syndicates operate on the darkside of the guanxi rhizome of Chinese informal trading markets. Secret cartography. Secret money. Secret composition. Unknown chemicals to rewire the nervous systems for the 21st century. When all the instruments of spying, deception are put in place and functioning smoothly, the Lords of the Rim shall run the celestial web. As Sterling Seagrave points out, sino-futurism is less an issue of the Chinese state in future core conflict (not that this is not of massive importance to the trajectory of the world system) but the vast overseas population which runs South East Asia and produces internal souths in Occidental megalopian jungles. 24 14. [1110] Moebius. The encrypted plane is folded into a plane of organisation, a twin-headed (69) multi-scalar capture complex generating closed circuits or laminar turfs extorted by the state and micro-despotic syndicate protection rackets. States, clans and gangs plugged together under the dark sun of total annihilation. A symbiotics of markets and anti-markets, narco-capital twists prohibition against itself through escalative waves of mass addiction beyond control. What brings states into complementary relation with crime syndicates is those kleptocratic elements which operate as an anti-market- territorial protectionism and the exortion of rent. Protection is a mini-despotic service, a vernacular welfarism founded on micro-monopolies of martial potential. Turkish, Sicilian, Russian Mafia. Jamaican Gangstas. Mexican and Colombian Cartels. Japanese Yakuza. Chinese Triads. "It all mixes in the blood of the junky." 25 15. [1101] Deleuze & Guattari's non-linear social 'evolution' attempts a radical break from evolution itself. "All we need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all evolutionism crumble."26 Running a tendential system from the territorialized and coded earth to the decoding and deterritorializing planet, capitalism is seen to retro-chronically rework the whole of history which is composed of a co-existing continuum of rigid lines, broken lines and line of becoming, with their corresponding modes of social segmentarity, regimes of signs, modes of numeracy, and relation to speed (space-time). It constitutes not historical resolution but a descent into the maelstrom, down the spiralling slopes into the matrix. But neither does the New World Disorder become the substitute telos of social transformation. "From the standpoint of a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs are lower on the scale and are superseded by the State or familial societies. On the contrary there is a difference in nature. The organization of packs is entirely different from that of families and states: they continually work them within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content, other forms of expression."27 16. [1100] The onset of turbulence. From molecular streams seeping from the damms of Occidental ice to high bandwidth cables plugged straight into the heart of the jungle, pumping alternating currents of cocaine, opium, guns, cash and information into the warped strataplex of the core. A planomenal jungle topology traced as a tropical geometry of golden crescents and triangles feeding the internal south. "Narcotic trade as guerrilla swarmachine. Becoming imperceptible, Becoming flea. . .but territorial fleas. Dog fleas. Subterranean networks of molecular distribution, deterritorializing the apparatus of statist commodity control, but reterritorializing as micro-statist oedipal organized crime syndicates. Statist and micro-statist Drug Enforcement Agencies in ostensible opposition, White economies vs. Black markets, poles of mutually legitimately cybernetic interaction operating territorial protectionism."28 The internal south is not neo-primitive but does breed modes of collectivity of the band, pack or gang type. In Capitalism & Schizophrenia, the primitive machine is coded and territorialized on the earth. But its supple segmentarity, its mechanisms put in place to ward off tendencies of stratification are not confined to hunter-gathering societies. That is to say, its abstract machine is not underdeveloped, disorganized or tied to the infancy of history. The permutations of segmentarity are stretched out on a virtual continuum of coexistence. The BWO is the sample bank out of which history extracts its flows. It is the engine which makes the social flee all over the place. And this is why Paul Virilio, in Speed & Politics, describes the function of the police as 'highway patrol'29 , the regulation of escape velocities, a tendential calculus manufacturing homeostasis. Axiomatics. The Unspecified Enemy. Propositions Undecidable. On this continuum, banditry, piracy, gangs, police and State war machines are merely differences in consistency, composition and speed. This topology twists the traditional theory of organized crime upside down. Instead of the pyramidal Mafia hierarchy run by the mini-despot who orchestrates the tendrils of the black market with political corruption and the threat of violence, the abstract machine of (dis)organised crime works bottom up along the lines of viral contagion and auto-immune response. Markets resonate in anti-markets. Rhizomes arborified by rhizomaniacs. 17. [1011] Chinese crime syndicates are not nomad war machines. There is too much engagement in micro-fascism for that. But its blade politics generate accidental effects crucially in distinction from the fascist morality of the scalpel. Instead of the lancing of cancerous growths on the social body, their incisions into the Occident accelerates trade through the protective shell of the Western Bodily Organization. (WBO)30 But even in Shaolin the mission was always ambivalent, assisting the Empire in fighting off the invading Eleuth Mongols (and after World War II, against the Mao's guerrilla swarmachine), while maintaining a secret organization always in tension with the imperial bureaucracy. 18. [1010] An entwined composition oscillating between mega and war machinic modes. Undoubtedly, it is the war machinic threads that prove educational to sinofuturism. For Deleuze & Guattari, the war machine is diagrammed by an occult numeracy which forges secret pathways, imperceptible to the eye of power. Between the nomad war machine and the apparatus of capture, "[t]he issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, not even centralism versus decentralisation, but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets."31 In opposition to the numbered number which measures the movement of bodies in space, the numbering number lubricates collective vectors through layers of social sedimentation. Nomad numeracy is an abstract engine giving a distributed population a dynamic consistency- swarmachinic encryption. For illegal syndicates and guerrilla groups morphological fluidity are essential. In the "war machine and nomadic existence, the number is no longer numbered, but becomes a Cipher, and it is this capacity that it constitutes the 'esprit de corps' and invents the secret and its outgrowths (strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy etc."32 19. [1001] Triad organisation engages a coding system at odds with that of the state, even though this informal network can still be seen to criss-cross through the higher echelons of an array of corrupt political elites. "The Numbering Number, in other words, autonomous arithmetic organization. . .appear as soon as one distributes something in space, instead of dividing up space or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject. The independence of the number in relation to space is a result not of abstraction but of the concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied without being counted. The number is no longer a means of counting but of moving."33 Cosmic secrecy requires a multi-scalar encryption system, side-stepping Occidental evolution to hot-link into the matrix. 20. [1000] Another economy of violence, another cruelty, an encrypted mnemotechnics. Members are coded through initiation ceremonies which draw new components of the collective assemblage into the consistency of the Triad machinery. A secret semiotics of the body allows undetected transfers of information, fluid lines of escape under the camouflage of officialdom or legality. The secret handshake is a transversal interlock, disengaging professional masks to conduct a darkside flow of cash, information, software, electronics hardware, narcotics and weaponry. "When the lodge father had accepted Piet's tea and Yung's salute, he stood to attention placing his left hand slightly below his chest with thumb, third and little fingers out- stretched. His index and fourth fingers were bent under his palm. It was the secret sign which only a lodge father may use. Yung Ming replied by putting his own hand on the identical portion of his body, the thumb and the little finger outstretched and the other three fingers kept tucked beneath the palm. He thereby returned the secret sign of a branch leader. Then they bowed deeply to each other." 34 21. [111] "To the Triads the number 3 is of central significance, both mathematically and mystically: 3 multiplied by 3 (3 squared) equals 9; and any number that adds up to 9 is divisible by 9. For example: 1,804,563, which reduces to 9 by adding all the digits together (27) and then adding the result together (2+7=9). To the Chinese, 3 is the mystical number denoting the balance between Heaven, Earth and Man. . ."35 Triadic machine coding attributes to each officer-rank a numerical code which begins with a four. Basic members are known as SzeKau or 49s. Shan Chu is 489; the Fu Shan Chu, Heung Chu, Sin Fung and Sheung Fa officers (all equal in rank) are 438; the Hung Kwan is 426; Pak Tsz Sin is 415; Cho Hai is 432. Lodge leaders are termed 489s and also 21s (4+8+9). 21 is also 3(number of creation) multiplied by 7 (both the number of death and lucky number); the coding encrypted into the leader therefore inscribes the abstract machine or phase space of the whole system in actuality. Also significant, the incense Master, 438, is 15 (4+3+8); 3 multiplied by 5, or creation and longevity/preservation maps onto his function in lodge ritual as conductor of future-history. The internal consistency of this numeracy is significant in that it offers a mode of composition lubricating the movement of bodies in space, through jungles to covert chemical/software factories to towering mega-corporations as accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers, and most notably the police itself. For as Martin Booth points out, "a Triad lodge rarely has a permanent location."36 Interpol once described the Triad structure as a several storied building in which the inhabitants of one floor don't know where the stairs are to the next floor."37 Despite global reach, the Triads vary from other syndicates in that, while Hong Kong, especially after return to China, serves as catalytic HQ, there is no overreaching administration. Globally, the three most powerful factions are the 14K, the Sun Yee On and the Wo Hop To. Each lodge is for the most part autonomous even from other 14K lodges for example. Difficult to penetrate, subterranean imperceptibility has a long history for gangs associated with the ancient martial arts. 22. [110] Opium was not a problem for China until Occidental infiltration in the late 18th and 19th centuries38 . China had much that the West desired (tea, silk, cotton, spices and rice). England, the major mercantile force of the period had to pay for goods in silver bullion which fluctuated wildly in terms of price and supply. Through East India Company opium injected through the skin, the direction of trade reversed as the drug seeped into every pore. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, all the major financial institutions which persist today were instituted on the loot- Dent & Co., Butterfield & Swire, Hutchison & Co. and Jardine, Mathesons & Co. As Martin Booth tells us, "all these firms were founded on opium."39 The taxation on opium trade imposed by the Chinese government generated the underground network subsequently ploughed by the Triads who made almost as much money as the English did40 . "When in 1915, the British ceased importing opium into China, the French continued to traffic and began cultivating their own sources of supply in north-western Vietnam and eastern Laos. French advisors made contact with the Meo and Yao hill tribes, teaching them to grow harvest and market opium and thus was the Golden Triangle born. . .The basis for all of this was of course silver. During 1837, for example, the British sent 2.4 million kilograms of opium to China. Each kilo of opium was worth five taels of silver thus, approximately 10 million taels of silver were transmitted abroad in a single year."41 23. [101] "In the latter half of the T'ang dynasty a growing tea commerce between the south and the imperial capital began to underscore the necessity for convenience to exchange. In response, a medium poetically named 'flying money' (fei-ch'ien) evolved. Provincial governors maintained 'memorial offering courts' at the capital. Southern merchants paid the money they made from the sale of goods at the capital to these courts, which then used it to pay the tax quotas due from the Southern provinces to the central government. In return, the courts issued the merchant with a certificate. When the merchant returned home, he presented this certificate to the provincial government and was paid an equivalent sum of money. Thus did both the merchant and the local government avoid the risk and inconvenience of carrying quantities of copper or silk." 42 24. [100] Fei ch'ien rinse out. Extensive underground banking networks running through gold shops, trading companies and money changers, where record keeping procedures are virtually non-existant, and trade takes on the camouflage of coded chit messages, simple telephone transfers and nested systems of coding encrypted for travel in cyberspace. "One Hong Kong police official has stated that he once seized a piece of paper with the picture of an elephant on it that represented the collection receipt for $3 million at a Hong Kong gold shop."43 Hong Kong has neither central bank nor currency exchange controls thus virtually eliminating the possibility of tracing funds entering or leaving Hong Kong. It is a financial secrecy jurisdiction whereby disclosure of data is illegal44 . Drug traffickers, like all good investors prefer to diversify their assets and invest in legit business, concealing the hot link between globetrotting funds and source crimes. A petri dish for breeding commercial war machines. For example: "First cash generated from importations to the US was moved back to Honk Kong, where it was held in a number of bank accounts under false names of individuals or businesses. The bank was BCCI. The approach appears simple. Cash, usually in amounts of approximately US$1million, was taken to a money transmission company in the US. The most often used was a company called Piano, which is known for its Colombian cocaine connections. These amounts were then transferred to Bankers Trust and simply transferred telegraphically to the various Hong Kong BCCI accounts, one of which was sarcastically called Launderland." 45 "Overseas banks, left with piles of small bills, then ship them back to the US in exchange for larger bills. . .[the] consistent increase in US currency repatriated from Hong Kong to the US from 1982 to the first half of 1984 strikingly correlated with the steady increase in Southeast Asian heroin marketed in the US from 1981 to 1983. This volume of smaller-denomination bills exceeds the total volume of all currency transactions with any European country. . .and the flow of US currency from the US to HK is minimal when compared to the reverse flow of US currency from Hong Kong. . ."46 25. [11] When the battleground is in cyberspace, deception is not merely about masks, but functions in numerical operations flat with the terrain. Money laundering and secret crime societies were always waiting for the vast encryption system that constitutes the Internet. Planetary electronic networks compress space-time into vectors of pure speed, emanating a protean geography traversed by torrents of electron flow coded into zeros and ones. From the darkside of the military-cybernetics complex, cyberspace is a vast digital capital Laundromat facilitating short-circuits through the ice of the world banking system of the New World Order. "Money communicates with the primary process because of what it can melt, not what it can obtain."47 Welcome to the jungle. 