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| author | p <grr@lo2.org> | 2024-11-25 03:41:05 -0500 |
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| committer | p <grr@lo2.org> | 2024-11-25 03:41:05 -0500 |
| commit | 3cb574d48dfb747e0c04eee36d4e53f225a9f32c (patch) | |
| tree | f622fdfe991417e74e31a35566f21d4691516abb | |
| parent | de480859a9b3d634922f21b6d2a5fef8dd899dc4 (diff) | |
| download | behold_metatron-3cb574d48dfb747e0c04eee36d4e53f225a9f32c.tar.gz | |
speed through 10-15
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| -rw-r--r-- | behold_metatron.otx | 10 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | ch10.otx | 12 | ||||
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8 files changed, 90 insertions, 92 deletions
@@ -9,8 +9,7 @@ \def\headlinefont{\_scalemain\_typoscale[800/]\caps\it} \def\mainstyle{ - \pageno=0 - \headline={{\headlinefont\headtitle\hrulefill}} + \headline={{}} \footlinedist=14pt \footline={\_hss\rmfixed \_folio \_hss}} @@ -102,5 +101,6 @@ % --- \fontfam[Pagella] -\typosize[10/13] -\def\headtitle{Blueprint for a Higher Civilization}
\ No newline at end of file +\typosize[11/13] +\def\headtitle{Blueprint for a Higher Civilization} +\def\Qs#1{\rightline{---{\it #1}}}
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/behold_metatron.otx b/behold_metatron.otx index e4662f3..ad79f02 100644 --- a/behold_metatron.otx +++ b/behold_metatron.otx @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ \input sal.otx \input aux.otx -\margins/2 fold (0.55,0.4,0.5,0.5)in +\margins/2 fold (0.65,0.5,0.6,0.6)in \def\pbrk{\vskip 2em} \blankstyle @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ % -- title page { \raggedright -Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel \ln +Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel \nl Sol Yurick \par } @@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ Columbia University \nl New York City, N.Y. 10027 U.S.A. } -\clearpage +\break % -- dedications, etc @@ -48,11 +48,11 @@ To Michiko Sawada, for conversations, friendship, analysis, and most of all comp \pbrk -To suppose that any author of fiction, poetry or discursive writing works alone is a conceit fostered by the Nineteenth Century. Of course one always has collaborators, advice, and even opposition. Here are some of the people who helped me: Bert Cowlan, Martin Elton, Karen Paulsell, Hesh Wiener, Peter Krass, John Verity, Joan Greenbaum, Peter Brooks, Robert Shapiro, Ken Donow, Jean McDermott, Herb Schiller, Oscar Urgeteche, George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Robert Greenblatt. Of course, they might not agree with my ideas or the way I used their help. I alone am responsible for what has resulted. \emph{Metatron} is also in partial fulfillment of a Guggenheim Foundation grant. +To suppose that any author of fiction, poetry or discursive writing works alone is a conceit fostered by the Nineteenth Century. Of course one always has collaborators, advice, and even opposition. Here are some of the people who helped me: Bert Cowlan, Martin Elton, Karen Paulsell, Hesh Wiener, Peter Krass, John Verity, Joan Greenbaum, Peter Brooks, Robert Shapiro, Ken Donow, Jean McDermott, Herb Schiller, Oscar Urgeteche, George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Robert Greenblatt. Of course, they might not agree with my ideas or the way I used their help. I alone am responsible for what has resulted. \e{Metatron} is also in partial fulfillment of a Guggenheim Foundation grant. \vfill -\clearpage +\break \mainstyle @@ -1,11 +1,11 @@ -\chapter{} +\chap\nl -Enter cliometrics. If legend, folktale, myth is a form of information and meta-history, featuring un-individualized heros as variables, then cliometrics is meta-meta-history --- the kind that makes it easier to match events up to number-series and can incorporate genetics-as-coded-logic --- which itself can be used as a kind of history (as history can be used as a kind of genetics). Each particular person, each event generated becomes a variable in a statistical series. Chosen events in a time series are matched up to chosen sets of self-transmitting individuals. Cliometrics is a sub-branch of those statistical time-series that computer archeologists are so found of retrojecting back to creation in the attempt to make history compatible with logical operations. Cliometrics is quantified history in which people and events are graded along an importance-scale and matches up to a time-scale established by archeology and evolution. Cliometrics, more than any other kind of historiography, is computer-compatible history. +Enter cliometrics. If legend, folktale, myth is a form of information and meta-history, featuring un-individualized heroes as variables, then cliometrics is meta-meta-history---the kind that makes it easier to match events up to number-series and can incorporate genetics-as-coded-logic---which itself can be used as a kind of history (as history can be used as a kind of genetics). Each particular person, each event generated becomes a variable in a statistical series. Chosen events in a time series are matched up to chosen sets of self-transmitting individuals. Cliometrics is a sub-branch of those statistical time-series that computer archeologists are so found of retrojecting back to creation in the attempt to make history compatible with logical operations. Cliometrics is quantified history in which people and events are graded along an importance-scale and matches up to a time-scale established by archeology and evolution. Cliometrics, more than any other kind of historiography, is computer-compatible history. -But then, ascent-mythology reenters. All event-clusters on an evolutionary series are in fact fungible. The billions-years-trajectory is mapped onto a short stretch of human history, just as an infinity of natural whole numbers can be, say, mapped onto all the possible fractions between one and two. But like any series, such a construct depends on the measurable regularity of events. Catastrophe, the unexpected, must be integrated, smoothed out. The catastrophe is cut apart into small segments, the compression stretched out and we see that event in regularized, even fragments. Why evolution --- which is supposed to move in glacially incremental steps --- is matched up to history --- which takes place in only a short time --- is an obsession --- progress, growth, incremental gain --- that the 19th century foisted on us. Humans have not changed, not evolved, in all the time they have been on earth. +But then, ascent-mythology reenters. All event-clusters on an evolutionary series are in fact fungible. The billions-years-trajectory is mapped onto a short stretch of human history, just as an infinity of natural whole numbers can be, say, mapped onto all the possible fractions between one and two. But like any series, such a construct depends on the measurable regularity of events. Catastrophe, the unexpected, must be integrated, smoothed out. The catastrophe is cut apart into small segments, the compression stretched out and we see that event in regularized, even fragments. Why evolution---which is supposed to move in glacially incremental steps---is matched up to history---which takes place in only a short time---is an obsession---progress, growth, incremental gain---that the 19th century foisted on us. Humans have not changed, not evolved, in all the time they have been on earth. -Then the proposition that evolution, as applied to humans and their history, is the movement from simple to complex, from less to more, from worse to better, from chaos to order, from primal virus to sub-human to human to angelic to god, doesn't work. Whereas the latest studies are purported to demonstrate that more than fifty percent of the economy is information work, a case can be made that whatever the conditions, peasant, primitive, factory worker, more than fifty percent of the work was \emph{always} informational. (Which intrudes a touch of the miraculous, for when, how and with what blinding speed, did humans become the way they are?) +Then the proposition that evolution, as applied to humans and their history, is the movement from simple to complex, from less to more, from worse to better, from chaos to order, from primal virus to sub-human to human to angelic to god, doesn't work. Whereas the latest studies are purported to demonstrate that more than fifty percent of the economy is information work, a case can be made that whatever the conditions, peasant, primitive, factory worker, more than fifty percent of the work was \e{always} informational. (Which intrudes a touch of the miraculous, for when, how and with what blinding speed, did humans become the way they are?) -The very act of selection, grading and valuation, in order to constitute part of the latest national rememberance-treasury of our enterprise, to make it fit to be good will, it must now be said that these events are convertible into these numbers, these increments. For it is part of the equity, the capitalization placed retroactively into the start up of the enterprise; a set of past events converted into numbered, stored and convertable values. After all, even eventless, invested capital must have some history. In any pool of money, there lurks an implicit collage of time series. +The very act of selection, grading and valuation, in order to constitute part of the latest national remembrance-treasury of our enterprise, to make it fit to be good will, it must now be said that these events are convertible into these numbers, these increments. For it is part of the equity, the capitalization placed retroactively into the start up of the enterprise; a set of past events converted into numbered, stored and convertible values. After all, even eventless, invested capital must have some history. In any pool of money, there lurks an implicit collage of time series. -Now if cliometrics is to have any usefulness, not only must religious history and mythology be quantified and arranged into an accretive time series, but it must be valued. Once quantified they may be translated into other metrical disciplines through a complex series of conversions shuttling back and forth in time. (Although, before this can happen, a rewriting and re-evaluation of the meaning oftime itself is required.) +Now if cliometrics is to have any usefulness, not only must religious history and mythology be quantified and arranged into an accretive time series, but it must be valued. Once quantified they may be translated into other metrical disciplines through a complex series of conversions shuttling back and forth in time. (Although, before this can happen, a rewriting and re-evaluation of the meaning of time itself is required.) @@ -1,28 +1,27 @@ -\chapter{} +\chap\nl -Starting from an other end, we can look again at the hypothetical annual report and balance sheet of our enterprise, Western Civilization. If we analyze, concretize, qualify, re-view, individualize or personify the bottom line, representing pools of capital, we unfold it to see a variety of sub-enterprises: factories, farms, plantations, mining operations, shipping, workers, slaves, wars, thievery, pieces of drama, the addition of last year's, last century's, last millenium's profits or losses, the whole ensemble of economic activity. These pools of money and nearmoney (an incredible array of quasi-liquid exchangables) have different key words, titles, identifiers, instructions and names attached to them, indicating by what rules they may be converted from one form into another: numbers to numbers, numbers to people, people to events, events to a varied range of goods... +Starting from an other end, we can look again at the hypothetical annual report and balance sheet of our enterprise, Western Civilization. If we analyze, concretize, qualify, re-view, individualize or personify the bottom line, representing pools of capital, we unfold it to see a variety of sub-enterprises: factories, farms, plantations, mining operations, shipping, workers, slaves, wars, thievery, pieces of drama, the addition of last year's, last century's, last millennium's profits or losses, the whole ensemble of economic activity. These pools of money and near-money (an incredible array of quasi-liquid exchangeables) have different key words, titles, identifiers, instructions and names attached to them, indicating by what rules they may be converted from one form into another: numbers to numbers, numbers to people, people to events, events to a varied range of goods\ld -But to repersonify, re-invent, decrypt events out of our bottom line puts limits on their exchange potentials by pointing to sets of \emph{particular} people, their lives, energy expenditures, products. They are not given to us in the proper language. It is hard to tradea human being (or a ghost) \emph{directly} in our society, with its putative committment to humanist values (each and every human in the world is supposed to be of importance ... but not their work). Yet, the abstracted, refined, distilled, symbolized value of part of a human, their work --- with the rest cast off --- can be stored, calculated and traded every day. Modern purification ceremonies. +But to repersonify, re-invent, decrypt events out of our bottom line puts limits on their exchange potentials by pointing to sets of \e{particular} people, their lives, energy expenditures, products. They are not given to us in the proper language. It is hard to trade a human being (or a ghost) \e{directly} in our society, with its putative commitment to humanist values (each and every human in the world is supposed to be of importance\ld\ but not their work). Yet, the abstracted, refined, distilled, symbolized value of part of a human, their work---with the rest cast off---can be stored, calculated and traded every day. Modern purification ceremonies. -The coming of high-speed communications, computers and trading programs allows for the movement of keyworded, encrypted bundles of capital across barriers and borders, to be entered as a profit here ina tax haven (a souls bereft of bodies ascend to heaven), a loss in a taxed sub-world: expensive signals of expenses. \emph{All} forms of credit are highly abstract, general-purpose information. Otherwise, how could they be moved and interfused? (Citibank, Chase, the Bank for International Settlements, Banco Ambrosiano, the IMF, the Federal Reserve System, etc., all banks and securities houses are information-handling, transactions and communications companies.) Information cannot be too particularized in order to make entries in account books. Generalized, it can be teleported easily through the most complex spaces (where humans cannot be moved), some of which are not so much spaces but representations of spaces, magnetic perturbations, addresses standing for a country, another enterprise, files on a tape or disc, or in flight, entries in an account book. I can transmit six million dollars (how many lives; how many things?) froma U.S. bank to a Japanese bank, which has a branch (a presence, but not a nescessarily a facility; a designation) in Panama --- move it from a ledger marked \enquote{U.S.