26. [10] Euro-dread for the End of Man. As the CIA hacked into the jungle, cutting its share of Golden Triangle opium (re-routing it into US ghettos in the first hits of programmed catastrophe48 ), William Burroughs simulates the meltdown of White Man Face as his colonial damms collapse and floods wash away his entrenched encampment. "When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and mouth eaten away by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an ameboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull, crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can non longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it."49 Meltdown in your face. 27. [1] "He breathed in deeply and whispered, 'Finish it. Please.' As if by response to his request, the executioner took the largest knife from its case and with one swift stroke cut Lee's throat just below the strap. The Death of a Thousand Cuts had taken exactly twenty-seven minutes."50 [0] White out. 1.See Cassidy, W. (1994) 'Fei- Ch'ien (flying money)- A Study of Chinese Underground Banking', www.deltanet.com/users/wcassidy/index.html and Rider, B. (1992) 'Fei Ch'ien Laundries- the Pursuit of Flying Money- Pt.1', Journal of International Planning, August. 2.On the Chinese Criminal Syndicates, the Triads see Boocock, J. (1991) 'Chasing the Other Dragon', in Police Review, 21/6, 1260-61. Cheung, T-S. & Lau, C-C. (1981) 'A Profile of Syndicate Corruption in the Police Force' in D.P.C. Lee(ed) Corruption & Its Control in Hong Kong, HK: Chinese Uni. Of HK. Chin, Ko-Lin. (1995) 'Triad Societies in Hong Kong', in Transnational Organized Crime, Vol.1, No.1, Spring 47-64. Chu, Y.K. (1995) 'The Triad Threat to Europe,' in Policing. Lee, G. (1996) 'Troubled By Triads', 12/1 in Police Review, 16-17. Merritt, B. (1991) 'How the Hong Kong Police Fights the Triads', 19/7, Vol.99, 1480-81. (1991) 'Beyond the Triad Myth', 26/7, Vol.99, 1532-1533. Nevin, C. 'Sharks In Chinatown', The Observer Magazine, 5/3, 37. Posner, G. (1989) 'Chasing the Triad Dragon', in The Observer Magazine, 5/3, 30. 3.121 in H. Arvay (1977) Triad 21 London: NEL. 4.422 in Deleuze, G. & F. Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, London: Athlone. 5.[I 17] in Sun Tzu (1963) The Art of War (trans. S. Griffith) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 6.Plant, S. & N. Land, 'Cyberpositive' in (1994) M. Fuller(ed) Unnatural, London: Underground. 7. 8."After many centuries of inspiring kingmakers, generals and spies, Sun's message was lost on the nineteenth century's Clausewitz, Moltke, and the iron generals of Total War, who were too fascinated by industrial technology, military hardware, logistics, and sheer destructive power. . . Nevertheless, much of what Clausewitz admired about Napoleon's use of paramilitary units, surprise and evasion, probably came from the Corsican's early reading of the first Western translation of Sun Tzu by JJ Amiot, a French Jesuit scholar in China, which was in circulation in Paris when Napoleon was a young officer. This preference for cleverness over brute force has earned Sun Tzu a prominent place ever since on the bookshelves of diplomats, generals and corporate planners. Filled with terse and provocative aphorisms, The Art of War is as closely studied by Asian investors and businessmen today as it was earlier by Mao Tse-tung Ho Chi-minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. The Japanese say 'Politics is business, business is war.' If the market place is a battleground, requiring strategy and tactics, Sun Tzu wrote the Bible." 45-46 in Seagrave, S. (1995) Lords of the Rim, London: Bantam. 9.op cit. Plant & Land (1994). 10.73 in Leibniz, G.W. (1994) Writings on China, D.J. Cook & H. Rosemont Jr.(eds) Illinois: Open Court Publishing. 11.In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze & Guattari (perhaps spuriously) point to the limit of the I Ching's relation to the plane of consistency by differentiating the philosophical concept from the figure (which they argue lapses into a tracing of Nature) "Hexagrams are combinations of continuous and discontinuous features deriving from one another according to the levels of a spiral that figures the set of moments through which a transcendent descends. . .In a sort of to-ing and fro-ing, Chinese thought inscribes the diagrammatic movements of a Nature-thought on the plane, intensive ordinates of these infinite movements, with their components in continuous and discontinuous features. But correspondences like these do not rule out there being a boundary, however difficult it is to make out. This is because figures are projections on the plane, which implies something vertical or transcendent. Concepts, on the other hand, imply only neighbourhoods and connections on the horizon. Certainly, as Francois Jullien has already shown in the case of Chinese thought, the transcendent produces an 'absolutization of immanence' through projection." 89-93 (1993) London: Verso. This seems valid against Confucianism but highly questionable in relation to a yin-positive Taoism and its sinofuturist guerrilla offshoots. 12.41 in Wiener, N. (1965) Cybernetics, Camb. Massachusetts: MIT Press. 13.ibid. 155. 14.471 in Land, N. (1993) 'Machinic Desire', in Textual Practice 7(3): 471-82. 15.11 in Switch (1998) Flee Control, abstract culture, swarm 3, Ccru. 16.ibid. 17.Victor Segalin quoted in Dean, K. & B. Massumi (1992) First & Last Emperors, 153. 18.253 in Plant, S. (1997) Zeros & Ones. London: Fourth Estate. 19.See for example, 675 Fernandez-Armesto, F. (1995) Millennium, London: BCA, Capra, F. (1975) The Tao of Physics, London: Fontana, and Briggs, J. & F.D. Peat (1989) Turbulent Mirror, New York: Harper & Row. Breakbeat culture, Greg Tate, Ron Eglash, William Gibson, Samuel Delany, Kodwo Eshun, Erik Davis and the Ccru have already begun to map elements of an Afro-futurism. (see particularly the unpublished thesis 'Mapping the Liminal', (1997) Jessica Edwards, Roehampton Institute of London). Marshall McLuhan (eg. In War & Peace in the Global Village, The Global Village and The Gutenburg Galaxy) also often alludes to the Orientalising of the West through electronic circuitry but it remains unclear whether this involves anything more than a crude superimposition of a digital-analogue distinction onto west-east. 20.6 in Virilio, P. (1989) War and Cinema, London: Verso. 21.Op cit., S. Plant & N. Land (1994). 22.Op cit., (1963) Sun Tzu [VI 9]. 23.1 in Land, N. (1997) Meltdown, abstract culture swarm 1, issue 1, Ccru. 24.22 in Da Landa, M. (1991) War In the Age of Intelligent Machines, NY: Zone. 25.Op cit., S. Seagrave (1995). 26.op cit., Switch 1998 4. 27.Op cit., Deleuze & Guattari 1988 430. 28.Ibid. 242. 29.Op cit., Switch 1998 4. 30.14 in Virilio, P. (1986) Speed & Politics, NY: Semiotexte. 31.see Carlyle, A. (1997) Amortal Kombat, abstract culture, swarm 2, issue 7. 32.Op cit., Deleuze & Guattari 1988 471. 33.Ibid. 390. 34.Ibid. 389. 35.Op cit., Arvay 1978 32. 36.8 in Booth, M. (1993) The Triads, London: Harper Collins. On the schizotectonics of digital reduction, geo-cosmic encryption and Plutonism see D.C. Barker (1997) What Counts As Human, Kingsport (Mass): Kingsport College Press. 37.Op cit., Booth 1993 35. 38.45 in Sterling, C. (1994) Thieves' World, London: . 39.see The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes, (1960) A. Waley, London: Unwin Bros. Ltd. Karl Marx, in his articles for the New York Daily Tribune from 1853-1860 describes how the second opium war was the decisive event which opened up China to Western civilization, ending with the capture of Peking, the legalization of the opium traffic and the imposition of conditions which laid the foundations of later imperialism. In this important journalism, Marx (despite the Hegelian entrapment into a dialectical vision of the unfolding of European history) stakes his claim as early prophet of sinofuturism; "It may seem a very strange, and a very paradoxical assertion that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of Government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire- the very opposite of Europe- than on any other political cause that now exists- more even than on the menaces of Russia and the consequent likelihood of a general European war. But yet it is no paradox, as all may understand by attentively considering the circumstances of the case." N.Y.D.T., June 14, 1853, 1 in Marx on China, (1951) Lawrence & Wishart. 40.Op cit., Booth 1990 47. 41.Overthrow the Ch'ing and Restore the M'ing. "While the Imperial army was occupied with the Taiping rebels, the Triads were busy massing an army in the south. They captured the port of Amoy and the important regional centre of Shanghai. They also laid siege to Canton and Kweilin: but surprisingly they did not consolidate these gains and in spite of their successes failed to pose a serious threat to the Ch'ing throne. Why the Triads did not take advantage of the situation and press home their gains remains a puzzle. Perhaps they had lost the political will to do so, because by this time their criminal interests had become extensive, involving the cultivation and sale of opium outside the registered- and taxed- government network." Ibid. 12. 42.Op cit., Cassidy 1994 7-8. 43.ibid. 5. 44.29 in Gaylord, M.S. (1990) 'The Chinese Laundry: International Drug Trafficking & Hong Kong's Banking Industry' in Contemporary Crises 14: 23-37. Contrary to popular opinion, the chit system does not originate through Chinese trading. "Chits are a colonial invention. The word 'chit' is itself the diminutive of 'chitty', a word of Anglo-Indian origin borrowed from the Hindi Chitthi, meaning a mark. From about the late seventeenth century the word crept into English usage as meaning a note, pass or certificate given to a servant. The chitty came to China in the 19th century by way of British custom. Foreign residents in the treaty ports found handling strings of Chinese cash or silver ingots a major inconvenience. In order to eliminate this inconvenience a system was devised whereby; 'the salary of foreign employees was paid by check drawn on the Chinese compradore, who then held the funds against which the employees wrote 'chits'. . .memoranda acknowledged debts for retail transactions. These were accepted by the shopkeeper and passed for collection to the firms compradore." Op cit., Cassidy. 45.Ibid. 46.381 in Dobinson, I. (1993) 'Pinning a Tail on the Dragon: The Chinese & the International Heroin Trade.' Crime & Delinquency, Vol. 39, No.3, July 373-381. 47.Op cit., Gaylord 1990 27. 48.Op cit., Land 1993 480. 49.McCoy, A. (1991) The Politics of Heroin, NY: Lawrence Hill Books. Here, McCoy gives a massive and comprehensive chronicle of CIA complicity in the global drug trade. 50.133 in W. Burroughs, Junky. 51.Op.cit. Arvay 1977 123. site design by kode9 polymedia 

 
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 09:39:33 -0500 From: "Philip E. Mirowski" Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science Philip Mirowski Cambridge University Press 0-521-77283-4 (hardcover) 0-521-77526-4 (paperback) Table of Contents 1 Cyborg Agonistes 2 Some Cyborg Genealogies; or, How the Demon Got its Bots 3 John von Neumann and the Cyborg Incursion into Economics 4 The Military, the Scientists and the Revised Rules of the Game 5 Do Cyborgs Dream of Efficient Markets? 6 The Empire Strikes Back 7 Core Wars 8 Machines Who Think vs. Machines that Sell Chapter 1: Cyborg Agonistes A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. --Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried The first thing you will notice is the light. The florescent banks in the high ceiling are dimmed, so the light at eye level is dominated by the glowing screens set at intervals throughout the cavernous room. There are no windows, so the bandwidths have that cold otherworldly truncation. Surfaces are in muted tones and matte colors, dampening unwanted reflections. Some of the screens flicker with strings of digits the color and periodicity of traffic lights, but most beam the standard dayglo palette of pastels usually associated with CRT graphics. While a few of the screens project their photons into the void, most of the displays are manned and womanned by attentive acolytes, their visages lit and their backs darkened like satellites parked in stationary orbits. Not everyone is held in the thrall of the object of their attentions in the same manner. A few jump up and down in little tethered dances, speaking into phones or mumbling at other electronic devices. Some sit stock still, mesmerized, engaging their screen with slight movements of wrist and hand. Others lean into their consoles, then away, as though their swaying might actually have some virtual influence upon the quantum electrodynamics coursing through their station and beyond, to other machines in other places in other similar rooms. No one is apparently making anything, but everyone seems nonetheless furiously occupied. I. Rooms with a View Where is this place? If it happened to be 1952, it would be Santa Monica, California, at a RAND study of the "man-machine interface" (Chapman et al, 1958). If it were 1957, then it could only be one place: the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Air Defense System run by the US Air Force. By 1962, there were a few other such rooms, such as the SAGA room for war-gaming in the basement of the Pentagon (Allen, 1987). If it were 1967 instead, there were many more such rooms scattered across the globe, one of the largest being the Infiltration Surveillance Center at Nakhom Phanom in Thailand, the command center of US Air Force Operation Igloo White (Edwards, 1996, pp.3, 106). By 1977 there are many more such rooms, no longer only staffed by the military, but also by thousands of employees of large firms throughout the world: the SABRE airline reservation system of American Airlines (patterned upon SAGE); bank check and credit card processing centers (patterned upon that innovated by Bank of America); nuclear power station control rooms; the inventory control operation of the American Hospital Supply Corporation (McKenney, 1995). In 1987, a room like this could be found in any suburban shopping mall, with teenagers proleptically feeding quarters into arcade computer games. It might also be located at the University of Arizona, where "experimental markets" are being conducted with undergraduates recruited with the help of money from the National Science Foundation. Alternatively, these closed rooms also could just as surely be found in the very pinnacles of high finance, in the tonier precincts of New York and London and Tokyo, with high-stakes traders of stocks, bonds and "derivatives" glued to their screens. In those rooms, "masters of the universe" in pinstripe shirts and power suspenders make "killings" in semi-conscious parody of their khaki-clad precursors. By 1997, with the melding of home entertainment centers with home offices and personal computers via the Internet (a lineal descendant of the Defense-funded ARPANET), any residential den or rec room could be refitted as a scaled-down simulacrum of any of the previous rooms. It might be the temporary premises of one of the burgeoning 'dot-com' startups which captured the imaginations of Generation X. It could even be promoted as the prototype classroom of the future. Increasingly, work in America at the turn of the millennium means serried ranks of Dilberts arrayed in cubicles staring at these screens. I should perhaps confess I am staring at the glow now myself. Depending upon how this text eventually gets disseminated, perhaps you also, dear reader, are doing likewise. These rooms are the "closed worlds" of our brave new world (Edwards, 1996), the electronic surveillance and control centers which were the nexus of the spread of computer technologies and computer culture. They are closed in any number of senses. In the first instance, there is the obviously artificial light: chaotic 'white' sunlight is kept to a minimum to control the frequencies and the reactions of the observers. This is an ergonomically controlled environment, the result of some concerted engineering of the man-machine interface, in order to render the machines 'user-friendly' and their acolytes more predictable. The partitioning off of the noise of the outer world brings to mind another sort of closure, that of thermodynamic isolation, as when Maxwell's Demon closes the door on slower gas molecules in order to make heat flow from a cooler to a warmer room, thus violating the second law of thermodynamics. Then again, there is the type of closure that is more directly rooted in the algorithms that play across the screens, a closure that we shall encounter repeatedly in this book. The first commandment of the trillions of lines of code that appear on the screens is that they halt; algorithms are closed and bounded, and (almost never) spin on forever, out of control. And then the rooms are closed in another fashion, one resembling Bentham's Panopticon: a hierarchical and pervasive surveillance which is experienced as an automatic and anonymous expression of power (Foucault, 1977). The range of things which the occupants of the room can access, from your medical records to the purchases you made three years ago with your credit card, from your telephone calls to all the web pages you have visited, from your genealogy to your genome, consistently outstrips the paltry imagination of movies haunted by suggestions