\slash Chase} to a ledger marked \enquote{Panama\slash Bank of Tokyo.} Has the money traveled? What does the question even mean? Yet the U.S., Panama, and Bank of Tokyo behave as if it has. +The coming of high-speed communications, computers and trading programs allows for the movement of keyworded, encrypted bundles of capital across barriers and borders, to be entered as a profit here ina tax haven (a souls bereft of bodies ascend to heaven), a loss in a taxed sub-world: expensive signals of expenses. \e{All} forms of credit are highly abstract, general-purpose information. Otherwise, how could they be moved and interfused? (Citibank, Chase, the Bank for International Settlements, Banco Ambrosiano, the IMF, the Federal Reserve System, etc., all banks and securities houses are information-handling, transactions and communications companies.) Information cannot be too particularized in order to make entries in account books. Generalized, it can be teleported easily through the most complex spaces (where humans cannot be moved), some of which are not so much spaces but representations of spaces, magnetic perturbations, addresses standing for a country, another enterprise, files on a tape or disc, or in flight, entries in an account book. I can transmit six million dollars (how many lives; how many things?) from a U.S. bank to a Japanese bank, which has a branch (a presence, but not a necessarily a facility; a designation) in Panama---move it from a ledger marked \dq{U.S.\slash Chase} to a ledger marked \dq{Panama\slash Bank of Tokyo.} Has the money traveled? What does the question even mean? Yet the U.S., Panama, and Bank of Tokyo behave as if it has. -If we intone \enquote{Russia,} six letters, we have some idea of what that means: the letters, or the sounded word, stands for the space in the file and that space, on tape or disc, matches up to the whole of Russia. (The code-name, the identifier, the recognition-signal, legitimizes the transaction. It must be precise. We cannot say we are sending \enquote{Oedipus,} for what does that mean? Or can we? +If we intone \dq{Russia,} six letters, we have some idea of what that means: the letters, or the sounded word, stands for the space in the file and that space, on tape or disc, matches up to the whole of Russia. (The code-name, the identifier, the recognition-signal, legitimizes the transaction. It must be precise. We cannot say we are sending \dq{Œdipus,} for what does that mean? Or can we?) -At bottom, these forms represent the activities of people in the present, the past, and the future (when capital was/is/will be stored, built up, accreted). Money contains a past: it is a memory and energy-storage. The labor of old machines (animals, plants, and humans) which once converted sun, soil and seed into food, raw materials into things; all these and more are implicitly represented. The credits are a form of miraculous, nonenergetic, energy storage. +At bottom, these forms represent the activities of people in the present, the past, and the future (when capital was\slash is\slash will be stored, built up, accreted). Money contains a past: it is a memory and energy-storage. The labor of old machines (animals, plants, and humans) which once converted sun, soil and seed into food, raw materials into things; all these and more are implicitly represented. The credits are a form of miraculous, non-energetic, energy storage. -We have reached a fascinating metaphysicality; energy storages which are not contained in material objects... Wood, coal, oil... these we can understand. With electricity, things become problematical. Electricity cannot be stored (except in limited ways; batteries). We must produce heat in order to drive the generators. But yet there are abstract, informational, non-heat, non-energized, \emph{symbolic} storage devices which nevertheless have the power to drive the energizer of machinery, the human. Money, securities, paper instruments of all kinds, electronic signals... all these (among others) have this power. But in order to energize they must recieve this power, which is purely a symbolizing activity which must take place in the context of a whole social climate which trains people to respond to the energy-stimulating information associated (not in) these devices, these instruments, these fictions. We are talking, in the long run, about belief-systems. +We have reached a fascinating metaphysicality; energy storages which are not contained in material objects\ld\ Wood, coal, oil\ld\ these we can understand. With electricity, things become problematical. Electricity cannot be stored (except in limited ways; batteries). We must produce heat in order to drive the generators. But yet there are abstract, informational, non-heat, non-energized, \e{symbolic} storage devices which nevertheless have the power to drive the energizer of machinery, the human. Money, securities, paper instruments of all kinds, electronic signals\ld\ all these (among others) have this power. But in order to energize they must receive this power, which is purely a symbolizing activity which must take place in the context of a whole social climate which trains people to respond to the energy-stimulating information associated (not in) these devices, these instruments, these fictions. We are talking, in the long run, about belief-systems. -History resides, embedded in each item we touch. A set of ghosts... remnants and memories of people who worked to produce money, wealth. Looking at a pool of credit, we are not permitted to infer the concrete existences, the lives, the sufferings, the pleasures now, of those pasts, this \emph{unspecified} stuff of phantoms. This analysis holds if we believe that capital is a residue, expropriated and stored work-energy, value and time (representing the expenditure of human energy, lives spent in forced labor). Electronic gold is the newest minimalist form. Capital represents a compressed work-and-time series omnipresent in credit and every processed or owned thing. A continuity of real and fictional people. (Why fictional? Information doesn't have to be about real things or people; it only has to be \emph{accepted} as real.) A revived theory of spirits. +History resides, embedded in each item we touch. A set of ghosts\ld\ remnants and memories of people who worked to produce money, wealth. Looking at a pool of credit, we are not permitted to infer the concrete existences, the lives, the sufferings, the pleasures now, of those pasts, this \e{unspecified} stuff of phantoms. This analysis holds if we believe that capital is a residue, expropriated and stored work-energy, value and time (representing the expenditure of human energy, lives spent in forced labor). Electronic gold is the newest minimalist form. Capital represents a compressed work-and-time series omnipresent in credit and every processed or owned thing. A continuity of real and fictional people. (Why fictional? Information doesn't have to be about real things or people; it only has to be \e{accepted} as real.) A revived theory of spirits. -But when we come to the creation of credit --- as the material representation of embedded value, gold, gems, declines in importance --- by banks (real banks, or fraudulent shell-game banks, and all the interest-leveraging games they play, lending five, ten, twenty, a hundred times their assets; national treasuries with their printing presses running full-time, account-book manipulations), we have arrived at the manufacture of value out of nothing. If credit, value are linked to people (genetic series: or their residues, for they continue to work when dead) and the lives they once lived, or might have lived, then inflationary cycles create even more fictional people, fictional lives which impinge upon and crowd the living. These humans and their energies seem to be drawn out of the \emph{future} (looking at interest as a price based on usage and future realization, as expressed in money and time, which is to say energy-expenditure --- labor --- to be realized) and become another way of birthing fictional people and enterprises. +But when we come to the creation of credit---as the material representation of embedded value, gold, gems, declines in importance---by banks (real banks, or fraudulent shell-game banks, and all the interest-leveraging games they play, lending five, ten, twenty, a hundred times their assets; national treasuries with their printing presses running full-time, account-book manipulations), we have arrived at the manufacture of value out of nothing. If credit, value are linked to people (genetic series: or their residues, for they continue to work when dead) and the lives they once lived, or might have lived, then inflationary cycles create even more fictional people, fictional lives which impinge upon and crowd the living. These humans and their energies seem to be drawn out of the \e{future} (looking at interest as a price based on usage and future realization, as expressed in money and time, which is to say energy-expenditure---labor---to be realized) and become another way of birthing fictional people and enterprises. -Hence, in this world all the forms of credit (information), if convertable to the lives of populations, create \emph{population pressures} on a limited environment, recrowding the past, or emptying the future. They, these \emph{prespirits}, impinge on the economy and on daily life and the psyche. Fantastical? +Hence, in this world all the forms of credit (information), if convertible to the lives of populations, create \e{population pressures} on a limited environment, recrowding the past, or emptying the future. They, these \e{pre-spirits}, impinge on the economy and on daily life and the psyche. Fantastical? -If dreams and myths have an effect on the lives of people, it is clear that metadreams and metamyths also have an effect. (What's a % make this a footnote -metadream? The purest form is capital, information without specification. To take another example from other realms of discourse; the score of a psychological test, which converts psychic states into numbers. This involves the pricing of the tests plus the start-up costs for developing the tests, getting people to believe in its validity, and the investment in the formation of some psyche or intelligence-testing company, and the sales of such test, and so forth. None of this mentions cohorts of theoreticians who develop the background theories of human nature. What are we left with? A disembodied and quantified psyche.) Such manipulations violate the first law of thermodynamics, creating energy out of nothing or the future. You can violate the laws of nature, at least for a while, if you put enough money into it... So said the physicist, I.I. Rabi, clearly identifying money and energy as one. +If dreams and myths have an effect on the lives of people, it is clear that metadreams and metamyths also have an effect.\fnote{What's a metadream? The purest form is capital, information without specification. To take another example from other realms of discourse; the score of a psychological test, which converts psychic states into numbers. This involves the pricing of the tests plus the start-up costs for developing the tests, getting people to believe in its validity, and the investment in the formation of some psyche or intelligence-testing company, and the sales of such test, and so forth. None of this mentions cohorts of theoreticians who develop the background theories of human nature. What are we left with? A disembodied and quantified psyche.} Such manipulations violate the first law of thermodynamics, creating energy out of nothing or the future. You can violate the laws of nature, at least for a while, if you put enough money into it\ld\ So said the physicist, I.I. Rabi, clearly identifying money and energy as one. -These labor\slash life\slash time\slash suffering residues, these generalized phantoms are peculiar ones. They have no meaning until the underwriters of an enterprise assign a value, a meaning to them. Assigning a value (and raising money against it) requires an act of confidence and the general acceptance of that assignation (which itself must be sold) is what constitutes the general act of faith in certain people's notions of present, past, the invisible, the future. Credit, \emph{credo}. You can invest in it, you can bank on it, you can buy a piece of the faith and people will be moved by it. By what? By this long series of conversions, metamorphoses, transubstantiations and appearances out of pure space, dyings and rebirths, incorporating a kind of serial cannibalism among its many charms. These acts of faith in the modern, rational age, are not merely cool and detached. They are attended by great excitations, curious passions and lusts, unseemly fights for status, murders, massacres, tortures, annihilations of populations, pomp, circumstance, exchanges of gifts, drink, drugs, bribes, kickbacks, display, ostentation, treachery, thievery, and so forth. +These labor\slash life\slash time\slash suffering residues, these generalized phantoms are peculiar ones. They have no meaning until the underwriters of an enterprise assign a value, a meaning to them. Assigning a value (and raising money against it) requires an act of confidence and the general acceptance of that assignation (which itself must be sold) is what constitutes the general act of faith in certain people's notions of present, past, the invisible, the future. Credit, \e{credo}. You can invest in it, you can bank on it, you can buy a piece of the faith and people will be moved by it. By what? By this long series of conversions, metamorphoses, transubstantiations and appearances out of pure space, dyings and rebirths, incorporating a kind of serial cannibalism among its many charms. These acts of faith in the modern, rational age, are not merely cool and detached. They are attended by great excitations, curious passions and lusts, unseemly fights for status, murders, massacres, tortures, annihilations of populations, pomp, circumstance, exchanges of gifts, drink, drugs, bribes, kickbacks, display, ostentation, treachery, thievery, and so forth. -Massed and abstracted capital represents not only a history but populations and their biographies. Economic archeology: capitalist historians, pushing progress, are counter- intelligence archeologists. They rewrite their history to deny that the suffering of populations ever took place, just as we deny the spirit world of \enquote{primitives} and their reverence for ancestors. We don't revere ancestors; we revere ancestry: inheritance, not inheritors. +Massed and abstracted capital represents not only a history but populations and their biographies. Economic archeology: capitalist historians, pushing progress, are counter- intelligence archeologists. They rewrite their history to deny that the suffering of populations ever took place, just as we deny the spirit world of \dq{primitives} and their reverence for ancestors. We don't revere ancestors; we revere ancestry: inheritance, not inheritors. -If you averaged out capital buildup per person per life, established historians, rewriting history, tell us that things were becoming better and better during the industrial revolution. Concentration of wealth is ignored. The invention of a class perspective created an oppositional classification, revealing one population's misery. But even Marx accepted these constructs; the evolutionary inevitable. He only wanted to change direction once these \enquote{necessary} sacrifices had been made. Both Marxists and capitalists have played the same kind of game. They didn't challenge the basic, agreed-upon, evolutionary-schemata, the concept of capital itself. +If you averaged out capital buildup per person per life, established historians, rewriting history, tell us that things were becoming better and better during the industrial revolution. Concentration of wealth is ignored. The invention of a class perspective created an oppositional classification, revealing one population's misery. But even Marx accepted these constructs; the evolutionary inevitable. He only wanted to change direction once these \dq{necessary} sacrifices had been made. Both Marxists and capitalists have played the same kind of game. They didn't challenge the basic, agreed-upon, evolutionary-schemata, the concept of capital itself. @@ -1,33 +1,33 @@ -\chapter{} +\chap\nl -If one could invent (or draw out of some infinite account) values created by populations yet to be born --- fictional people, which might include robots and simulations --- those populations have a real effect on our present. What \emph{space} do they live in? If they're fictional, how can we feel their presence here and now? Or if they are far away, even in the future, how can we feel their impingement, as if they were next to us? They exert mysterious influences through myths and interest rates, like the gravitational perturbations coming at us from past and future, annunciating the presence of an unseen planet or star. We search for them. They can be found by indirect methods; relating population to space, converting the numbers of those-yet-to-suffer into space time and people. This is done by the art of studying population pressures in the present, for new populations are being unleashed upon our planet, teleported to us, backward in time, emerging through the central processing units of financial institutions. +If one could invent (or draw out of some infinite account) values created by populations yet to be born---fictional people, which might include robots and simulations---those populations have a real effect on our present. What \e{space} do they live in? If they're fictional, how can we feel their presence here and now? Or if they are far away, even in the future, how can we feel their impingement, as if they were next to us? They exert mysterious influences through myths and interest rates, like the gravitational perturbations coming at us from past and future, annunciating the presence of an unseen planet or star. We search for them. They can be found by indirect methods; relating population to space, converting the numbers of those-yet-to-suffer into space time and people. This is done by the art of studying population pressures in the present, for new populations are being unleashed upon our planet, teleported to us, backward in time, emerging through the central processing units of financial institutions. -Segmented demographics (studies of populations in abstracted, discontiguous home territories, stacked up, perceived, recorded, retrievable, quite as if they were in some mass memory; memorialized particle-clusters, when networked, make their territories contiguous, while lack of communications-access makes the land of the poor quite seperated) allow us to play new games with the location of populations, to move them from place to place, even into invented countries. For example the Nielsen rating's \cA country, \cB country, \cC country. (There is a \cD country but that is discounted. Dante also had an \cA, \cB, and \cC country and, although he didn't write about it, a \cD country; for Dante never wrote about the poor and the ordinary.) People in \cA country can be scattered all over the world; they don't even have to live in proximity. +Segmented demographics (studies of populations in abstracted, discontiguous home territories, stacked up, perceived, recorded, retrievable, quite as if they were in some mass memory; memorialized particle-clusters, when networked, make their territories contiguous, while lack of communications-access makes the land of the poor quite separated) allow us to play new games with the location of populations, to move them from place to place, even into invented countries. For example the Nielsen rating's {\bf A} country, {\bf B} country, {\bf C} country. (There is a {\bf D} country but that is discounted. Dante also had an {\bf A}, {\bf B}, and {\bf C} country and, although he didn't write about it, a {\bf D} country; for Dante never wrote about the poor and the ordinary.) People in {\bf A} country can be scattered all over the world; they don't even have to live in proximity. -How were these populations get into these demographies? If we have totalled up real people --- hungering, sweating, copulating --- then we need real geography, at least at some point in time... perhaps in the past. With the advent of the need for targeted, reachable populations, demographic regions were invented, related, classified, archtypalized along buying\slash class\slash income\slash taste\slash interest\slash communication lines. We see continents dissolve into an archipelago. (Dante preferred to stack them in cones and concentric, high-velocity circles.) All nations have --- at least as far as some of their populations who live in transnational space --- dissolved. +How were these populations get into these demographies? If we have totalled up real people---hungering, sweating, copulating---then we need real geography, at least at some point in time\ld\ perhaps in the past. With the advent of the need for targeted, reachable populations, demographic regions were invented, related, classified, archtypalized along buying\slash class\slash income\slash taste\slash interest\slash communication lines. We see continents dissolve into an archipelago. (Dante preferred to stack them in cones and concentric, high-velocity circles.) All nations have---at least as far as some of their populations who live in transnational space---dissolved. Corporations transcend boundaries. Financial institutions hurl money across timespace. Pools of wealth flee the constraints of national taxation. Russian and Americans bank in off-shore havens. The French and Germans invest in Russia and the U.S. I.G. Farben, Dupont, Imperial Chemical and Mitsui had an explosives cartel throughout the Second World War. What does nationspace mean to them? They live in Paradiso. They absorb the energies of dead Germans, Americans, British, Japanese. This subset of French, German, etc., constitute a cultural homogeneity. -Such an approach generates endless lists for direct-mail and political polling, possibly electro-politics. One could even poll \emph{the compilations of taste-lists} (which would contain significant sociological, psychological and bio-medical data simulating humans), a thing the computer does very well. The information age becomes more scholastic and magical. +Such an approach generates endless lists for direct-mail and political polling, possibly electro-politics. One could even poll \e{the compilations of taste-lists} (which would contain significant sociological, psychological and bio-medical data simulating humans), a thing the computer does very well. The information age becomes more scholastic and magical. -Given these geographies --- these weird topologies inhabited by real and fictional populations --- questions are raised: are we merely playing an intellectual game, or do these fictional people have some substance? Do they have a history? How were these list-populations generated? +Given these geographies---these weird topologies inhabited by real and fictional populations---questions are raised: are we merely playing an intellectual game, or do these fictional people have some substance? Do they have a history? How were these list-populations generated? -In his extremely information-oriented, mechanistic, Laplacian \emph{Sociobiology} (genetics percieved not only as information, but as the motivators of every human act), E.O. Wilson proposes the notion of the feeding capacity of an environment, a region, a land, a territory, in relation to the population of animals, or humans. The relationship is called the density-dependence ratio. The amount of grass to cows, cows to humans, for example, in a set amount of geography. This limits the feeding capacity of cows and humans. If one factors \emph{percieved need} the ratio changes in a non-rational way. When class, and all that term entails (culture, for instance), one must erect a set of densitydependence equations and ratios for hierarchies of populations, relating masses of fictional capital to fictional populations to real populations, since capital needs to feed and be fed... and all of these to assigned to certain confined spaces, which constitutes mass. We are beginning to talk about frame-references of space, energy, time, money, genetics (both real and invented). +In his extremely information-oriented, mechanistic, Laplacian \e{Sociobiology} (genetics perceived not only as information, but as the motivators of every human act), E.O. Wilson proposes the notion of the feeding capacity of an environment, a region, a land, a territory, in relation to the population of animals, or humans. The relationship is called the density-dependence ratio. The amount of grass to cows, cows to humans, for example, in a set amount of geography. This limits the feeding capacity of cows and humans. If one factors \e{perceived need} the ratio changes in a non-rational way. When class, and all that term entails (culture, for instance), one must erect a set of density-dependence equations and ratios for hierarchies of populations, relating masses of fictional capital to fictional populations to real populations, since capital needs to feed and be