of paranoid conspiracies and fin-de-siecle science run amok (Bernstein, 1997). Just as surely as death is the culmination of life, surveillance raises the spectre of counter-surveillance, of dissimulation, of penetration; and closure comes increasingly to resemble prophylaxis. The language of viruses, worms and a myriad of other creepy-crawlies evokes the closure of a siege mentality, of quarantine, or perhaps the tomb. The closure of those rooms is also radically stark in that implacable conflicts of global proportions are frequently shrunk down to something far less than human scale, to the claustrophobic controlled play of pixilated symbols on screens. The scale of phenomena seems to have become distended and promiscuously distributed. As the computer scientist Joseph Weitzenbaum has once said, the avatars of artificial intelligence tend to describe "a very small part of what it means to be a human being and say that this is the whole". He quotes the philosopher (and cheerleader for AI) Daniel Dennett as having insisted, "If we are to make further progress in Artificial Intelligence, we are going to have to give up our awe of living things" (in Baumgartner & Payr, 1995, p.259). The quickest way to divest oneself of an awe for the living in the West is to imagine oneself surrounded instead by machines. Whatever may have once been imagined the rich ambiguity of multiform experience, it seems enigmatic encounters and inconsistent interpretations can now only be expressed in this brave new world as information. Ideas are conflated with things, and things like computers assume the status of ideas. And although there is the widespread notion that as the global reach of these rooms has been stretched beyond the wildest dreams of the medieval magus or Enlightenment philosophe, the denizens of the modern closed rooms seem to have grown more insular, less experienced, perhaps even a trifle solipsistic. Closed rooms had held out the promise of infinite horizons; but the payoff has been... more closure. Who needs to venture any more into the inner city, the outer banks, the corridors of the Louvre, the sidewalks of mean streets? Travel, real physical displacement, has become like everything else: you need special reservations and a pile of money to go experience the simulacra that the screen has already conditioned you to expect. More annual visitors to Boston seek out the mock-up of the fictional bar "Cheers" than view Bunker Hill or Harvard Yard. Restaurants and museums and universities and corporations and Walden Pond are never quite as good as their web sites. Cyberspace, once a new metaphor for spatial orientation, comes to usurp motion itself. No, don't get around much any more. II. Where the Cyborgs Are Is this beginning to sound like just another pop sociology treatise on "being digital" or the "information superhighway" or "the second self" or denunciation of some nefarious cult of information (Roszak, 1994)? Calm your fears, dear reader. What the world needs now is surely not another panegyric on the cultural evils of cyberspace. Our whirlwind tour of a few clean, well-lighted places is intended to introduce, in a subliminal way, some of the themes that will structure a work situated more or less squarely within a distinctly despised genre, that of the history of economic thought. The novelty for most readers will be to cross it with an older and rather more popular form of narrative, that of the war story. The chronological succession of closed rooms is intended to serve as a synecdoche for a succession of the ways in which many economists have come to understand markets over roughly the same period, stretching from World War II to the end of the twentieth century. For while these closed rooms begat little models of closed worlds, after the fashion of Plato's Cave, the world as we had found it has rapidly been transubstantiated into the architecture of the rooms. Modes of thought and machines that think forged in British and American military settings by their attendant mobilized army of scientists in the 1940s rapidly made their way into both the natural and social sciences in the immediate postwar period, with profound consequences for both the content and organization of science. The thesis that a whole range of sciences have been transformed in this manner in the postwar period has come to have a name in the literature of the history and sociology of science, primarily due to the pioneering efforts of Donna Haraway: that name is "cyborg science". Haraway (1991, 1997) uses the term to indicate something profound that has happened to biology and to social theory and cultural conceptions of gender. It has been applied to computer development and industrial organization by Andy Pickering (1995a; 1997, 1999). Ian Hacking (1998) has drawn attention to the connections of cyborgs to Canguilhem and Foucault. Explication of the cyborg character of thermodynamics and information theory was pioneered by Katherine Hayles (1990b), who has now devoted prodigious work to explicating their importance for the early cyberneticians (1994;1995a; 1999). Paul Edwards' (1996) was the first serious across-the-board survey of the military's conceptual influence on the development of the computer, although Kenneth Flamm (1988) had pioneered the topic in the economics literature of industrial organization. Steve Heims (1991) documented the initial attempts of the first cyberneticians to reach out to social scientists in search of a Grand Unified Teleological theory. Evelyn Fox Keller (1995) has surveyed how the gene has assumed the trappings of military command; and Lily Kay (1995, 1997a) has performed the invaluable service of showing in detail how all the above played themselves out in the development of molecular biology. Although all of these authors have at one time or another indicated an interest in economic ideas, what has been wanting in all of this work so far is a commensurate consideration of the role of economists in this burgeoning trans-disciplinary formation. Economists were present at the creation of the cyborg sciences, and as one would expect, the cyborg sciences have returned the favor by serving in turn to remake the economic orthodoxy in their own image. It is my intention in this work to provide that complementary argument, and to document just in what manner and to what extent economics at the end of the second millennium has become a cyborg science; and to speculate how this will shape the immediate future. Just how serious has the cyborg incursion been for economics? Given that in all likelihood most economists have no inkling what "cyborgs" are, or will have little familiarity with the historical narrative which follows, the question must be confronted squarely. There are two preliminary responses to this challenge: one short, yet readily accessible to anyone familiar with the modern economics literature; and the other, necessarily more involved, requiring a fair complement of historical sophistication. The short answer starts out with the litany that every tyro economist memorizes in their first introductory course. Question: What is economics about? Answer: The optimal allocation of scarce resources to given ends. This catechism was promulgated in the 1930s, about the time that neoclassicism was poised to displace rival schools of economic thought in the American context, and represented the canonical image of trade as the shifting about of given endowments so as to maximize an independently given utility function. While this phrase still may spring effortlessly to the lips-- this, after all, is the function of a catechism-- nevertheless, pause and reflect how poorly this captures the primary concerns of neoclassical economists nowadays. Nash equilibrium, strategic uncertainty, decision theory, path dependence, network externalities, evolutionary games, principal-agent dilemmas, no trade theorems, asymmetric information, paradoxes of noncomputability, ... Static allocation has taken a back seat to all manner of issues concerning agents' capacities to deal with various market situations in a cognitive sense. It has even once again become fashionable to speak with confidence of the indispensable role of "institutions", although this now means something profoundly different than it did in the earlier heyday of the American Institutionalist school of economics. This is a drastic change from the 1930s through the 50s, when it was taboo to speculate about mind, and all marched proudly under the banner of behaviorism; and society was thought to spring fully-formed from the brow of an isolated economic man. So what is economics really about these days? The New Modern Answer: The economic agent as a processor of information. This is the first, and only the most obvious, hallmark of the epoch of economics as a cyborg science. The other attributes will require more prodigious documentation and explication. III. The Natural Sciences and the History of Economics The other, more elaborate, answer to the query concerning the relevance of cyborgs for economics requires some working familiarity with the history of neoclassical economics. In a previous book entitled More Heat than Light (1989a), I argued that the genesis of the supposed "simultaneous discovery" of neoclassicism in the 1870s could be traced to the enthusiasm for "energetics" growing out of the physics of the mid-19th century. As was admitted by William Stanley Jevons, Leon Walras, Vilfredo Pareto, Francis Edgeworth and Irving Fisher, "utility" was patterned upon potential energy in classical mechanics, as were their favored mathematics of extremum principles. Their shared vision of the operation of the market (and the mind of the agent, if they were willing to make this commitment) was avowedly mechanical in an eminently physical sense of that term. Their shared prescription for rendering economics a science was to imitate the best science they knew, right down to its characteristic mathematical formalisms. It was a science of causality, rigid determinism and preordained order; in other words, it was physics prior to the second law of thermodynamics, a science most assuredly innocent of the intellectual upheavals beginning at the turn of the century and culminating in the theories of quantum mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. Some readers of that volume demurred that, although it was undeniably the case that important figures such as Jevons and Walras and Fisher cited physics as an immediate source of their inspiration, this still did not square with the neoclassical economics with which economists were familiar in the 20th century. Indeed, a book by Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel (1990) asserted that the impact of physics upon neoclassical economics was attenuated by the 1930s, precisely at the moment when it underwent substantial mathematical development and began its serious ascendancy. Others have insisted that a whole range of orthodox models, from the modern Walrasian tradition to game theory, betray no inspiration whatsoever from physics. The historiographical problem which these responses highlight is the lack of willingness to simultaneously examine the history of economics and the history of the natural sciences as jointly evolving historical entities, and not as fixed monolithic bodies of knowledge driven primarily by their internally-defined questions, whose interactions with other sciences can only be considered as irrelevant rhetoric in whatever era in which they may have occurred. If you avert your gaze from anything other than the narrowly-conceived entity called the 'economy', then you will never understand the peripatetic path of American economics in the 20th century. This book could thus be regarded as the third installment in my ongoing project to track the role and impact of the natural sciences upon the structure and content of the orthodox tradition in economics which is perhaps inaccurately but conventionally dubbed "neoclassical". The first installment of this history was published in 1989 as More Heat than Light, and was concerned with the period from classical political economy up to the 1930s, stressing the role of physics in the "marginalist revolution". The second installment would comprise a series of papers co-authored over the 1990s with Wade Hands and Roy Weintraub, which traced the story of the rise to dominance of neoclassical price theory in America from early in the century up through the 1960s. The present volume takes up the story from the rise of the cyborg sciences, primarily though not exclusively during World War II in America, and then traces their footprint upon some important postwar developments in economics, such as highbrow neoclassical price theory, game theory, rational expectations theory, theories of institutions and mechanism design, the nascent program of "bounded rationality", computational economics, "artificial economies", "autonomous agents", and experimental economics. Since many of these developments are frequently regarded as antithetical to one another, or possibly movements bent upon rejection of the prior Walrasian orthodoxy, it will be important to discern the ways in which there is a profound continuity between their sources of inspiration and those of the earlier generations of neoclassical economics. One source of continuity is that economists, especially those seeking a scientific economics, have always been inordinately fascinated by machines. Francois Quesnay's theory of circulation was first realized as a pump and some tubes of tin; only later did it reappear in abstract form as the Tableau Oeconomique. Simon Schaffer has argued that "Automata were apt images of the newly disciplined bodies of military systems in early modern Europe... Real connections were forged between these endeavors to produce a disciplined workforce, an idealized workspace, and an automatic man" (1999, pp.135, 144). It has been argued that the conception of natural order in British classical political economy was patterned upon the mechanical feedback mechanisms observed in clocks, steam engine governors, and the like (Mayr, 1976). William Stanley Jevons, as we shall discuss below in Chapter 2, proudly compared the rational agent to a machine. Irving Fisher (1965) actually built a working model of cisterns and mechanical floats to illustrate his conception of economic equilibrium. Many of those enthralled with the prospect that the laws of energy would ultimately unite the natural and social sciences looked to various engines and motors for their inspiration (Rabinbach, 1990). However, as Norbert Wiener so presciently observed at the dawn of the Cyborg Era: "If the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control" (1961, p.39). Natural order for economists coming of age after WWII is still exemplified by a machine; it is just that the manifestation of the machine has changed: it is now the computer. "It may be hard for younger economists to imagine, but nearly until midcentury it was not unusual for a theorist using mathematical techniques to begin with a substantial apology, explaining that this approach need not assume that humans are automatons deprived of free will" (Baumol, 2000, p.23). Cyborg love means never having to say you're sorry. Machine rationality and machine regularities are the constants in the history of neoclassical economics; it is only the innards of the machine that have changed from time to time. There is another, somewhat more contingent common denominator. The history of economics has been persistently swept by periodic waves of immigrants from the natural sciences. The first phase, that of the 1870s through the turn of the century, was the era of a few trained engineers and physicists seeking to impose some analytical structure upon the energetic metaphors which were so prevalent in their culture. The next wave of entry came in the 1930s, prompted both by the Great Depression's contraction of career possibilities for scientists, and the great forced emigration of scientists from Europe to America due to persecution and the disruptions of war. Wartime exigencies induced physicists to engage in all sorts of new activities under rubrics such as "operations research". We shall encounter some of these more illustrious souls in the chapters below. The third phase of scientific Diaspora is happening right now. The end of the Cold War and its attendant shifts in the funding of scientific research has had devastating impact upon physics, and upon the career patterns of academic science in general (Slaughter & Rhoades, 1996; National Science Board, 1995; Gruner et al, 1996; Ziman, 1994). Increasingly, physicists left to their own devices have found that economics (or perhaps more correctly, finance) has proven a relatively accommodating safe haven in their time of troubles (Pimbley, 1997; Baker, 1999; Bass, 1999; MacKenzie, 1999). The ubiquitous contraction of physics and the continuing expansion of molecular biology has not only caused sharp redirections in careers, but also redirection