fed\ld\ and all of these to assigned to certain confined spaces, which constitutes mass. We are beginning to talk about frame-references of space, energy, time, money, genetics (both real and invented). -Grass converts sunlight; cows convert grass; humans convert cows by ingesting and transforming them. Commodity brokers, grain companies, agribusinesses, food-processors, chemical companies (for preservatives and fertilizers), refrigeration specialists, distributers, railroads, truckers and unions, politicians and bankers... intervene beween humans and their eating, seperating mouth from food, by inventing multiplexed and involuted distances which are a function of pricing through two kinds of intersecting transportation systems: physical transportation of goods and transportation of money, invoices... The complexities of credit and time, in all of their forms --- commodities, options, future, indices --- creates conversionary mediation-complexes and lengthens distance. The need of a loan in some distant place creates a shortage of liquidity on the local land, a sort of drought, symbolically and effectively equivalent to a plague of grasshoppers. +Grass converts sunlight; cows convert grass; humans convert cows by ingesting and transforming them. Commodity brokers, grain companies, agribusinesses, food-processors, chemical companies (for preservatives and fertilizers), refrigeration specialists, distributors, railroads, truckers and unions, politicians and bankers\ld\ intervene between humans and their eating, separating mouth from food, by inventing multiplexed and involuted distances which are a function of pricing through two kinds of intersecting transportation systems: physical transportation of goods and transportation of money, invoices\ld\ The complexities of credit and time, in all of their forms---commodities, options, future, indices---creates conversionary mediation-complexes and lengthens distance. The need of a loan in some distant place creates a shortage of liquidity on the local land, a sort of drought, symbolically and effectively equivalent to a plague of grasshoppers. -The more capital there is, the more population. A small, capital-intensive poulation consuming vast amounts of capital-intensive food with the aid of technology becomes equivalent to a huge population, crowding out the living from earthly space by the reproduction of hungering ghosts. No wonder the ancients fed ghosts, spirits, gods. And given cliometrics, demographics and the density-dependence equations, considerations of capital, telematic acceleration, surely we can find these antecedant considerations somewhere in our ancient texts. +The more capital there is, the more population. A small, capital-intensive population consuming vast amounts of capital-intensive food with the aid of technology becomes equivalent to a huge population, crowding out the living from earthly space by the reproduction of hungering ghosts. No wonder the ancients fed ghosts, spirits, gods. And given cliometrics, demographics and the density-dependence equations, considerations of capital, telematic acceleration, surely we can find these antecedent considerations somewhere in our ancient texts. We could estimate the amount of food, perhaps in calories, required to feed each individual, averaging consumption, and set a provisional standard for existence. But this is mere munch-democracy. It's not the way things work. Given real considerations of power and concentration, much capital never even reaches the earth, but remains in perpetual transit in the empyrean, going from countryless account to countryless account, money being invested in money (which embodies time) for high interest rates and other profitable instrumentalities, passing through odd logic gates and mythic addresses. Some populations not only eat for themselves, but for whole hordes. The bankers have, in fact, invented hyperspace concurrently with the physicists and have their own white and black holes. In short, relatively, we are speaking of gods. All they lack is actual, as against relative, immortality. -Wanting to know what his population is all about (consider a heaven or hell, full of ghosts, phantoms, spirits; the dead and their claims upon the living; the exploitation of the dead) we can, by decoding, assign characteristics to this population. We can ressurect the dead, or the unborn, though not, unfortunately, with their bodies intact. We can write histories. Suppose the recorders of life, the gossip columnists, the journalists, sat down and looked, along with the poet, novelist and biographer, over the bottom line of our enterprise's balance sheet, instead of looking at the illusory world around them. If our premise is right, why couldn't they construct (or deconstruct) a novel, a history, a biography from the numbers? How? +Wanting to know what his population is all about (consider a heaven or hell, full of ghosts, phantoms, spirits; the dead and their claims upon the living; the exploitation of the dead) we can, by decoding, assign characteristics to this population. We can resurrect the dead, or the unborn, though not, unfortunately, with their bodies intact. We can write histories. Suppose the recorders of life, the gossip columnists, the journalists, sat down and looked, along with the poet, novelist and biographer, over the bottom line of our enterprise's balance sheet, instead of looking at the illusory world around them. If our premise is right, why couldn't they construct (or deconstruct) a novel, a history, a biography from the numbers? How? -For example, one could use psychological, medical testing and diagnosis, to record and store up the signs of the living. We can get readings on medical machines: lie-detectors, EEG's, EKG's, stress-analyzers, voice prints, PET scanners, CAT scanners, NMR machines, varieties of brain scanners, and other kinds of instrumentation. We can create electronic simulations that fluctuate, as if alive. We can store those records electronically (at a price). We can establish a constant link between body and record (itself fragile, almost \enquote{alive}) so that as the body changes, the record changes. Each change alerts the medical monitoring machine to take action. The record becomes an analogue of the body. If the development of medicine has been correct (problematical) and the translations of bodily qualities into signs, numbers and waves is correct, and the instrumentation is correct, the simulation begins to approach autonomy (as long as the electricity is on; doubtful in these days). Now presumably this body-to-record-and-recorder can be reversed, so that when the records change (the simulation is given a disease and then transmits it to the body), the state of the body changes. We can invent whole library-demographics of electronically simulated bodies. We can also put them in synch with the state of the world's economy. So that a change in the numbers in a complex of account sheets would change the health of the simulated population and the health of the simulated population would affect the health of the world... And, indeed, isn't that what happens in the case of the sacred king? Oedipus? +For example, one could use psychological, medical testing and diagnosis, to record and store up the signs of the living. We can get readings on medical machines: lie-detectors, EEG's, EKG's, stress-analyzers, voice prints, PET scanners, CAT scanners, NMR machines, varieties of brain scanners, and other kinds of instrumentation. We can create electronic simulations that fluctuate, as if alive. We can store those records electronically (at a price). We can establish a constant link between body and record (itself fragile, almost \dq{alive}) so that as the body changes, the record changes. Each change alerts the medical monitoring machine to take action. The record becomes an analogue of the body. If the development of medicine has been correct (problematical) and the translations of bodily qualities into signs, numbers and waves is correct, and the instrumentation is correct, the simulation begins to approach autonomy (as long as the electricity is on; doubtful in these days). Now presumably this body-to-record-and-recorder can be reversed, so that when the records change (the simulation is given a disease and then transmits it to the body), the state of the body changes. We can invent whole library-demographics of electronically simulated bodies. We can also put them in synch with the state of the world's economy. So that a change in the numbers in a complex of account sheets would change the health of the simulated population and the health of the simulated population would affect the health of the world\ld\ And, indeed, isn't that what happens in the case of the sacred king? Œdipus? -We can abstract and average out the readings; we can even feed back pre-recorded physiological data into this ghost population and give it life. We can appropriate the stored-up work-effort of the sports athlete, the assembly-line athlete, the drug-consuming athlete, the neurosis-athlete (who struggles to produce new records in psychosis: anguish indices). Why, pain itself can be telemetered on different scales, even stored electronically in these computerized telemedical systems and transmitted, when needed, through wire or satellite, broadcast to far distant places. After all, the electrical \emph{instruction} to a prod applied to the genitalia doesn't have to be administered directly by a finger pushing the button that turns on the juice, button connected to finger connected to person in the same room with the tortured. The amounts of current can be calculated from far away (assessed by previous testings) and be transmitted by satellite to some banana republic, just as money (compressed and massed lives, sufferings) is transmitted every day through SWIFT. +We can abstract and average out the readings; we can even feed back pre-recorded physiological data into this ghost population and give it life. We can appropriate the stored-up work-effort of the sports athlete, the assembly-line athlete, the drug-consuming athlete, the neurosis-athlete (who struggles to produce new records in psychosis: anguish indices). Why, pain itself can be telemetered on different scales, even stored electronically in these computerized telemedical systems and transmitted, when needed, through wire or satellite, broadcast to far distant places. After all, the electrical \e{instruction} to a prod applied to the genitalia doesn't have to be administered directly by a finger pushing the button that turns on the juice, button connected to finger connected to person in the same room with the tortured. The amounts of current can be calculated from far away (assessed by previous testings) and be transmitted by satellite to some banana republic, just as money (compressed and massed lives, sufferings) is transmitted every day through SWIFT. We can even poll the indicators to find out the wishes of this phantom population. In fact no one has to poll real people, just query the taste and market-cluster data-banks containing the repository of psychosocial desires and physiological indicators. It is already clear that voting electronically can be like ballot-box stuffing, using votes of the dead, since the powerful make the powerless a transmitter and talk only to themselves. If a big stockholder votes his shares, why can't he vote his ghosts? -When we move into these realms of abstraction, we can play any game we want with the indicators, the concepts, the \enquote{stand- fors,} just as long as there is consensual agreement to credit, honor, have faith in these acts. And this is what's happening. +When we move into these realms of abstraction, we can play any game we want with the indicators, the concepts, the \dq{stand-fors,} just as long as there is consensual agreement to credit, honor, have faith in these acts. And this is what's happening. -In Kaballistic thought, the elements of a language, ordered one way, reveals one world. Ordered another way, a completely different world with different laws emerges. Language precedes things and humans in enostic thought. Even history itself can be restructured (along with geography) in interesting ways. Events in \emph{Oedipus} can be placed next to the events in Joseph's Egypt (since they are about agricultural disaster), even made concurrent with a cash-flow crisis in the U.S., and related to the collectivization period in the Soviet Union, and to link them up we have the marriage of IBM, Comsat General and Aetna into Satellite Business Systems linked by Systems Network Architecture. After all, wasn't it Delphi's and Joseph's monopolization of knowledge that caused all the trouble? +In Kabbalistic thought, the elements of a language, ordered one way, reveals one world. Ordered another way, a completely different world with different laws emerges. Language precedes things and humans in gnostic thought. Even history itself can be restructured (along with geography) in interesting ways. Events in \e{Œdipus} can be placed next to the events in Joseph's Egypt (since they are about agricultural disaster), even made concurrent with a cash-flow crisis in the U.S., and related to the collectivization period in the Soviet Union, and to link them up we have the marriage of IBM, Comsat General and Aetna into Satellite Business Systems linked by Systems Network Architecture. After all, wasn't it Delphi's and Joseph's monopolization of knowledge that caused all the trouble?
\ No newline at end of file @@ -1,42 +1,42 @@ -\chapter{}% 13 +\chap\nl We have been moving from time-series to simultaneities. Serial and synchronous time threaten to become surreal time. Speed and distance are functions of time. In the world of linked up computers, messages move faster at the center than at the peripheries where messages move an entirely different way. What's the center? One can propose a model: a set of rings. Messages in the inner ring move fastest: less distance to travel. Messages to and from the outer ring move slower. Dante's model. This is a conceptual device that expresses the state of communications today. However the center is in fact spread and networked all over the world. It is faster, for, say, Citicorp to get a message to Hong Kong from Lexington Avenue, than it is to deliver a message across Manhattan walking, riding a bicycle or taking a taxi. Citicorp-Hongkong is a center: 9,000 miles. Lexington Avenue-Eighth Avenue is a periphery: 1/2 mile. -When we take into account pricing and power, the the problem becomes even more complicated when the message traffic has to go through some center or complex of centers. It is asserted that if everyone is linked up by interactive terminals and microcomputers, this blazing center of knowledge will be available to all. This is nonsense. In the real world competetive advantage depends on your opponent's being relatively ignorant. We're not even beginning to talk about price and the horrendous effects, in the U.S., of the AT\&T divestiture. Prices of computers go down: this is true. But prices of communications not only go up, but will be unavailable to a large group of people. And anyway, one has to reeducate oneself to use these clumsy machines. +When we take into account pricing and power, the the problem becomes even more complicated when the message traffic has to go through some center or complex of centers. It is asserted that if everyone is linked up by interactive terminals and microcomputers, this blazing center of knowledge will be available to all. This is nonsense. In the real world competitive advantage depends on your opponent's being relatively ignorant. We're not even beginning to talk about price and the horrendous effects, in the U.S., of the AT\&T divestiture. Prices of computers go down: this is true. But prices of communications not only go up, but will be unavailable to a large group of people. And anyway, one has to reeducate oneself to use these clumsy machines. -If we are to make a transition to the information economy, in which information is a certain kind of currency, certain steps must be taken. Treasure is meaningless if everyone has it. Treasure, and every good, has built into it a political and business version of the second law of thermodynamics. Maxwellian demons concentrate treasure, energy and information. These are shrunk, massed, concentrated into smaller and smaller class-spaces. When knowledge becomes treasure, the value of it is meaningless if everyone has it. But there's a problem. The spread of information is limitless. If we tell a number of people something, then they all have it. So the purpose of the information revolution is to put a value, a price on information and add to the rituals of learning by technologizing it so that few may have it. In the context of the present attempt to make the grand transition to this new era, we have come to see what this means. It is a way of recapitalizing the past and to undo what Lucifer or Prometheus did. Think of the whole complex of modern telematics as one, gigantic, central, country-spanning intelligence and counter-intelligence agency. It also means that everyone outside this informtion economy is doomed, and that, perhaps, is half the world's population. This is important to remember. +If we are to make a transition to the information economy, in which information is a certain kind of currency, certain steps must be taken. Treasure is meaningless if everyone has it. Treasure, and every good, has built into it a political and business version of the second law of thermodynamics. Maxwellian demons concentrate treasure, energy and information. These are shrunk, massed, concentrated into smaller and smaller class-spaces. When knowledge becomes treasure, the value of it is meaningless if everyone has it. But there's a problem. The spread of information is limitless. If we tell a number of people something, then they all have it. So the purpose of the information revolution is to put a value, a price on information and add to the rituals of learning by technologizing it so that few may have it. In the context of the present attempt to make the grand transition to this new era, we have come to see what this means. It is a way of recapitalizing the past and to undo what Lucifer or Prometheus did. Think of the whole complex of modern telematics as one, gigantic, central, country-spanning intelligence and counter-intelligence agency. It also means that everyone outside this information economy is doomed, and that, perhaps, is half the world's population. This is important to remember. It is said that the speed of generating and processing messages inside of a computer may be faster than in the human brain. That's one way of looking at it. But, in fact, the permissible messages, their content and form, in a computer are enormously different than the message traffic inside of a brain, especially if one considers the development costs (which are in their way a function of time and energy). -The application of abstraction to things or people creates problems. One can say two, four, six...: obviously the next number should be eight. But we can also pick any number at all and make that the next step after six, and invent a logical proof for that choice. A logical proof can be invented to justify \emph{any} arrangement. (We are moving toward a consideration of time-series in a modern, quantumized, relativized, financial, informationalized context.) +The application of abstraction to things or people creates problems. One can say two, four, six\ld: obviously the next number should be eight. But we can also pick any number at all and make that the next step after six, and invent a logical proof for that choice. A logical proof can be invented to justify \e{any} arrangement. (We are moving toward a consideration of time-series in a modern, quantized, relativized, financial, informationalized context.) -There are values, variables, with a multiplicity of identifiers, from different yet convergant frameworks, assigned to the stored-up residues of past, present and future human activity. It may be a genetic identifier, a financial identifier, a cliometrical identifier, a literary identifier, a physical identifier. The arrangements of history and the sequence of the buildup of capital of all sorts (taking into account the falsified and adjustive historiography as common practice: for instance, CIA or Church historiography) is somewhat like a problem in scheduling information traffic in a computer. It must be controlled by timers managing the sub-routines, moving and saving bytes, using loops, querying the memory, all contributing to the flow of traffic, done as events happen, after events happen, before events happen; a sort of time-travel. Given something abstracted, but accepted as an act of faith and so lived-by, as a pool of credit, one can fill in any history one wants. +There are values, variables, with a multiplicity of identifiers, from different yet convergent frameworks, assigned to the stored-up residues of past, present and future human activity. It may be a genetic identifier, a financial identifier, a cliometrical identifier, a literary identifier, a physical identifier. The arrangements of history and the sequence of the buildup of capital of all sorts (taking into account the falsified and adjustive historiography as common practice: for instance, CIA or Church historiography) is somewhat like a problem in scheduling information traffic in a computer. It must be controlled by timers managing the sub-routines, moving and saving bytes, using loops, querying the memory, all contributing to the flow of traffic, done as events happen, after events happen, before events happen; a sort of time-travel. Given something abstracted, but accepted as an act of faith and so lived-by, as a pool of credit, one can fill in any history one wants. But in order to do so requires that one overcome deviant memories and histories. One has to fight to control the history, its event, its passions, its humans, its meaning. This we surely know: people died miserable to contribute to that pool. Defining the meaning of that pool becomes a political and ideological fight over good will. The winner writes history. -The derivation or invention of any series takes place both in historical contexts and according to \enquote{deeper needs.} But these \enquote{deeper needs} are not to be found in nature, or \enquote{Man,} but are the shared desires of a small part of the world's population who constantly fine-tunes the ancient methodologies of series\slash simultaneity-making. The \enquote{facts} --- whatever those are --- or processable specifications, establishes a background theory for those \enquote{facts.} The accumulation of many forms of capital is required, each as a contribution to the information economy, for we are no longer in that age when the wishes, ceremonies, sacrifices and incantations of priests and shamans seemed to control the universe: although the sacrifices still continue. +The derivation or invention of any series takes place both in historical contexts and according to \dq{deeper needs.} But these \dq{deeper needs} are not to be found in nature, or \dq{Man,} but are the shared desires of a small part of the world's population who constantly fine-tunes the ancient methodologies of series\slash simultaneity-making. The \dq{facts}---whatever those are---or processable specifications, establishes a background theory for those \dq{facts.} The accumulation of many forms of capital is required, each as a contribution to the information economy, for we are no longer in that age when the wishes, ceremonies, sacrifices and incantations of priests and shamans seemed to control the universe: although the sacrifices still continue. -For capital to be accreted and stored, there must have been sets of people arrayed in some time-sequence, laboring to build it up (and also wasting it) during the historic process of production, circulation, consumption, storage and reproduction for that subset of humans who are series-makers and rememberancers. Certain goods may have decayed, but they can still be stored eternally, retrieved, called up, as information. +For capital to be accreted and stored, there must have been sets of people arrayed in some time-sequence, laboring to build it up (and also wasting it) during the historic process of production, circulation, consumption, storage and reproduction for that subset of humans who are series-makers and remembrancers. Certain goods may have decayed, but they can still be stored eternally, retrieved, called up, as information. -There's a limit to how long actual grain can be stored but there's no limit to how long we can store the abstractions standing for the grain. It is possible to sell a ton of grain harvested in Pharoahonic times now. The only thing is that it cannot be \emph{eaten}, only bought and sold perpetually. If the buyer and seller agree, one can sell the Pharoahonic grain and use the money to buy real grain. Perhaps it is only the designator, \enquote{Pharoahonic grain} which throws us. Can't we sell a cargo of grain a thousand times, symbolically moving it from port to port without that cargo actually moving? +There's a limit to how long actual grain can be stored but there's no limit to how long we can store the abstractions standing for the grain. It is possible to sell a ton of grain harvested in Pharaonic times now. The only thing is that it cannot be \e{eaten}, only bought and sold perpetually. If the buyer and seller agree, one can sell the Pharaonic grain and use the money to buy real grain. Perhaps it is only the designator, \dq{Pharaonic grain} which throws us. Can't we sell a cargo of grain a thousand times, symbolically moving it from port to port without that cargo actually moving? -At issue is the relation of symbols, information to the non-informational world. What happens if the informational world collapses? Panics, depressions, bubbles, inflation are all \emph{informational} collapses. The non-existant crowds out the living. +At issue is the relation of symbols, information to the non-informational world. What happens if the informational world collapses? Panics, depressions, bubbles, inflation are all \e{informational} collapses. The non-existent crowds out the living. -If we have a pool of symbolic capital, which stands for, and is used for, stored energy, stored value, stored time, stored space, dreams and aspirations, then we implicitly have an accompanying population-continuity and \emph{population-simultaneity}. It may be fictional but can also be considered a storage of real and fictional genetic sequences. We may consider how real people adapt to their changing environments, but we must also think about how fictional populations adapt to material environments and how real populations adapt to fictional environments. For if they are valued, their fictional lives impinge on the lives of the truly living. +If we have a pool of symbolic capital, which stands for, and is used for, stored energy, stored value, stored time, stored space, dreams and aspirations, then we implicitly have an accompanying population-continuity and \e{population-simultaneity}. It may be fictional but can also be considered a storage of real and fictional genetic sequences. We may consider how real people adapt to their changing environments, but we must also think about how fictional populations adapt to material environments and how real populations adapt to fictional environments. For if they are valued, their fictional lives impinge on the lives of the truly living. -What sort of time-sequence-storage does a genetic sequence in any one human represent? What we