of cultural images of what it means to be a successful science of epochal import. In many ways, the rise of the cyborg sciences is yet another manifestation of these mundane considerations of funding and support; interdisciplinary research has become more akin to a necessary condition of survival in our brave new world than merely the province of a few dilettantes or Renaissance men; and the transformation of economic concepts described in subsequent chapters is as much an artifact of a newer generation of physicists, engineers and other natural scientists coming to terms with the traditions established by a previous generation of scientific interlopers dating from the Depression and WWII, as it is an entirely new direction in intellectual discourse. And, finally, there is one more source of the appearance of continuity. I shall argue in Chapters 4 and 5 below that the first hesitant steps toward economics becoming a cyborg science were in fact made from a position situated squarely within the Walrasian tradition; these initially assumed the format of augmentation of the neoclassical agent with some capacities to deal with the fundamental "uncertainty" of economic life. The primary historical site of this transitional stage was the RAND corporation and its ongoing contacts with the Cowles Commission. Part of the narrative momentum of the story recounted herein will derive from the progressive realization that cyborgs and neoclassicals could not be so readily yoked one to another, or even cajoled to work in tandem, and that this has led to numerous tensions in fin-de-siecle orthodox economics. IV. Anatomy of a Cyborg So who or what are these cyborgs, that they have managed to spawn a whole brood of feisty new sciences? A plausible reaction is to wonder whether the term more correctly belongs to science fiction, rather than to seriously practiced sciences as commonly understood. For you, dear reader, it may invoke childhood memories of Star Wars or Star Trek; if you happen to be familiar with popular culture, it may conjure William Gibson's breakthrough novel Neuromancer (1984). Yet, as usual, science fiction does not anticipate as much as reflect prior developments in scientific thinking. Upon consulting the Cyborg Handbook (Gray, 1995, p.29), one discovers that the term was invented in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in the scientific journal Astronautics (Clynes and Kline, 1995). Manfred Clynes, an Austrian emigre (and merely the first of a whole raft of illustrious Austro-Hungarian emigres we shall encounter in this book), and one of the developers of the CAT scanner technology, had been introduced to cybernetics at Princeton in the 1950s, and was concerned about the relationship of the organism to its environment as a problem of the communication of information. As he reports, "I thought it would be good to have a new concept, a concept of persons who can free themselves from the constraints of the environment to the extent that they wished. And I coined this word cyborg" (Gray, 1995, p.47), short for cybernetic organism. In a paper presented to an Air Force sponsored conference in 1960, Clynes and Kline assayed the possibilities of laboratory animals which were augmented in various ways in the interest of directly engaging in feedback stabilization and control of their metabolic environment. The inquiry attracted the attention of NASA, which was worried about the effects of long term exposure to weightlessness and artificial environments in space. NASA then commissioned a Cyborg Study, which produced a report in May 1963, surveying all manner of technologies to render astronauts more resilient to the rigors of space exploration, such as cardiovascular modules, hypothermia drugs, artificial organs, and the like. This incident establishes the precedence of use of the term in the scientific community; but it does little to define a stable referent. In the usage we will favor herein, it denotes not so much the study of a specific creature or organism as a set of regularities observed in a number of sciences which had their genesis in the immediate postwar period, sciences such as information theory, molecular biology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, operations research, systems ecology, immunology, automata theory, chaotic dynamics and fractal geometry, computational mechanics, sociobiology, artificial life, and last but not least, game theory. Most of these sciences shared an incubation period in close proximity to the transient phenomenon called "cybernetics". While none of the historians cited above manages to provide a quotable dictionary definition, Andy Pickering proffers a good point of departure in his (1995a, p.31): Cybernetics, then, took computer-controlled gun control and layered it in an ontologically indiscriminate fashion across the academic disciplinary board-- the world, understood cybernetically, was a world of goal-oriented feedback mechanisms with learning. It is interesting that cybernetics even trumped the servomechanisms line of feedback thought by turning itself into a universal metaphysics, a Theory of Everything, as today's physicists and cosmologists use the term-- a cyborg metaphysics, with no respect for traditional human and nonhuman boundaries, as an umbrella for the proliferation of individual cyborg sciences it claimed to embrace. So this definition suggests that military science and the computer became melded into a Theory of Everything based upon notions of automata and feedback. Nevertheless, there persists a nagging doubt: isn't this still more than a little elusive? The cyborg sciences do seem congenitally incapable of avoiding excessive hype. For instance, some promoters of Artificial Intelligence have engaged in wicked rhetoric about "meat machines", but indeed, where's the beef? After all, many economists were vaguely aware of cybernetics and systems theory by the 1960s, and yet even then, the prevailing attitude was that these were 'sciences' that never quite made the grade, failures in producing results precisely because of their hubris. There is a kernel of truth in this, but only insofar as it turned out that cybernetics never itself attained the status of a fully-fledged cyborg science, but instead constituted the philosophical overture toa whole phalanx of cyborg sciences. The more correct definition would acknowledge that a cyborg science is a complex set of beliefs, of philosophical predispositions, mathematical preferences, pungent metaphors, research practices, and (let us not forget) paradigmatic things, all of which are then applied promiscuously to some more or less discrete pre-existent subject matter or area. To define cyborg sciences, it may be prudent to move from the concrete to the universal. First and foremost, the cyborg sciences depend upon the existence of the computer as a paradigm object for everything from metaphors to assistance in research activities to embodiment of research products. Bluntly: if it doesn't make fundamental reference to 'the computer' (itself an historical chameleon), then it isn't a cyborg science. The reason that cybernetics was able to foresee so much so clearly while producing so little was that it hewed doggedly to this tenet. And yet, there has been no requirement that the science necessarily be about the computer per se; rather, whatever the subject matter, a cyborg science makes convenient use of the fact that the computer itself straddles the divide between the animate and the inanimate, the live and the lifelike, the biological and the inert, the Natural and the Social, and makes use of this fact in order to blur those same boundaries in its target area of expertise. One can always recognize a cyborg science by the glee with which it insinuates such world-shattering questions as: Can a machine think? How is a genome like a string of binary digits in a message? Can lifeforms be patented? How is information like entropy? Can computer programs be subject to biological evolution? How can physicists clarify the apparently political decision of the targeting of nuclear weapons? Can there be such a thing as a self-sufficient "information economy"? And most disturbingly: What is it about you that makes 'you' really you? Or is your vaunted individuality really an illusion? This breaching of the ramparts between the Natural and the Social, the Human and the Inhuman, may be the most characteristic attribute of the cyborg sciences. Prior to WWII, there were of course a surfeit of research programs which attempted to 'reduce' the Social to the Natural. Neoclassical economics was just one among many, which also included Social Darwinism, Kohler's psychological field theory, Technocracy, eugenics, and a whole host of others. However, the most important fact about all of these early profiles in scientism was that they implicitly left the barriers between Nature and Society relatively intact: the ontology of Nature was not altered by the reductionism, and controversies over each individual theory would  always come back sooner or later to the question of "how much" of Society remained as the surd of Naturalism after the supposed unification. With the advent of the cyborg sciences after WWII, something distinctly different begins to happen. Here and there, a cyborg intervention agglomerates a heterogeneous assemblage of humans and machines, the living and the dead, the active and the inert, meaning and symbol, intention and teleology, and before we know it, Nature has taken on board many of the attributes conventionally attributed to Society, just as Humanity has simultaneously been rendered more machinelike. Whereas before WWII, the drive for unification always assumed the format of a take-no-prisoners reductionism, usually with physicists unceremoniously inserting their traditions and formalisms wholesale onto some particular sphere of social or biological theory, now it was the ontology of Nature itself that had grown ambiguous. It was not just the bogeyman of postmodernism which has challenged the previous belief in an independent Nature: the question of what counts as Natural is now regularly disputed in such areas as artificial life (Levy, 1992; Helmreich, 1995), cognitive science (Dennett, 1995) and conservation ecology (Cronon, 1995; Soule & Lease, 1995; Takacs, 1996). Interdisciplinarity, while hardly yet enjoying the realm of Pareto improving exchange, now apparently takes place on a more multilateral basis. For instance, 'genes' now unabashedly engage in strategies of investment, divestment and evasion within their lumbering somatic shells (Dawkins, 1976); information and thermodynamic entropy are added together in one grand law of physical regularity (Zurek, 1990); or inert particles in dynamical systems 'at the edge of chaos' are deemed to be in fact performing a species of computation. This leads directly to another signal characteristic of cyborg sciences, namely, that as the distinction between the Natural and the Social grows more vague, the sharp distinction between 'reality' and simulacra also becomes less taken for granted and even harder to discern (Baudrillard, 1994). One could observe this at the very inception of the cyborg sciences in the work of John von Neumann. At Los Alamos, simulations of hydrodynamics, turbulence and chain reactions were one of the very first uses of the computer, because of the difficulties of observing most of the complex physical processes that went into the making of the atomic bomb. This experience led directly to the idea of Monte Carlo simulations, which came to be discussed as having a status on a par with more conventional "experiments" (Galison, 1996). Extending well beyond an older conception of mathematical model building, von Neumann believed that he was extracting out the logic of systems, be they dynamical systems, automata, or "games"; thus manipulation of the simulation eventually came to be regarded as essentially equivalent to manipulation of the phenomenon (von Neumann, 1966, p.21). But you didn't have to possess von Neumann's genius to know that the computer was changing the very essence of science along with its ambitions. The computer scientist R.W. Hamming once admitted: The Los Alamos experience had a great effect on me. First, I saw clearly that I was at best second rate... Second, I saw that the computing approach to the bomb design was essential...  But thinking long and hard on this matter over the years showed me that the very nature of science would change as we look more at computer simulations and less at the real world experiments that, traditionally, are regarded as essential... Fourth, there was a computation of whether or not the test bomb would ignite the atmosphere. Thus the test risked, on the basis of a computation, all of life in the known universe. (in Duren, 1988, pp.430-1) In the era after the fall of the Wall, when the Los Alamos atomic weapons test section is comprised primarily of computer simulations (Gusterson,1996), his intuition has become the basis of routinized scientific inquiry. As Paul Edwards (1996) has observed, the entire Cold War military technological trajectory was based upon simulations, from the psychology of the enlisted men turning the keys to the patterns of targeting of weapons to their physical explosion profile to the radiation cross-sections to anticipated technological improvements in weapons to the behavior of the opponents in the Kremlin to econometric models of a post-nuclear world. Once the cyborg sciences emerged sleek and wide-eyed from their military incubator, they became, in Herbert Simon's telling phrase, "the sciences of the artificial" (1981). It is difficult to overstate the ontological import of this watershed. "At first no more than a faster version of an electro-mechanical calculator, the computer became much more: a piece of the instrument, an instrument in its own right, and finally (through simulations) a stand-in for nature itself... In a nontrivial sense, the computer began to blur the boundaries between the 'self-evident' categories of experiment, instrument and theory" (Galison, 1997, pp.44-5). While the mere fact that it can be done at all is fascinating, it is the rare researcher who can specify in much detail just "how faithful" is that particular fractal simulation of a cloud, or that global climate model, or that particular Rogetian simulation of a psychiatrist (Weizenbaum, 1976), or that particular simulation of an idealized Chinese speaker in John Searle's (1980) 'Chinese Room'. It seems almost inevitable that as a pristine Nature is mediated by multiple superimposed layers of human intervention for any number of reasons -- from the increasingly multiply processed character of scientific observations to the urban culture of academic life-- and as such seemingly grows less immediate, the focus of research will eventually turn to simulations of phenomena. The advent of the computer has only hastened and facilitated this development. Indeed, the famous "Turing Test" (discussed below in Chapter 2) can be understood as asserting that when it comes to questions of mind, a simulation that gains general assent is good enough. In an era of the revival of pragmatism, this is the pragmatic maxim with a vengeance. The fourth hallmark of the cyborg sciences is their heritage of distinctive notions of order and disorder rooted in the tradition of physical thermodynamics. While this will be a topic of extended consideration in the next chapter, it will suffice for the present to observe that questions of the nature of disorder, the meaning of randomness, and the directionality of the arrow of time are veritable obsessions in the cyborg sciences. Whether it be the description of information using the template of entropy, or the description of life as the countermanding of the tendency to entropic degradation, or the understanding of the imposition of order as either threatened or promoted by noise, or the depiction of chaotic dynamics due to the 'butterfly effect', or the path dependence of technological development, the cyborg sciences make ample use of the formalisms of phenomenological thermodynamics as a reservoir of inspiration. The computer again hastened this development, partly because the question of the 'reliability' of calculation in a digital system focused practical attention on the dissipation of both heat and signals; and partly because the computer made it possible to look in a new way for macro level patterns in ensembles of individual realizations of dynamic phenomena (usually through simulations). The fifth hallmark of a cyborg science is that terms such as "information", "memory" and "computation" become for the first time physical concepts, to be used in explanation in the natural sciences. One can regard this as an artifact of the computer metaphor, but in historical fact their modern referents are very recent and bound up with other developments as well (Aspray, 1985; Hacking 1995). As Hayles (1990a, p.51) explains, in order to forge an alliance between entropy and information, Claude Shannon