are supposed to have is life, enormously compressed, a serial simultanized, represented by pools of credit. The pools of credit are as folded up as any crumpled helix of genestrings. And if the production of engineered humans becomes possible --- given enough money (taken from where) to suspend the laws of nature --- capital and genetics can be compared, even equated. A look at the bio-engineering markets is in order. Where do these fictional populations \enquote{live}? On everted globes, on satellites and space colonies, or ribbon planets, in chip architecture, on paradisical islands before, beyond or at the end of time itself? What operations must we do with these time series\slash simultaneities, these lives, real and false? But what's time? +What sort of time-sequence-storage does a genetic sequence in any one human represent? What we are supposed to have is life, enormously compressed, a serial simultanized, represented by pools of credit. The pools of credit are as folded up as any crumpled helix of gene-strings. And if the production of engineered humans becomes possible---given enough money (taken from where) to suspend the laws of nature---capital and genetics can be compared, even equated. A look at the bio-engineering markets is in order. Where do these fictional populations \dq{live}? On everted globes, on satellites and space colonies, or ribbon planets, in chip architecture, on paradisaical islands before, beyond or at the end of time itself? What operations must we do with these time series\slash simultaneities, these lives, real and false? But what's time? -We have been bound by several perceptions of time, subject to various revisions. We have been tied to the tyrannous cycle of ageing, risings and settings of suns, rounds of seasons (and seen the priests control those rounds, inserting themselves between us and the sky), birth, growth, death: \emph{felt} duration. Our biological clocks can be fooled. +We have been bound by several perceptions of time, subject to various revisions. We have been tied to the tyrannous cycle of ageing, risings and settings of suns, rounds of seasons (and seen the priests control those rounds, inserting themselves between us and the sky), birth, growth, death: \e{felt} duration. Our biological clocks can be fooled. -The perception of time became industrial gradually, introduced in the 15th century or so. Time's continuity was fragmented into equal lengths, matched up against factory and production ties; unit time, unit goods, unit prices, unit consumption, units of exchange, but all arranged into the cheerful, progressive, accumultory one-way-up trajectory. This vision was introjected into the conciousness of those inhabiting the industrializing world. It is being introduced now into the consciousness of those inhabiting the underdeveloped world. +The perception of time became industrial gradually, introduced in the 15th century or so. Time's continuity was fragmented into equal lengths, matched up against factory and production ties; unit time, unit goods, unit prices, unit consumption, units of exchange, but all arranged into the cheerful, progressive, accumulatory one-way-up trajectory. This vision was introjected into the consciousness of those inhabiting the industrializing world. It is being introduced now into the consciousness of those inhabiting the underdeveloped world. -Time zones were created in relation to the sun's passage, marking the business day and year: market time. But all renegotiated timeschema retained this long range trajectory, the primal beginning and the ultimate end. +Time zones were created in relation to the sun's passage, marking the business day and year: market time. But all renegotiated time-schema retained this long range trajectory, the primal beginning and the ultimate end. -Enter, just before the industrial revolution, the modern magicians. First wave: mathematicians, scientists, logicians, topologists (and technicians), the Founding Fathers of the New Age, \emph{circa} the 17th and 18th century... followed quickly by accountants and business topologists, the time and money managers. +Enter, just before the industrial revolution, the modern magicians. First wave: mathematicians, scientists, logicians, topologists (and technicians), the Founding Fathers of the New Age, \e{circa} the 17\textsuperscript{th} and 18\textsuperscript{th} century\ld\ followed quickly by accountants and business topologists, the time and money managers. -But Leibniz and Descartes were primarily mystics: Galileo faked the results of experiments. As for Newton, the evidence is that he was more interested in gnostic\slash astrological\slash alchemical\slash hermetic thought than science. In astrological thought, for the stars to affect life, and conversely, \emph{instantaneous} transmission of forces are required. Perhaps for Newton the enterprise of regularizing the universe was required to give a sound and calculable foundation to astrology. The astrological requires order and regularity as well as an orderly medium for the transmission of heavenly signals affecting human life, thought and destiny. Newton tried to formulate a precise scientific methodology for dating events, using Scripture and Greek myths. For Newton, time was teleological. He related time to a history of royal, Hebraic dynasties. He matched up time, considered abstractly, to a special kind of ethnic\slash dynastic genetics (although he didn't use those words). He felt that the ancient Jews had secret knowledge which filtered down to the Pythagoreans. He considered the music of the spheres a metaphor for the law of gravity. He believed that the dimensions and configuration of Solomon's Temple concealed alchemical formulae which corresponded to a divine unity in nature. He explored sacred geometry, practised alchemy (along with Robert Boyle), and was of course that perfect kind of compulsive dualist in all things. Newton was also alchemically and financially involved with gold; he was Master of The Mint. Given this, Newton's \enquote{beginning} is religious, extrapolated to Nature. +But Leibniz and Descartes were primarily mystics: Galileo faked the results of experiments. As for Newton, the evidence is that he was more interested in gnostic\slash astrological\slash alchemical\slash hermetic thought than science. In astrological thought, for the stars to affect life, and conversely, \e{instantaneous} transmission of forces are required. Perhaps for Newton the enterprise of regularizing the universe was required to give a sound and calculable foundation to astrology. The astrological requires order and regularity as well as an orderly medium for the transmission of heavenly signals affecting human life, thought and destiny. Newton tried to formulate a precise scientific methodology for dating events, using Scripture and Greek myths. For Newton, time was teleological. He related time to a history of royal, Hebraic dynasties. He matched up time, considered abstractly, to a special kind of ethnic\slash dynastic genetics (although he didn't use those words). He felt that the ancient Jews had secret knowledge which filtered down to the Pythagoreans. He considered the music of the spheres a metaphor for the law of gravity. He believed that the dimensions and configuration of Solomon's Temple concealed alchemical formulae which corresponded to a divine unity in nature. He explored sacred geometry, practiced alchemy (along with Robert Boyle), and was of course that perfect kind of compulsive dualist in all things. Newton was also alchemically and financially involved with gold; he was Master of The Mint. Given this, Newton's \dq{beginning} is religious, extrapolated to Nature. Or maybe he wanted regularity and predictability because he lost money in speculation. @@ -44,4 +44,4 @@ How much better than Velikovsky was Newton? It was this complex of thought upon which the reconstructions in relativity and quantum physics are based. -With the introduction of artificial light, divisions into day and night begin to end. With sealed, climate-controlled environments, the seasons begin to become irrelevant. the conversion of the natural world into the artificial world, from the raw to the processed, continues. For some the world is already the atemporal control room of a space ship where the ever-chilled, perpetually running, energy-consuming computers, spinning out their fantasies, are attended. +With the introduction of artificial light, divisions into day and night begin to end. With sealed, climate-controlled environments, the seasons begin to become irrelevant. the conversion of the natural world into the artificial world, from the raw to the processed, continues. For some the world is already the atemporal control room of a space ship where the ever-chilled, perpetually running, energy-consuming computers, spinning out their fantasies, are attended.
\ No newline at end of file @@ -1,54 +1,53 @@ -\chapter{} +\chap\nl -Einstein's thoughts (building on and reconstructing Newton, the alchemist's thought) on simultaneity become instructive, as do the thoughts of modern bankers as they scan their electronic spread-sheets. For bankers and physicists meditate on states of simultaneity, relative to those who do not, \emph{cannot} have access to this distance-insensitive equipment. This is to say bankers enjoy abstract immortality in relation to the banked, along with quantum physicists and metaphysicians and magicians. +Einstein's thoughts (building on and reconstructing Newton, the alchemist's thought) on simultaneity become instructive, as do the thoughts of modern bankers as they scan their electronic spread-sheets. For bankers and physicists meditate on states of simultaneity, relative to those who do not, \e{cannot} have access to this distance-insensitive equipment. This is to say bankers enjoy abstract immortality in relation to the banked, along with quantum physicists and metaphysicians and magicians. -For Einstein a number of events can be considered to be taking place at the same time, but only in relation to an observor recording different signals from those events and timing them with coordinated clocks. (Compare the delicate timing of an international arbitrage operation which requires relative speed, or relative simultaneity, and at the same time requires relative ignorance --- or relative distance --- on the part of one's opponents.) Everything depends on the observor and the recording instruments and relative accumulations of knowledge (the instruments being a manifestation of assumptions built into them) and speeds of transmission to determine what looks like simultaneity. +For Einstein a number of events can be considered to be taking place at the same time, but only in relation to an observer recording different signals from those events and timing them with coordinated clocks. (Compare the delicate timing of an international arbitrage operation which requires relative speed, or relative simultaneity, and at the same time requires relative ignorance---or relative distance---on the part of one's opponents.) Everything depends on the observer and the recording instruments and relative accumulations of knowledge (the instruments being a manifestation of assumptions built into them) and speeds of transmission to determine what looks like simultaneity. -Simultaneity has nothing to do with where those events are happening (unless you are being shot at from two directions), but rather when they are percieved. Perception is a function of distance and the tools required to transmit knowledge. A corporation, our chimera, in the \emph{contemplation} of law, this society of the anonymous and hidden, an organic being (more than the sum of activities of individuals and groups), with stored-up misery-and-energy, lives converted to credit, may be scattered over a wide geography and over time. All things in it and of it and about it may be considered simultaneous from the point of view of an auditor contemplating this balance sheet. When the accountant's sheet is computerized, constantly recieving information from all over the world and interconnected with the product of statistical projections from all over space and time, then all operations are happening simultaneously, including invested-in future events, since they are handled in the present. +Simultaneity has nothing to do with where those events are happening (unless you are being shot at from two directions), but rather when they are perceived. Perception is a function of distance and the tools required to transmit knowledge. A corporation, our chimera, in the \e{contemplation} of law, this society of the anonymous and hidden, an organic being (more than the sum of activities of individuals and groups), with stored-up misery-and-energy, lives converted to credit, may be scattered over a wide geography and over time. All things in it and of it and about it may be considered simultaneous from the point of view of an auditor contemplating this balance sheet. When the accountant's sheet is computerized, constantly receiving information from all over the world and interconnected with the product of statistical projections from all over space and time, then all operations are happening simultaneously, including invested-in future events, since they are handled in the present. -Similarly, it is said that any complex of genetic material contains the complete history of the organism and all preceding organisms (a genetic archeology, but still alive). By the proscess of combination and recombination of its memory elements, amino acids, etc., since it contains all past, probable, potential and possible organisms, even pre-organisms; and like the elements of, the combinatorial rules of, say English (rules which are derived after the languge is mature), is subject to the same operations, containing all past and future literary works, even those that Shakespeare forgot to write. Implicit in all these observational operations is the notion of the simultaneity-observor of all genetic and\slash or linguistic, and\slash or monetary possibility. And thus genetics, if seen as information, is the rememberance of things past (all the organic --- and inorganic --- universe, all the realized and unrealized