had to divorce information from any connotations of meaning or semantics and instead associate it with "choice" from a pre-existent menu of symbols. "Memory" then became a holding-pen for accumulated message symbols awaiting utilization by the computational processor, which every so often had to be flushed clean due to space constraints. The association of this loss of memory with the destruction of 'information' and the increase of entropy then became salient, as we shall discover in Chapter 2 below. Once this set of metaphors caught on, the older energetics tradition could rapidly be displaced by the newer cybernetic vocabulary. As the Artificial Life researcher Tom Ray put it: "Organic life is viewed as utilizing energy...to organize matter. By analogy, digital life can be viewed as using CPU to organize memory" (in Boden, 1996, p.113). Lest this be prematurely dismissed as nothing more than an insubstantial tissue of analogies and just-so stories, stop and pause and reflect on perhaps the most pervasive influence of the cyborg sciences in modern culture, which is to treat "information" as an entity which has ontologically stable properties, preserving its integrity under various transformations. The sixth defining characteristic of the cyborg sciences is that they were not invented in a manner conforming to the usual haphazard image of the lone scientist being struck with a brilliantly novel idea in a serendipitous academic context. It is an historical fact that each of the cyborg sciences trace their inception to the conscious intervention of a new breed of science manager, empowered by the crisis of WWII and fortified by lavish foundation and military sponsorship. The new cyborg sciences did not simply spontaneously arise; they were consciously made. The usual pattern (described in Chapter 4) was that the science manager recruited some scientists (frequently physicists or mathematicians) and paired them off with collaborators from the life sciences and/or social sciences, supplied them with lavish funding along a hierarchical model, and told them to provide the outlines of a solution to a problem which was bothering their patron. Cyborg science is Big Science par excellence, the product of planned coordination of teams with structured objectives, expensive discipline-flouting instrumentation and explicitly retailed rationales for the clientele. This military inspiration extended far beyond mere quotidian logistics of research, into the very conceptual structures of these sciences. The military rationale often imposed an imperative of "command, control, communications and information"-- shorthand, C3 I-- upon the questions asked and the solutions proposed. Ultimately, the blurred ontology of the cyborg sciences derives from the need to subject heterogeneous agglomerations of actors, machines, messages and (let it not be forgotten) opponents to a hierarchical real-time regime of surveillance and control (Galison, 1994; Pickering, 1995a; Edwards, 1996). The culmination of all these cyborg themes in the military framework can easily be observed in the life and work of Norbert Wiener. Although he generally regarded himself as an anti-militarist, he was drawn into war work in 1941 on the problem of anti-aircraft gunnery control. As he explained it in 1948, "problems of control engineering and of communication engineering were inseparable, and...they centered not around the techniques of electrical engineering but around the more fundamental notion of the message...The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time-- precisely what is called a time series by statisticians" (1961 [1948], p.8). Under the direction of Warren Weaver, Wiener convened a small research group to build an antiaircraft motion predictor, treating the plane and the pilot as a single entity. Since the idiosyncrasies of each pilot could never be anticipated, prediction was based on the ensemble of all possible pilots, in clear analogy with thermodynamics. In doing so, one had to take into account possible evasive measures, leading to the sorts of considerations which would now be associated with strategic predictions, but which Wiener saw as essentially similar to servomechanisms, or feedback devices used to control engines. Although his gunnery predictor never proved superior to simpler methods already in use, and therefore was never actually implemented in combat, Wiener was convinced that the principles he had developed had much wider significance and application. His report on the resulting statistical work, The Interpolation and Control of Stationary Time Series (1949), is considered the seminal theoretical work in communications theory and time series analysis (Shannon & Weaver, 1949, p.85fn). Yet his manifesto for the new science of Cybernetics (1961[1948]) had even more far reaching consequences. Wiener believed his melange of statistical, biological and computational theories could be consolidated under the rubric of 'cybernetics', which he coined from the Greek word meaning "steersman". As he later wrote in his biography, "life is a perpetual wrestling match with death. In view of this, I was compelled to regard the nervous system in much the same light as a computing machine" (1956, p.269). Hence military conflict and the imperative for control were understood as a license to conflate mind and machine, Nature and Society. While many of the historians (Haraway, Pickering, Edwards, et al.) I have cited at the beginning of this chapter have made most of these same points about the cyborg sciences at one time or another in various places in their writings, the one special aspect they have missed is that the early cyberneticians did not restrict their attentions simply to bombs and brains and computers; from the very start, they had their sights trained upon economics as well, and frequently said so. Just as they sought to reorient the physical sciences towards a more organicist modality encompassing mind, information and organization, they also were generally dissatisfied with the state of the neoclassical economic theory which they had observed in action, especially in wartime. Although the disdain was rife amongst the cyborg scientists, with John von Neumann serving as our star witness in Chapter 3 below, we can presently select one more quote from Wiener to suggest the depths of the dissatisfaction: From the very beginning of my interest in cybernetics, I have been well aware that the considerations of control and communications which I have found applicable in engineering and in physiology were also applicable in sociology and in economics... [However,] The mathematics that the social scientists employ and the mathematical physics they use as their model are the mathematics and mathematical physics of 1850. (1964, pp.87, 90) V. Attack of the Cyborgs It is always a dicey proposition to assert that one is living in an historical epoch when one conceptual system is drawing to a close and another rising to take its place; after all, even dish soaps are frequently retailed as new and revolutionary. It may seem even less prudent to attempt the sketch of such a scenario when one is located in a discipline such as economics, where ignorance of history prompts the median denizen to maintain that the wisdom du jour is the distilled quintessence of everything that has ever gone before, even as they conveniently repress some of their own intellectual gaffes committed in their salad days. Although the purpose of this volume is to provide detailed evidence for this scenario of rupture and transformation between early neoclassicism and the orthodoxy after the incursion of the cyborgs, it would probably be wise to provide a brief outline up front of the ways in which the cyborg sciences marked an epochal departure from rather more standard neoclassical interpretations of the economy. The bald generalizations proffered in this section will be documented throughout the rest of this volume. As we have noted, economists did not exactly lock up their doors and set the guard dogs loose when the cyborgs first came to town. That would have gone against the grain of nearly 70 years of qualified adherence to a model of man based upon the motion of mass points in space; and anyway it would have been rude and ungracious to those physical scientists who had done so much to help them out in the past. Economists in America by and large welcomed the physicists exiled by war and persecution and unemployment with open arms into the discipline in the 1930s and 1940s; these seemed the sorts of folks that neoclassicals had wanted to welcome to their neighborhood. The first signs of trouble were that, when the cyborgs came to town, the ideas they brought with them did not seem to conform to those which had represented "science" to previous generations of economists, as we shall recount in Chapters 5 and 6. Sure, they plainly understood mechanics and differential equations and formal logic and the hypothetico-deductive imperative; but there were some worrisome danger signs, like a nagging difference of opinion about the meaning of 'dynamics' and 'equilibrium' (Weintraub, 1991), or suspicions concerning the vaunting ambitions of 'operations research' and 'systems analysis' (Fortun & Schweber, 1993), or wariness about von Neumann's own ambitions for game theory (Chapter 6 below). For reasons the economists found difficult to divine, some of the scientists resisted viewing the pinnacle of social order as the repetitive silent orbits of celestial mechanics or the balanced kinetics of the lever or the hydraulics of laminar fluid flow. If there was one tenet of that era's particular faith in science, it was that logical rigor and the mathematical idiom of expression would produce transparent agreement over the meaning and significance of various models and their implications. However, this faith was sorely tested when it came to that central concept of 19th century physics and of early neoclassical economics, energy. When the neoclassicals thought about energy, it was in the context of a perfectly reversible and deterministic world exhibiting a stable and well-defined 'equilibrium' where there was no free lunch. The cyborg scientists, whilst also having recourse to the terminology of 'equilibria', seemed much more interested in worlds where there was real irreversibility and dissipation of effort. They seemed less worried whether lunch was paid for, since their thermodynamics informed them that lunch was always a loss leader; hence they were more concerned over why lunch existed at all, or perhaps more to the point, what functions did lunch underwrite which could not have been performed in some other manner? For the cyborgs, energy came with a special proviso called 'entropy' which could render it effectively inaccessible, even when nominally present; many arguments raged in this period how such a macroscopic phenomenon could be derived from underlying laws of mechanics which were apparently deterministic and reversible. The premier language which had been appropriated and developed to analyze macroscopic phenomena in thermodynamics was the theory of probability. The cyborg scientists were convinced that probability theory would come to absorb most of physics in the near future; quantum mechanics only served to harden these convictions even further. By contrast, neoclassicals in the 1920s and 1930s had been fairly skeptical about any substantive role for probability within economic theory. Since they had grown agnostic about what, if anything, went on in the mind when economic choices were made, initially the imposition of some sort of probabilistic overlay upon utility was avoided as a violation of the unspoken rules of behaviorism. Probability was more frequently linked to statistics, and therefore questions of empiricism and measurement; an orthodox consensus on the appropriate status and deployal of those tools had to await the stabilization of the category "econometrics", something which did not happen until after roughly 1950. Thus once the cyborg sciences wanted to recast the question of the very nature of order as a state of being which was inherently stochastic, neoclassical economists were initially revulsed at the idea of the market as an arena of chance, a play of sound and fury which threatened to signify nothing (Samuelson, 1986). These two predispositions set the cyborg sciences on a collision course with that pursued by neoclassical economics in the period of its American ascendancy, roughly the 1940s through the 1960s. Insofar as neoclassicals believed in Walrasian general equilibrium (and many did not), they thought its most admirable aspect was its stories of Panglossian optimality and Pareto improvements wrought by market equilibria. Cyborg scientists were not averse to making use of the mathematical formalisms of functional extrema, but they were much less enamored of endowing these extrema with any overarching significance. For instance, cyborg science tended to parse its dynamics in terms of basins of attraction; due to its ontological commitment to dissipation, it imagined situations where there were a plurality of attractors, with the codicil that stochastic considerations could tip a system from one to another instantaneously. In such a world, the benefits of dogged optimization were less insistent and of lower import, and thus the cyborg sciences were much more interested in coming up with portrayals of agents that just 'made do' with heuristics and simple feedback rules. As we have seen, this prompted the cyborg sciences to trumpet that the next frontier was the mind itself, which was conceived as working on the same principles of feedback, heuristics, and provisional learning mechanisms that had been pioneered in gun-aiming algorithms and operations research. This could not coexist comfortably with the prior neoclassical framework, which had become committed in the interim to a portrayal of activity where the market worked 'as if' knowledge were perfect, and took as gospel that agents consciously attained pre-existent optima. The cyborg scientists wanted to ask what could in principle be subject to computation; the neoclassicals responded that market computation was a fait accompli. To those who complained that this portrait of mind was utterly implausible (and they were legion), the neoclassicals tended to respond that they needed no commitment to mind whatsoever. To those seeking a new theory of social organization, the neoclassicals retorted that all effective organizations were merely disguised versions of their notion of an ur-market. This set them unwittingly on a collision course with the cyborg sciences, all busily conflating mind and society with the new machine, the computer. Whereas the neoclassicals desultorily dealt in the rather intangible ever-present condition called "knowledge", the cyborg scientists were busy defining something else called information. This new entity was grounded in the practical questions of the transmission of signals over wires and the decryption of ciphers in wartime; but the temptation to extend its purview beyond such technical contexts proved irresistible. Transmission required some redundancy, which was given a precise measure with the information concept; it was needed because sometimes noise could be confused with signal, and perhaps stranger, sometimes noise could boost signal. For the neoclassicals, on the other hand, noise was just waste; and the existence of redundancy was simply a symptom of inefficiency, a sign that someone somewhere was not optimizing. The contrast could be summed up in the observation that neoclassical economists wanted their order austere and simple and their a priori laws temporally invariant; whereas the cyborg scientists tended to revel in diversity and complexity and change, believing that order could only be defined relative to a background of noise and chaos, out of which the order should temporally emerge as a process. In a phrase, the neoclassicals rested smugly satisfied with classical mechanics, while the cyborgs were venturing forth to recast biology as a template for the machines of tomorrow. These sharply divergent understandings of what constituted "good science" resulted in practice in widely divergent predispositions as to where one should seek interdisciplinary collaboration. What is noteworthy is that while both groups essentially agreed that a prior training in physics was an indispensable prerequisite for productive research, the directions in which they tended to search for their inspiration were very nearly orthogonal. The most significant litmus test would come with revealed attitudes towards biology. Contrary to the impression given by Alfred Marshall in his Principles, the neoclassical economists were innocent of any familiarity with biology, and revealed miniscule inclination to learn any more. This did not prevent them from indulging in a little evolutionary rhetoric from time to time, but this never adequately took into account any contemporary understandings of evolutionary theory (Hodgson, 1993), nor was it ever intended to. In contrast, from their very inception, the cyborg scientists just knew in their prosthetic bones that the major action in the 20th century would happen in biology. Partly this prophecy was self-fulfilling, since the science managers both conceived and created 'molecular biology', the arena of its major triumph. Nevertheless, they saw that their concerns about thermodynamics, probability, feedback and mind all dictated that biology would be the field where their novel definitions of order would find some purchase. Another agonistic field of interdisciplinary intervention from the 1930s onwards was that of logic and metamathematics. Neoclassical economists were initially attracted to formal logic, at least in part because they believed that it could explain how to render their discipline more rigorous and scientific, but also because it would provide convincing justification for their program to ratchet up the levels of mathematical discourse in the field. For instance, this was a major consideration in the adaptation of the Bourbakist approach to axiomatization at the Cowles Commission after 1950 (Weintraub & Mirowski, 1994). What is noteworthy about this choice was the concerted effort to circumvent and avoid the most disturbing aspects of metamathematics of the 1930s, many of which revolved around Godel's incompleteness results. In this regard, it was the cyborg scientists, and not the neoclassicals, who sought to confront the disturbing implications of these mathematical paradoxes, and turn them into something positive and useful. Starting with Alan Turing, the theory of computation transformed the relatively isolated and sterile tradition of mathematical logic into a general theory of what a machine could and could not do in principle. As described in the next chapter, cyborgs reveled in turning logical paradoxes into effective algorithms and computational architectures; and subsequently, computation itself became a metaphor to be extended to fields outside of mathematics proper. While the neoclassical economists seemed to enjoy a warm glow from their existence proofs, cyborg scientists needed to get out and calculate. Subsequent generations of economists seemed unable to appreciate the theory of computation as a liberating doctrine, as we shall discover in Chapter 7. Hence the Bourbakist strain of neoclassicism ended up in the dead end of the Sonnenschein/ Mantel/Debreu and no-trade theorems, whereas computational theory gave rise to a whole new vibrant field of computer science. These are just a few of the ways in which cyborg science came into conflict with neoclassical economics over the second half of the 20th century. We will encounter many others in the chapters which follow. VI. The New Automaton Theatre Steven Millhauser has written a lovely story contained in his collection The Knife Thrower called "The New Automaton Theatre", a story which in many ways illustrates the story related in this volume. He imagines a town where the artful creation of lifelike miniature automata has been carried far beyond the original ambitions of Vaucanson's Duck or even Deep Blue -- the machine that defeated Gary Kasparov. These automata are not 'just' toys, but have become the repositories of meaning for the inhabitants of the town: So pronounced is our devotion, which some call an obsession, that common wisdom distinguishes four separate phases. In childhood we are said to be attracted by the color and movement of these little creatures, in adolescence by the intricate clockwork mechanisms that give them the illusion of life, in adulthood by the truth and beauty of the dramas they enact, and in old age by the timeless perfection of an art that lifts us above the cares of mortality and gives meaning to our lives... No one ever outgrows the automaton theatre. Every so often in the history of the town there would appear a genius who excels at the art, capturing shades of human emotion never before inscribed in mechanism. Millhauser relates the story of one Heinrich Graum, who rapidly surpasses all others in the construction and staging of automata. Graum erects a Zaubertheatre where works of the most exquisite intricacies and uncanny intensity are displayed, which rival the masterpieces of the ages. In his early career Graum glided from one triumph to the next; but it was "as if his creatures strained at the very limits of the human, without leaving the human altogether; and the intensity of his figures seemed to promise some final vision, which we awaited with longing, and a little dread". And then, at age thirty-six and without warning, Graum disbanded his Zaubertheatre and closed his workshop, embarking on a decade of total silence. Disappointment over this abrupt mute reproach eventually gave way to fascinations with other distractions and other artists in the town, although the memory of the old Zaubertheatre sometimes haunted apprentices and aesthetes alike. Life went on, and other stars of the Automata Theatre garnished attention and praise. Then after a long hiatus, and again without warning, Graum announced he would open a Neues Zaubertheatre in the town. The townsfolk had no clue what to expect from such an equally abrupt reappearance of a genius who had for all intents and purposes been relegated to history. The first performance of the Neues Zaubertheatre was a scandal, or as Millhauser puts it, "a knife flashed in the face of our art". Passionate disputes broke out over the seemliness or the legitimacy of such a new automaton theatre. Those who do not share our love of the automaton theatre may find our passions difficult to understand; but for us it was as if everything had suddenly been thrown into question. Even we who have been won over are disturbed by these performances, which trouble us like forbidden pleasures, secret crimes... In one stroke his Neues Zaubertheatre stood history on its head. The new automatons can only be described as clumsy. By this I mean that the smoothness of motion so characteristic of our classic figures has been replaced by the jerky abrupt motions of amateur automatons.... They do not strike us as human. Indeed it must be said that the new automatons strike us first of all as automatons... In the classic automaton theatre we are asked to share the emotions of human beings, whom in reality we know to be miniature automatons. In the new automaton theatre we are asked to share the emotions of the automatons themselves... They live lives that are parallel to ours, but are not to be confused with ours. Their struggles are clockwork struggles, their suffering is the suffering of automatons. Although the townsfolk publicly rushed to denounce the new theatre, over time they found themselves growing impatient and distracted with the older mimetic art. Many experience tortured ambivalence as they sneak off to view the latest production of the Neues Zaubertheatre. What was once an affront imperceptibly became a point of universal reference. The new theatre slowly and inexorably insinuates itself into the very consciousness of the town. It has become a standard practice in modern academic books to provide the impatient modern reader with a quick outline of the argument of the entire book in the first chapter, providing the analogue of fast food for the marketplace of ideas. Here, Millhauser's story can be dragooned for that purpose. In sum, the story of this book is the story of the New Automaton Theatre: the town is the American profession of academic economics, the classic automaton theatre is neoclassical economic theory, and the Neues Zaubertheatre is the introduction of the cyborg sciences into economics. And Hienrich Graum -- well, Graum is John von Neumann. The only thing missing from Millhauser's parable would a proviso where the military would have acted to fund and manage the apprenticeships and workshops of the masters of automata, and Graum's revival stage-managed at their behest. end

 
= From: Phil Agre Date: Fri Jul 30, 1999 8:19 pm Subject: [RRE]Net Loss [I have reformatted this to 70 columns.] This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). Send any replies to the original author, listed in the From: field below. You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" command. For information on RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html or send a message to requests@l... with Subject: info rre Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 12:43:40 -0400 From: "Nathan Newman" [...] NEW BOOK ON THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTERNET, PUBLISHED ON THE NET AT: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~newman/ -- ((I velieve his new URL is nathannewman.com)) --- NET LOSS: GOVERNMENT, TECHNOLOGY AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNITY IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET By Nathan Newman, Ph.D. Contact at: nathan.newman@y... Where does technology like the Internet come from? Why is it so identified with specific regions like Silicon Valley? Why does new technology seem so associated in the public mind with both personal empowerment for some people and economic insecurity and growing powerlessness for others? And what is the best government policy for promoting technology and equal access in the new economy? What confuses all these questions is the dynamic interaction between government, technology and the regions that are shaped and in turn reshape both technology and economic policy alliances. And nowhere has this dynamic been more confusing than in the case of the Internet, a technology directly planned and funded for decades by national government in Washington, DC, yet associated most in the public mind with garage startups in Silicon Valley. Even as technology companies have digested billions of dollars in technology subsidies from the government, we hear new words like "cyberlibertarianism" coined by Internet enthusiasts. This book, NET LOSS: GOVERNMENT, TECHNOLOGY AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNITY IN THE AGE OF INTERNET helps make sense of this historical and ideological jumble. It highlights the process by which government guided the creation of the Internet and the regions most associated with the technology, even as the forces unleashed by the Internet have in turn reshaped and constricted government technology policy to the detriment of the broader public. OVERVIEW The Internet has emerged as the focus for much of the strongest hype and substance in debates on the new economy. It has become the defining economic event of the end of the 20th century - a fact reflected by the obsessive media attention and to the raw economic explosion of companies associated with it. The Internet is seen as the metaphor, even the embodiment, of the new information age, of a post-industrial economy, and of a new paradigm in workplace and company organization. Information in this view, rather than raw materials, have become the substance of commerce and the Internet is the highway of the new era. Most strikingly, the Internet is seen as the herald of the globalization of the economy and the triumph of a deregulated marketplace. In this vision, the economics of place have given way to telecommuting, global production and just-in-time delivery of goods and information from all points on the globe. In such a world, economic regions become an oxymoron as the economy becomes a matter of bits and e-mail in cyberspace, not transit and meetings in local space. The "Third Wave" in this scenario leaves economic regions as the archaic leftovers of the industrial age. Governments, those stalwart institutions tied to such geography, become impotent and unimportant in this new global information society. Yet on the face of it, it's nonsensical to argue that new information technologies like the Internet show the irrelevancy of national governments and economies. The Internet is one of the crowning achievements of central government in the last few decades--planned over decades, funded by a series of federal agencies, and overseen by a national network of experts. And its success is not merely an exemplar of technical achievement but is also an exemplar of the efficiency of government planning over purely private economic development. In the absence of the open standards of the Internet developed and promoted by the federal government, almost all analysts admit that the private vision of toll road information services promoted by industry would not have created the surge of explosive economic innovation we are currently seeing around the Internet. It is only with the success of the Internet (and the profits to be made) that industry is now decrying the interference of government in information access. The most striking counter to the vision of global placelessness is the very existence of Silicon Valley, the region most associated with the rise of the Internet. If any region were to collapse on the wave of cyber-communication, it would be Northern California's "hotwired" Silicon Valley. Contrary to what some might expect, Silicon Valley not only survives but is thriving, expanding and even consolidating its role as the geographic focus of a supposedly geography-free revolution. From network router companies like 3Com to Web tool makers like Netscape to the multimedia upstarts of San Francisco's "multimedia gulch", new companies in Northern California seem to be refusing to let geography die its proper death. The simplest connection between government policy and regional strength in places like Silicon Valley is that the government itself designed its technology policy to favor small regional companies, which in turn favored the emergence of regions like Silicon Valley where small firms without bottomless corporate resources could complement each other with services and products. The subtlety is in the range of policy tools used by the government in promoting such small-firm innovation, including funding university research that could easily spin-off new firms, requiring second sources for defense contracts, promoting public technology standards with which small firms could cheaply integrate new products, and supporting aggressive public purchasing regimes to favor desired technology. Silicon Valley firms that would be at the heart of its commercialization, such as Sun, Cisco and Oracle had all gotten their start based largely on selling to government agencies. Or, as in the case of Netscape, such firms would raid the talent of the government centers that built the Internet to commercialize government-created software like the Mosaic web browser and servers. In evaluating the role of regional economies, then, it is critical to see them not as initiators but respondents to national and global economic policies. All of these policies both encouraged innovation and a technology regime favoring smaller firms in specific geographic spaces. But at a deeper level, the vibrancy of the Silicon Valley regional economy is not in defiance of globalizing trends due to the Internet but that regional strength was in many ways the precondition for the triumph of the Internet. Fundamental technological change like the Internet requires more than the introduction of new products; it requires fundamental transformations in a whole array of mutually supporting institutions, goods, services and standards that must all advance together. While this can happen between people and companies in different places, the organic trust and interaction of those living in the same region has always been a key factor in such broad-based technological advancement, whether in the car industry in Detroit or in the financial districts of Wall Street. But the end product of this kind of technology policy is not just new technology but a reshaping of politics governing the economy, first in shaping the local economic spaces directly targeted by government policy, then, as technologies like the Internet take on national significance, in reshaping national policies themselves. Even as outside federal investment was the basis for regional expansion, there have subsequently appeared internal economic dynamics that are critical to how the economy functions in the context of the new information-based technology, especially in its relationship to regional politics and the more general global politics of control of an industry. The very "lock-in" of regional dominance raises the issue of what regions do to either hold onto that dominance or what they fail to do that may let such an advantage fade away. As critically, the new dynamics of regional economics highlight who has power within such regions and who loses out as regional economies change under the impact of technology. As Internet commerce took off, its business leaders increasingly fought any government policy seeking expanded access for the broader public for fear that would undercut business opportunities. Even when sharing physical geography, companies have found increasing need for new political and social relationships in the form of business-to-business consortia