beings, objects and forces) which generate the organisms which invent various schema of rembererance, which then remember the complex that recollects it. +Similarly, it is said that any complex of genetic material contains the complete history of the organism and all preceding organisms (a genetic archeology, but still alive). By the process of combination and recombination of its memory elements, amino acids, etc., since it contains all past, probable, potential and possible organisms, even pre-organisms; and like the elements of, the combinatorial rules of, say English (rules which are derived after the language is mature), is subject to the same operations, containing all past and future literary works, even those that Shakespeare forgot to write. Implicit in all these observational operations is the notion of the simultaneity-observer of all genetic and\slash or linguistic, and\slash or monetary possibility. And thus genetics, if seen as information, is the remembrance of things past (all the organic---and inorganic---universe, all the realized and unrealized beings, objects and forces) which generate the organisms which invent various schema of remembrance, which then remember the complex that recollects it. -But for Einstein there was an upper limit: the speed of light. The quantum physicists, introducing indeterminacy, and the intervention of the observor and his instrumentation, implied that in a certain sense, all events were in fact simultaneous, regardless of clocks, for they had distributed Mind into the universe, a notion Einstein rejected. +But for Einstein there was an upper limit: the speed of light. The quantum physicists, introducing indeterminacy, and the intervention of the observer and his instrumentation, implied that in a certain sense, all events were in fact simultaneous, regardless of clocks, for they had distributed Mind into the universe, a notion Einstein rejected. -Let's take a side trip to paradise and consider time there. What happens before the beginning, or after the end, is a question to which Kaballists and gnostics address themselves. This problem has been transmitted right down into modern times in a new form: what happened \emph{before} The Beginning, the Big Bang (itself a construct open to doubt)? +Let's take a side trip to paradise and consider time there. What happens before the beginning, or after the end, is a question to which Kabbalists and gnostics address themselves. This problem has been transmitted right down into modern times in a new form: what happened \e{before} The Beginning, the Big Bang (itself a construct open to doubt)? -\emph{All} matter, energy, space and time (and thus all possibility) was contracted into a dimensionless point (or nothingness) ... so the mythic tale goes. Infinite mass, for if the point was suseptible to measurement, even of the most miniscule kind, then its mass was less than infinite. If all matter, space, motion, energy, time --- and potentially, perhaps inevitably, all life --- in the universe was massed into this dimensionless point, then there could be no time or space \emph{outside} this dimensionless, infinite-massed point. Infinitely compressed matter and energy (which included, potentiality, all life) meant that there was no one to measure it, not even any automated measuring tools. So all Mind was there too. Perfect simultaneity, \emph{but not objective simultaneity}, which, being involved with signals, distance and time, couldn't be measured. It was therefore eternal inside the dimensionless point, a feature of all paradises. +\e{All} matter, energy, space and time (and thus all possibility) was contracted into a dimensionless point (or nothingness)\ld\ so the mythic tale goes. Infinite mass, for if the point was susceptible to measurement, even of the most miniscule kind, then its mass was less than infinite. If all matter, space, motion, energy, time---and potentially, perhaps inevitably, all life---in the universe was massed into this dimensionless point, then there could be no time or space \e{outside} this dimensionless, infinite-massed point. Infinitely compressed matter and energy (which included, potentiality, all life) meant that there was no one to measure it, not even any automated measuring tools. So all Mind was there too. Perfect simultaneity, \e{but not objective simultaneity}, which, being involved with signals, distance and time, couldn't be measured. It was therefore eternal inside the dimensionless point, a feature of all paradises. -Time is not a term that stands by itself, nor does any other term: all terms are multireferential, bootstrapping every other term into the air where it hovers like some plasma, contained away from the apprehension of most people. But the multi-referentiality (as well as the breakdown into terms of a complex of things) indicates the intervention of mind inside the universe. If Mind is an emanation of that pre-moment --- physical, chemical, biological, monetary, literary, religious --- it might be possible to \emph{remember} this paradisical past now, as we \emph{remember}, say, Eden, a lower-level and later paradise. It is out of logic, the mathematics, the equations --- a form of metaphorical activity --- the statistical retrojection --- a specialized and leached-out form of memory --- and the observation of the distribution of matter in space, and the Red Shift, that we might infer, and remember, the Big Bang. +Time is not a term that stands by itself, nor does any other term: all terms are multireferential, bootstrapping every other term into the air where it hovers like some plasma, contained away from the apprehension of most people. But the multi-referentiality (as well as the breakdown into terms of a complex of things) indicates the intervention of mind inside the universe. If Mind is an emanation of that pre-moment---physical, chemical, biological, monetary, literary, religious---it might be possible to \e{remember} this paradisaical past now, as we \e{remember}, say, Eden, a lower-level and later paradise. It is out of logic, the mathematics, the equations---a form of metaphorical activity---the statistical retrojection---a specialized and leached-out form of memory---and the observation of the distribution of matter in space, and the Red Shift, that we might infer, and remember, the Big Bang. -It is over this Big Bang that modern physicists, ancient priests and shamans, magicians, caballists and communications artists come together. +It is over this Big Bang that modern physicists, ancient priests and shamans, magicians, Kabbalists and communications artists come together. -Given this compulsive activity, this associative, similizing, metaphoric, organizing, disorganizing, ordering, concentrating, distributing, interventionary, aesthetic activity of humans, and the compulsive nescessity to lay on one hundred and forty four interpolations where there appears the slightest gap (indeed to invent gaps) we can also say that all economic observations contain the purified metaphysical and stored-up simultaneous record of all activity. And we can add that the genetic material is not only an information-analogue, but a factory and clock analogue: the gamete's growing becomes an analogy to the ever repeated evolution, a biological mini-Big Bang. +Given this compulsive activity, this associative, similizing, metaphoric, organizing, disorganizing, ordering, concentrating, distributing, interventionary, aesthetic activity of humans, and the compulsive necessity to lay on one hundred and forty four interpolations where there appears the slightest gap (indeed to invent gaps) we can also say that all economic observations contain the purified metaphysical and stored-up simultaneous record of all activity. And we can add that the genetic material is not only an information-analogue, but a factory and clock analogue: the gamete's growing becomes an analogy to the ever repeated evolution, a biological mini-Big Bang. -Since all credit is meaningless unless linked to an active, perpetually moving market, linked to people to believe in it and to the institutions they inhabit, given these massive flows of \emph{perceptions}, symbols and signs standing for life, space, factories, and given the increasing velocities, we have reached the age of Einsteinianism in business, approaching (as in Dante's Paradiso), simultaneity \emph{inside} this system and serial, labrorious time and ageing (the post-paradisical universe) \emph{outside} the system. It is with the arrival of the computers and highspeed communications, with perpetually operating, around-the-world-all-time-on-line-markets, time and time-zones, for some speculators, mean less and less, but are needed more and more. +Since all credit is meaningless unless linked to an active, perpetually moving market, linked to people to believe in it and to the institutions they inhabit, given these massive flows of \e{perceptions}, symbols and signs standing for life, space, factories, and given the increasing velocities, we have reached the age of Einsteinianism in business, approaching (as in Dante's Paradiso), simultaneity \e{inside} this system and serial, laborious time and ageing (the post-paradisaical universe) \e{outside} the system. It is with the arrival of the computers and high-speed communications, with perpetually operating, around-the-world-all-time-on-line-markets, time and time-zones, for some speculators, mean less and less, but are needed more and more. The zones, after all, are merely a hangover of local dawns and sun-settings, a way to start and end the business day (but at the same time have reference to eternity). For those, time becomes a manipulable commensurable, a function of price to be adjusted seasonally, daily, hourly, minutely to the financial needs of different credit\slash time\slash zone-spanning topologies. Linked-up, high-speed computers, telexes, with their internal and communicating velocities, working all the time to coordinate long and short term messages become like the matching up of different infinities. -Now, it is said, \emph{all} can be linked: financial markets, factories, laboratory work, electrical grid systems, voice conversations, graphic displays, on-line-in-real-time accounting systems, tax structures, banking operations, brokering, trading programs, games, military and political scenarios, telemedical diagnostic and treatment-delivery networks, point-of-sale processors, home banking and trading, data-retrieval... All change the notion of time and timing. The restlessness of these unsleeping telematic devices negates out older senses of time. The movements of humans, matched up to the \emph{movement of the records of humans and their endeavors} change the notion of time, timeing and human behavior. Real time begins to dance in time to telecommunicated computer time; capital-containing time-movements\slash time-containing capital movements. The human cycle of production and consumption falls out of line with the informational cycle of production and consumption. Life is driven by these abstractions and fictional populations are more suited to survive at these speeds than humans. It becomes bizzare when time becomes not only mensurable, but something that can be corelated to a set of logic games. +Now, it is said, \e{all} can be linked: financial markets, factories, laboratory work, electrical grid systems, voice conversations, graphic displays, on-line-in-real-time accounting systems, tax structures, banking operations, brokering, trading programs, games, military and political scenarios, telemedical diagnostic and treatment-delivery networks, point-of-sale processors, home banking and trading, data-retrieval\ld\ All change the notion of time and timing. The restlessness of these unsleeping telematic devices negates out older senses of time. The movements of humans, matched up to the \e{movement of the records of humans and their endeavors} change the notion of time, timing and human behavior. Real time begins to dance in time to telecommunicated computer time; capital-containing time-movements\slash time-containing capital movements. The human cycle of production and consumption falls out of line with the informational cycle of production and consumption. Life is driven by these abstractions and fictional populations are more suited to survive at these speeds than humans. It becomes bizarre when time becomes not only mensurable, but something that can be correlated to a set of logic games. -After the reconstruction, or rememberance of the Big Bang, time was said to move only in one direction: \enquote{forward.} An anomoly. This asymetricality was bothersome. After all, the universe is electromanichean. Then it was found, possibly, that for sub-atomic particles time may be bi-directional, an analogy deduced from the assumed bi-polar nature of charged particles. A question: why should time only go \enquote{forward,} along a \enquote{line,} as if trying to move away from, or perhaps forward into an enormous pool of pre- or post-existent, paradisical pre-creation. If there are chronons, positive, forward-moving time-particles, then there should be anti-chronons, negative, backward-moving timeparticles. (Or on the other hand, maybe the observational equipment, the human, subject to time, could not perceive time any other way --- except in dreams --- and thus projected this time, operationally, imposing --- as mind imposes --- a certain order in the universe.) +After the reconstruction, or remembrance of the Big Bang, time was said to move only in one direction: \dq{forward.