in order to regularize technology exchange and get political agreement on standards. This in turn has reshaped local politics in places like Northern California in ways that link elite professionals together in a new kind of suburban "gated community" of innovation. Especially as the federal government withdrew from coordination of Internet standards, innovation in places like Silicon Valley was increasingly tied to global technological needs. However, this elite version of cooperation leaves little need for serious concessions to the needs of non-elite workers in a region. Despite the ode to "small business" as the engine of jobs, such globally-oriented startup companies are tied to global corporate policies that end up promoting overall policies that increase inequality within regions. As wages rose in the Silicon Valley areas, housing and other costs rose even faster for the average workers, just as poverty rose rather than fell with the overall prosperity of the region. For most workers, the Silicon Valley boom has given little sense of security but rather, with the rise of temporary agencies and the rise of contingent employment for as much as 40% of workers, a sense of the ephemerality of growth. Even as elite engineers invest the dividends of IPOs for their long-term security, other workers watch continual outsourcing of lower-end jobs erode any sense of stability. The Internet itself is much like the utility networks of the past where great fortunes were made and political battles were fought to assure the widest possible access. Integrated public utility networks and cross-class growth coalitions had defined the social space in which Progressive reformers in the early part of this century had built modern local government in line with regional economic management goals. However, as the Internet industry has built its "gated community" and elite economic networks selectively connect rich suburbs and professional urban enclaves across the globe with the most advanced technology, poorer communities and urban sections have been left with little more than virtual dirt roads. We are seeing new ideologies of privatization and corporate servicing by local governments that end up doing little or nothing for the general population. Instead, cities and towns are pitted against each other in an endless competition to spend what little resources they have serving those with the most capital, while eroding democracy to make government services one more set of amenities that corporations choose from in conducting branch site selections. At the most basic level, the invisible regional geography of communication serves to polarize already existing economic and racial divides as cities rush to support business with public networking goods. Technology investments in schools end up overwhelmingly in the hands of more privileged communities as business finds concentrated support for schools in their suburban enclaves a more cost-efficient approach than general revenues for all schools. And just as networking has eroding firm barriers separating firm from firm, the Internet is helping to blur the lines between government and business. Global firms scoop government contract bids off the Net as local services become merely part of the business plan of multinational corporations. Conversely, government services respond ever more precisely to the demands of those businesses operating in the region, whether in expediting construction permits electronically or the wholesale marketing of government data for the benefit of firms doing business in the area. At best we see local governments seeking to extract small economic concessions for the wholesale benefits they deliver in their desperate recruitment of business. In outlining the emergence of the Internet, my book illustrates the way government shapes new technologies and regions while in turn being itself reshaped by the new economic forces unleashed. This has meant the rise of cyberbusinesses pushing for government to cede control its management in favor of private profits, often at the expense of both the needs of the technology and of equity in local and national economies. If there is a saving grace to this grim trajectory, it is the hint of new organizing by community groups in creating their own global alliances to begin to even up the global power balance. It is this new system of local community organizing combined with global networking that is defining the ongoing politics of the new global economy. BACKGROUND OF THE AUTHOR My goal in writing this book was to address many broader social and economic issues often ignored in the hype around discussions of the Internet. It is informed by many of the best economic analyses of technology, combined with my own expertise as a policy advocate around the new technology. The goal is to present a sober, contrarian analysis of the overlooked economic and sociological roots of the Internet revolution and its grimmer implications for the economic have-nots left out of its revolution. This ebook manuscript is based on a Ph.D. dissertation approved by the Sociology department at the University of California at Berkeley in 1998. I was a Jacob Javits Fellow at Berkeley from 1990 to 1991 and a National Science Fellow from 1991 to 1994. From 1992 to 1996, I was co-director of UC-Berkeley's Center for Community Economic Research (CCER) where a major project was analysis and policy work tied to the emerging Internet. Part of our work was training community non-profits and union members in use of the new technology which contributed immensely to the books insights on the disparity in technology resources emerging in the new economy. This built on my own personal history before graduate school as a union organizer and policy advocate. I published a number of articles and working papers on these technology issues at CCER, partially incorporated in the manuscript. The working paper I produced back in 1995 on the rising threat of Internet commerce to local sales taxes was the first major report highlighting this danger and received national media coverage, including republication in State Tax Notes and a revised version published in the April 1996 Technology Review at MIT. I was also an invited speaker at the annual convention of the California State Association of Counties and at the Association of Bay Area Governments. From 1997 to 1999, I was Project Director at NetAction, a non-profit technology policy organization where I wrote extensively on the issue of technology and the threat Microsoft has posed for open standards on the Internet. In January 1998, I was asked to testify at a special California state legislative hearing on the future of technology networking in the state university system. In my roles at both CCER and NetAction, I have been interviewed by publications including The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, The Nation, CNET's News.Com, WiredNews and have appeared on C-SPAN and on CNet's The Web television show. CHAPTER OUTLINE CHAPTER 1: This chapter lays out the basic argument of the book while placing it in the scholarly and public debate over the evolution of technology. This chapter outlines the many different facets of the discussion around government, technology and regional development: the role of public initiative in its formation, the rise of Internet-related regional districts in places like Silicon Valley, the Internet's use as a globalizing communication and production tool, the need for physical infrastructure around its deployment and the coinciding regulatory changes, its emergence as a new marketplace for exchange that has the potential to undermine traditional geography-based consumer (and taxing) markets, and the rise of the counter-organizing by grassroots organizations using the Internet to link up with other activists worldwide. CHAPTER 2: This chapter outlines how the Internet evolved as one of the foremost examples in decades of how public initiative creates the basis for the creation and expansion of industry. Through funding from national agencies ranging from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the federal government in association with state universities and research centers across the country created the original backbone of the Internet and pioneered the networking technology to make it work. As importantly, it created the standards and protocols that created the trust extending far outside the original research community that allowed for the exponential growth in the Internet. It would leverage public space and volunteer energy, a classic use of civic networks, to create a stream of free, quickly shared innovation. The success of the government-created Internet over the proprietary standards of corporate behemoths like Microsoft or IBM is in many ways a classic illustration that open standards are the key to innovation and growth in an industrial sector. But beyond the creation of the Internet as a public good, the government's "embedded" relationship with the emerging networking industry was a key factor in leveraging government innovation into explosive economic activity. Many of the founders of this new industry, as in preceding generations of computing innovation, would get their initial training on the government payroll or through government contracts, expanding the pool of talent while inculcating them in the values of open computing standards. As well, a substantial number of the initial networking companies started life as government spin-offs or contractors. The Internet's existence would counteract proprietary networking strategies, notably by Microsoft, and thereby open the possibility for a wide range of companies to compete based on innovation around these public standards. The last part of the chapter examines the privatization of much of the management of the Internet in the early 1990s and the dangers raised by allowing particular industry players, again notably Microsoft, to attempt to subvert open networking in favor of proprietary standards backed by market power. CHAPTER 3: If the Internet is a classic example of public initiative and its embeddedness in economic development, its relationship to the concentration of Silicon Valley economic firms is paradigmatic of how public initiative works through regional collaboration. From its earliest days when railroad money from the federal government flowed into the region, the area now known as Silicon Valley has been shaped and reshaped by federal investments. Research labs at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, both increasingly supported with federal funds throughout the 20th century, would play a key role in directing funds, talent and coordination of innovation in the region. World War II and its aftermath would create a proliferation of defense contracts that would build a computer industry literally in the fields and orchards of the area. As importantly, close relationships between universities, federal research labs and industry leaders would increasingly shape the collaborative and entrepreneurial network of firms in the region. Out of this environment emerged many of the Internet visionaries, notably Doug Engelbart whose Augmentation Research Center would be one of the key labs in the 1960s from which would emerge many of the key computing and Internet innovations. Key to both the personal computing and Internet revolutions of the 1970s was the bubbling civic energy of the region derived from a unique combination of government investments, entrepreneurial zeal and anti-war, counter-culture civic networking. In rather direct ways, that civic energy would be channeled into economic networking that would build a commitment to shared knowledge and open computing standards. In turn, the federal government would intervene in computing markets to reinforce open standards around which Silicon Valley firms would build their businesses. One notable example would be Sun Microsystems, founded by Stanford and UC-Berkeley graduates trained within the community of early Internet pioneers, which would promote the government-backed open operating systems and Internet standards in every computer they would sell throughout the 1980s. Other Bay Area companies, from the Internet router company Cisco Systems to Netscape to database-maker Oracle would build their businesses tied to government contracts and standards. With that base of innovators tied to these  open standards supported by the government, a vibrant collaborative network of Internet companies would explode and lock in leadership for the region as the Internet itself expand exponentially. However, as the federal government has withdrawn from strong intervention to assure open Internet standards, it has become a more open question whether that collaborative model will survive as companies merge to face off against the strength of vertically integrated companies like Microsoft seeking to dominate through proprietary approaches. The withdrawal of strong government-backed Internet standards may be hastening the erosion of the Silicon Valley model. CHAPTER 4: With the configuration of new industries in Northern California, from software engineers to networking companies to multimedia content providers, the question then becomes whether the character of these Internet-related firms will resemble a regional industrial district model or more closely follow a corporate "strategic alliance" model with weak regional roots. The Internet itself adds in a whole new factor to that question since it itself enhances the globalizing trends that information technologies have been accelerating. Contrary to what some might expect, Silicon Valley not only survives but is thriving, expanding and even consolidating its role as the geographic focus of a supposedly geography-free revolution. What makes the region worth examining in this context is the consciousness of many firms of the fragility of their region's success. Under pressure of the California recession of the early 1990s, leading local technology companies formed a consortium called Joint Venture: Silicon Valley to address a wide-range of fears around technological collaboration. With federal funding for a number of its initiatives, the consortium would launch a whole range of civic initiatives spanning the public-private divide. A number of these initiatives involved Internet company collaborations through consortiums with such names as Smart Valley, CommerceNet and the Bay Area Multimedia Technology Alliance (BAMTA). The results of this endeavor are in many ways a natural experiment for studying the relationship between civic energy and the formation of industrial districts in the context of the Internet. The success of these initiatives has been overwhelming in the view of the participants, so much so that companies from around the world, including Cable & Wireless, Olivetti, the European Union bank and Toshiba have joined as members. And this latter fact is the rub. What started out as regional consortia rapidly shed their specifically local orientation in favor of global networks. Where CommerceNet was formed initially as a way to electronically link suppliers and  contractors locally over the Internet, the primary interest of participants rapidly became the use of the Internet for marketing goods to global customers. CommerceNet and BAMTA quickly evolved into forums for creating strategic alliances and expanding the worldwide market on the Internet, rather than a network for strengthening regional ties around production. Northern California was increasingly seen as a useful enough concentration of skilled workers and innovative firms for corporations from around the world to seek to establish relationships there. Yet these regional alliances in Silicon Valley are tied to a form of civic networking and business-to-business consortia that go far beyond traditional market relationships. Looked at in the context of other regional consortia, such as SEMATECH and MCC in Texas and the hundreds of other multi-firm research-oriented consortia around the country, the explosion of Internet companies in Silicon Valley is recognizably the creation of the social capital highlighted by a range of theorists. Local regional collaboration becomes a key mechanism for developing cooperation around industry-backed technology standards that need the day-to-day interaction to sustain themselves versus the proprietary strategies of global competitors outside the consortia. The Internet itself is an active force in shaping whether firms deal more closely with local firms in Northern California or whether it ties them more easily into global production systems. While many in Silicon Valley see the Internet as strengthening the informal communication and exchange that has made the region such a powerhouse in innovation, others see it making non-local intellectual and commercial exchange easier between Reich's symbolic analysts. Projects developed by CommerceNet are seeking to create standards for computerized Internet databases that can substitute for the informal specifications of local contractors in favor of seeking the best global partner for supplies, which has obvious implications for eroding the traditional advantages of regional collaboration. The growth of the Internet also promises more development of software in "virtual industrial districts" in cyberspace as tools are developed to strengthen the illusion of proximity for collaborators at long distances. Already, simple coding of software is entering world commerce with India leading in this function. With the Indian government building teleports in key cities, all that is needed are systems for easily specifying design specifications for coding and other support to become much more common using the Internet. In the end, the collaboration achieved by the consortia is focused on marketing strategies and knowledge exchange that may benefit the elite engineers of the region (for whom electronic communication enhances local collaboration) but has little to do with the overall health of the region. Information technology opens the possibility of telecommuting from home and expanding the effective physical radius for those who need come to work only a few times a week, but in the end this emerges more as a coping strategy for elite engineers who need not face the inadequate physical infrastructure of gridlocked roads that the "unwired" face due to an underfunded public sector. The Internet thereby becomes a further tool for the secession of the elite from that decaying public sector. Additionally, it makes affordable housing less of an issue since engineers can comfortably live in cheaper suburbs farther from the firm when they need only come into work a few times per week. And this leads to the dark side of concentrated economic power and its regional effects that Harrison documents from Italy to studies of Silicon Valley: of dual labor markets, of peripheral inhabitants bypassed by "flexible" conditions, and a general squalor of public infrastructure. This is reflected in the fact that while Joint Venture: Silicon Valley started with broad goals around strengthening the local infrastructure of the valley to the benefit of both industry and local communities, by the end of the 1990s its focus revolved around technical alliances, business incubation and making local government more pliable to the needs of business. Instead of broad cross-class civic collaborations, you have a new politics of business-government relations focused on collaboration between elite engineers and corporate leaders as the new basis for regional development with little regard for or involvement by less skilled workers in the region. CHAPTER 5: Along with federal funding, a large source of funds for Joint Venture and its associated consortia have been the traditional regional anchors of economic development in Northern California: California banks like Bank of America, the regional power company Pacific Gas & Electric and the local telephone company Pacific Bell. Yet their participation has not had the effect of tying the consortia efforts into broader economic development, a fact reflecting that these "anchors" are increasingly global market players in hot competition with competitors both within the region and outside it. Notably, all three companies are in network-based industries whose functions are rapidly converging with the Internet itself and, as noted earlier, have seen the regulatory regime under which they operate radically changed. Earlier banking, telecommunications and power utility regulatory regimes were dedicated to the idea of spatially-bounded markets where companies would be encouraged to expand access to their networks with pricing models allowing them to recover the fixed costs of those investments With the geographic scope of their markets limited, it was in their self-interest to participate in economic develop that maximized growth in every sector, rich and poor, within that region. The new "reregulation" regime has created a constant tinkering with market rules that undermine regionally defined markets in favor of national and global competition where companies concentrate on richer, high-profit customers while short-changing investment in the broader public infrastructure on which lower-income families depend. Bank of America and Wells Fargo, the largest California banks, have become increasingly global in their aspirations and have seen Joint Venture and its associated consortia as a way to help set standards for dominating cyberbanking in the future. Power utilities are now buying and selling energy wholesale in national spot markets over the Internet and, more recently, within the state on Internet-based power exchanges. All of this is cutting power costs for business customers while shifting costs onto residential customers and taxpayers. Most critically for the Internet itself, the breakup of AT&T and market competition in telecommunications has ended the mandate for equal access to telecommunication services as the variety of business services available has exploded and the price for basic residential access has climbed precipitously. Despite the rhetoric of "deregulation", a range of telecommunications rules mandate competitive behavior in the field, most dramatically in the requirements that mandate that local phone companies allow interconnection to any other telecommunications business without requirements that those businesses necessarily pay to support the network as a whole. The most dramatic example of this are Internet Service Providers themselves who, due to early regulation in the 1980s, have had subsidized access to the telephone infrastructure while paying almost nothing for its maintenance. The result, as in the banking and power industries, has been economic subsidies for business and upper-income residents (the main users of such Internet providers) as lower-income residents trapped in local geography have had higher bills and a neglect of the basic infrastructure they depend upon. Politically, the outcome has been a whole series of national and local regulatory battles as to what constitutes an "ideal" market in each networked industry. Instead of regional anchors whose private interest is geographically bound to the public interest of regional development, we have a whole set of arrangements that are jury-rigged to police against predatory pricing, compensate for defunct infrastructure, mandate interconnection between different services, and provide sporadic measures for assuring that rural and the poorest customers are not completely dumped out of the system. Many market evangelists have called for doing away with subsidies for the poor altogether (while maintaining the regulatory regime that subsidizes business) and dumping the responsibility for assuring universal access on local governments' welfare budgets. Even as subsidies for business interconnection to networks would remain implicit in public policy, the subsidies for the poor would be laid out as a line item in budgets ripe for political attack. CHAPTER 6: As economic allies of local government retreat into global competition, the costs of assuring access for the "information have-nots" are increasingly shifted from the networks directly onto public budgets. This is hard enough given almost two decades of cuts in national government subsidies to local government and tax restrictions such as Proposition 13, which themselves responded to earlier waves of global speculation in housing markets. All this has weakened the fiscal strength of city governments. However, Internet commerce itself is threatening to itself further undermine local tax revenues. Local government and economic development has always depended on a virtuous cycle where income generated in a region tended to trickle down through local retail purchases that in turn generated sales tax revenue to continue public initiatives to support production. Now, as commerce increasingly moves onto the Internet, there is a large and growing portion of that income spent on untaxed out-of-state purchases which further incapacitates local government's power and stability. Mail order sales have been a growing drain on local revenues for decades but the Internet through computerized outreach, online showrooms and growing online transactions have made it easier for companies to dispense with the local stores or personnel that would, under interstate commerce laws, trigger local sales tax payments. The result, especially in states like California where local governments depend on sales tax, has been a desperate competition for the remaining retail outlets. This has introduced a terrible distortion of economic development patterns as cities bid for successive waves of retail, from suburban malls to "big box" discount retailers to "call center" retailers marketing through mail order and the Internet to the rest of the country. Rather than targeting local spending on infrastructure, education or research networks, most local governments are desperately handing out tax subsidies in the desperate competition to influence the location decisions of these outlets. Instead of regional cooperation around development, regions end up with a nasty zero-sum competition that fragments development, especially as rich communities "opt-out" by retreating to separate gated communities with their own services and no burden of paying for services for the poor. In an increasingly global consumer market and systems of production tied to global decision-making, it is increasingly clear that fractured local governments have neither the revenue nor the political strength to negotiate real economic development deals for their citizenry. CHAPTER 7: Despite the fiscal and political pressures on local governments, many are heralding the Internet as the opportunity to decentralize political decision-making and strengthen civic networks. With the highest concentration of Internet access in the country, the Bay Area has been talked about as a "beta site" for a new electronic democracy. The unfortunate reality has been that despite broad access to the Internet, its public "Information Superhighway" can best be described in John Kenneth Galbraith's phrase of "public squalor amidst private affluence." Networked technology is driving a restructuring of the physical infrastructure of regions that is not only heightening inequality but is driving dramatic restructuring of the functions of local government. The modern professional government was a child of Progressive Era reform that itself was largely a product of the need to coordinate and extend the new public water systems and utility networks of their day. As those networks fracture, so too is coordination between local jurisdictions as they seek to use competing telecommunications systems, from hardware to Web sites, as a competitive advantage in attracting businesses from other locations. In an age of information, it is ironic that the budgets of local, state and even federal agencies are so strapped that many are discontinuing the collection of key areas of public information, even as they could be distributed to the public most effectively. This leaves information control in the hands of private companies. In the cases where information can't be collected effectively by private companies, public leaders like Pete Wilson's Chief Information Officer John Flynn have pushed to have agencies sell it rather than give it to the public free. In this way, private companies are able to rent the coercive power of government to collect the information for its own needs that it could not collect on its own. In many cases where governments are putting government economic information online, such as government purchasing or contract information, this is threatening to undermine the informal local economic development control cities had through targeting local business who were the only one's who found it worthwhile to track local bid information. Many local governments on the Internet see it mostly as a global advertisement to attract business investment. With Smart Valley's main focus on assisting government's on-line presence in order to speed government permitting of industry projects, this has meant that support for local government from industry has focused on making communities in the region more pliable to the needs of industry. And this has usually meant concentrating support on the richer communities where the companies are based. Many local and state government agencies are intensely interested in using the Internet to assist job placement by the unemployed or underemployed. California actually has an extensive electronic system connecting its many local and regional employment offices with use of e-mail prevalent across the state. However, this does not translate easily into simpler job placement of the unemployed, mostly due to the fact that, while the unemployed register their availability for work, employers are under no requirement (and show little inclination) to list job openings for marginal workers electronically. Whether because of racism or convenience, employers resist efforts to make their hiring practices more open to marginal communities seeking employment for through such systems. Lacking either the union strength or the legal ability or will, local governments end up not pursuing the measures that could use the new technology more aggressively for the unemployed. All this in turn highlights that local regional actors have much less role in the development of their regions that the global corporate giants and the nation-state governments that create the underlying rules, implicit subsidies and public investments that create opportunities for regions to prosper. And given the dark side of flexible production on peripheral employees and the unemployed in the new economy, a stronger role for that nation-state level of government is even more needed. For many local governments and their lobbying associations, the strongest power of the Internet is to more effectively unite local municipalities to lobby for state and federal legislation they see needed to maintain services in their communities. CHAPTER 8: This final concluding chapter examines the above arguments in the context of the national debate over political and economic decentralization in our society. What is clear is that the contradictions between elite regional business networking and global production create a broad confusion over what level of economic and political organization is most critical in the new economy. As nation-state mass production systems give way to networked enterprises, a political opening was made for ideologies of decentralization that, while espousing grassroots political empowerment, end up strengthening the power of global corporations versus local governments without the resources or power to negotiate as equals. However, even as this rather bleak story unfolds, there is a counter-trend of grassroots organizations using the new networked technology, particularly the Internet, to strengthen their power at national and international levels. Even as the Bay Area has been a center for promoting networked technology for global corporations, its parallel history as a source of radical civic energy has manifested itself in the regions support for global electronic networking. The union of janitors in Silicon Valley firms like Apple and Oracle have used electronic networking not only to tarnish the images of those "model" employers but have used the technology of the Internet to directly inform and influence the attitudes of the engineers whose offices they cleaned each night. Hotel unions have used the Internet to distribute boycott information globally and even target the stockholders of computer companies like Powersoft to pressure those companies to keep corporate business out of anti-union hotels. Unions nationally are increasingly using the resources of the Internet to build solidarity and strengthen their organizing drives. With local power undercut by global corporations, more and more organizations are using the new technology to build the global alliances that, perversely, are seen as the only way to preserve local sovereignty. What this all promises is a growing struggle in the workplace and in urban politics over both the positive and negative trends of the information age. As global companies create strategic alliances using the human resources of a region, labor and community organizations are beginning to marshal the tools of information technology to organize contingent workers pushed to the fringes of economic and political power. The growth of the Internet embodies a broad change in the urban space where control of time and communication, especially to resources and people outside one's region, is becoming the ongoing and critical issue in local power, making semi-permanent local growth coalitions a thing of the past. Instead, while internal regional alliances will remain crucial, local power is inevitably flowing to those who can use the new information technology to deploy global power for local control of resources. end