} An anomaly. This asymmetrically was bothersome. After all, the universe is electromanichean. Then it was found, possibly, that for sub-atomic particles time may be bi-directional, an analogy deduced from the assumed bi-polar nature of charged particles. A question: why should time only go \dq{forward,} along a \dq{line,} as if trying to move away from, or perhaps forward into an enormous pool of pre- or post-existent, paradisaical pre-creation. If there are chronons, positive, forward-moving time-particles, then there should be anti-chronons, negative, backward-moving time-particles. (Or on the other hand, maybe the observational equipment, the human, subject to time, could not perceive time any other way---except in dreams---and thus projected this time, operationally, imposing---as mind imposes---a certain order in the universe.) -But, if time is moving forward, and matter is moving outward, expanding, attenuating, inflating, then entropic disaster faces us and preoccupies some small, but influential set of thinkers. It is astonishing that some far-off heat-death of the universe should affect this subset with despair, as if they were faced with a black and dusty cosmos a mere ten or twenty years from now. This hints at a religious or at least an ideological sensibility. The crisis demands reconcentration and reunifiction, these new forms of calculational and accumulative ideology which permeates all forms of thought. There is also a peculiar aspect to this thought, a sort of despair. If the universe perpetually expands, or if it is steady-state, or expands and contracts in cycles, all seems \enquote{purposeless.} Now we are not merely talking about religious thinking, but scientists have voiced these concerns. Purpose, as well as the imposition of order in all things, is negantropy. +But, if time is moving forward, and matter is moving outward, expanding, attenuating, inflating, then entropic disaster faces us and preoccupies some small, but influential set of thinkers. It is astonishing that some far-off heat-death of the universe should affect this subset with despair, as if they were faced with a black and dusty cosmos a mere ten or twenty years from now. This hints at a religious or at least an ideological sensibility. The crisis demands reconcentration and reunification, these new forms of calculational and accumulative ideology which permeates all forms of thought. There is also a peculiar aspect to this thought, a sort of despair. If the universe perpetually expands, or if it is steady-state, or expands and contracts in cycles, all seems \dq{purposeless.} Now we are not merely talking about religious thinking, but scientists have voiced these concerns. Purpose, as well as the imposition of order in all things, is negentropy. -This crisis, this terror of conceptual, informational, ideological inflation, is seen in finance, physics, cosmology, genetics... The universe-picture collapses for the physicists. All the functions of esoteric calculation-magic to keep the universe alive emerges in their logic-compared-to-the-universe. The banker's loans default, their world system is threatened with collapse, just as a star, using its energy too freely, burns out too quickly, collapsing back on itself into a black hole. The banker must reschedule or re-time his loans, or at least reform the calenders of his debtors ... although he cannot retime his debtor's lives. For the banker and the physicist, the universe must balance, all things in it, thus time itself: they must hold their two-aspected world together. For the banker it may be nescessary to reschedule or slow down time. +This crisis, this terror of conceptual, informational, ideological inflation, is seen in finance, physics, cosmology, genetics\ld\ The universe-picture collapses for the physicists. All the functions of esoteric calculation-magic to keep the universe alive emerges in their logic-compared-to-the-universe. The banker's loans default, their world system is threatened with collapse, just as a star, using its energy too freely, burns out too quickly, collapsing back on itself into a black hole. The banker must reschedule or re-time his loans, or at least reform the calenders of his debtors\ld\ although he cannot retime his debtor's lives. For the banker and the physicist, the universe must balance, all things in it, thus time itself: they must hold their two-aspected world together. For the banker it may be necessary to reschedule or slow down time. -Can this be accepted by those living in a debtor --- low-energy, low-mass --- nation, since the tyranny of their bodies may not repond to this new schema? They cannot suspend their bodily functions and await the paradise of debt payoff or redemption in a hundred years. Therefore, the bankers must play games with time, population (genetics) and space. The physicists and cosmologists also reschedule time, making statistical projections and retrojections, equating (like the banker) all time with that contained in a massified and concentrated microworld which they can then manipulate with ease. +Can this be accepted by those living in a debtor---low-energy, low-mass---nation, since the tyranny of their bodies may not respond to this new schema? They cannot suspend their bodily functions and await the paradise of debt payoff or redemption in a hundred years. Therefore, the bankers must play games with time, population (genetics) and space. The physicists and cosmologists also reschedule time, making statistical projections and retrojections, equating (like the banker) all time with that contained in a massified and concentrated microworld which they can then manipulate with ease. -Operations can be performed with timequanta that distort our sense of what time is. We can add it; we can subtract it; we can make it go sideways, crowd centuries into minutes. How much time was spent by Dante, going through hell, purgatory and heaven on that Easter triad of days, 1300: subjective time inside these three realms as against objective time outside of it? If time can be accumulated, can it be sold? Truly sold as a commodity? Can it be consumed, metabolized? In some sense, yes. How? Be % TODO be -> by -making it into a commodity; the businessman's trick. Commodity means \enquote{the measured against.} Is time, like other commodities, deliverable? We sell time-sharing. But those are, after all, metaphors. We can sell it as interest. We sell money, we loan money, and if we are striving for a profit, time becomes expressed in interest rates already embedded in money. All money, all that is valued, contains time, both the time of its existence and the time incorporated into it. But, to buy it is still not to \emph{live} it. +Operations can be performed with time-quanta that distort our sense of what time is. We can add it; we can subtract it; we can make it go sideways, crowd centuries into minutes. How much time was spent by Dante, going through hell, purgatory and heaven on that Easter triad of days, 1300: subjective time inside these three realms as against objective time outside of it? If time can be accumulated, can it be sold? Truly sold as a commodity? Can it be consumed, metabolized? In some sense, yes. How? By making it into a commodity; the businessman's trick. Commodity means \dq{the measured against.} Is time, like other commodities, deliverable? We sell time-sharing. But those are, after all, metaphors. We can sell it as interest. We sell money, we loan money, and if we are striving for a profit, time becomes expressed in interest rates already embedded in money. All money, all that is valued, contains time, both the time of its existence and the time incorporated into it. But, to buy it is still not to \e{live} it. -Debt redemption is the redemption of time-price. (A famous work on slave cliometrics is called \booktitle{Time on The Cross}. After the original time on the cross, came the journey into another space and the ressurrection.) It is performance in production, events-to-come-treated as if they had already happened. Time is delivered from then to now. Ridiculous? If quarks are confined in larger particles and cannot be separated, but nevertheless calculated with as if separated, why not time? No one has ever seen a free quark; why not confined chronons? Matching time to value, we monetarize it, but in a \enquote{confined} manner. +Debt redemption is the redemption of time-price. (A famous work on slave cliometrics is called \booktitle{Time on The Cross}. After the original time on the cross, came the journey into another space and the resurrection.) It is performance in production, events-to-come-treated as if they had already happened. Time is delivered from then to now. Ridiculous? If quarks are confined in larger particles and cannot be separated, but nevertheless calculated with as if separated, why not time? No one has ever seen a free quark; why not confined chronons? Matching time to value, we monetize it, but in a \dq{confined} manner. -There can be no such thing in our current financial system as a static pool of money, or near-money. Since it is restless, it has velocity, and if it has velocity, then it traverses space --- what is velocity without space --- in a variety of ways. A meter is now defined in terms of light travel. It was discovered that a rigid measuring rod shrunk, and so gained mass, in the direction of the movement relative to a measuring rod in a slower timeframe. Speeding clocks also slow up in the direction of velocity. We may also say that money, in perpetual motion, if massed, slows up time relative to slower moving money, or conversely, time inside a massed and concentrated pool of money slows up as the velocity of money increases. So now so many fraction-seconds of light traveled equals a meter, based on the assumption that light-travel is a constant in any time-frame. The same operation applies to money, which can define space (if not pure space, then at least real-estate). Increase the velocity (requiring what amounts of energy and investments?) to the speed of light and mass will begin to become compressed into smaller and smaller spaces approaching nothingness, infinite mass, and at the same time will be relatively eternal. Time, from the point of view of someone's going slower, appears longer. Infinity, but relative infinity. Immortality, but relative immortality. And when the speed of light is transcended (or possibly when there is enough treasure-energy piled up) then time might go backwards. We have arrived at the conditions of the black hole. +There can be no such thing in our current financial system as a static pool of money, or near-money. Since it is restless, it has velocity, and if it has velocity, then it traverses space---what is velocity without space---in a variety of ways. A meter is now defined in terms of light travel. It was discovered that a rigid measuring rod shrunk, and so gained mass, in the direction of the movement relative to a measuring rod in a slower timeframe. Speeding clocks also slow up in the direction of velocity. We may also say that money, in perpetual motion, if massed, slows up time relative to slower moving money, or conversely, time inside a massed and concentrated pool of money slows up as the velocity of money increases. So now so many fraction-seconds of light traveled equals a meter, based on the assumption that light-travel is a constant in any time-frame. The same operation applies to money, which can define space (if not pure space, then at least real-estate). Increase the velocity (requiring what amounts of energy and investments?) to the speed of light and mass will begin to become compressed into smaller and smaller spaces approaching nothingness, infinite mass, and at the same time will be relatively eternal. Time, from the point of view of someone's going slower, appears longer. Infinity, but relative infinity. Immortality, but relative immortality. And when the speed of light is transcended (or possibly when there is enough treasure-energy piled up) then time might go backwards. We have arrived at the conditions of the black hole. If we can talk about dollars per time-unit, we can now also talk about time-units per dollar. If we change our rates, we can talk about more dollars per time-unit and more time-units per dollar. If inflation takes place, value drops or dollars per item increases, and therefore rates increase to compensate. Or conversely, velocity also contributes to inflation. By the same token, chronons per unit can be inflated. Inflation creates time. We approach immortality. If this seems like an intellectual game, without consequence in the real world, we must consider the effects on people of short and long-term debt, defaults, accelerated payments and production, in which the whole cycle must be speeded up in order to repay. Either people work faster (and live for shorter periods of time) for less pay, or fewer people work at faster rates (aided by the ghost army embedded in robotics and computers). -The speed of light is the ultimate standard, the limit, Einstein's \emph{primum mobile}. Since everything is defined in terms of everything else, there can be no such thing as a \emph{primum mobile} other than the one those who set the standards impose on us. While time is closely linked to light and the traversal of space, if we link time to compound iterest formulae, the parameters change. While we have been reticent, resistant to play with time because cycles of hunger, fatigue and death drain us, it is happening nevertheless, in our practice. But biological time still lurks somewhere in our perceptions; yielding to an artificial immortality terrifies us, like submitting ourselves to heaven and hell. It should be remembered that an infinite amount of money must be spent in order to become equivalent to an infinite amount of mass and energy, to an infinite amount of space, lives, energy, history, time... High technology, capital intensivity compresses the mass of commodities. Capitech-intensivity increases its mass-energy-time-velocity in relation to a slower-moving, starvation world. +The speed of light is the ultimate standard, the limit, Einstein's \e{primum mobile}. Since everything is defined in terms of everything else, there can be no such thing as a \e{primum mobile} other than the one those who set the standards impose on us. While time is closely linked to light and the traversal of space, if we link time to compound interest formulae, the parameters change. While we have been reticent, resistant to play with time because cycles of hunger, fatigue and death drain us, it is happening nevertheless, in our practice. But biological time still lurks somewhere in our perceptions; yielding to an artificial immortality terrifies us, like submitting ourselves to heaven and hell. It should be remembered that an infinite amount of money must be spent in order to become equivalent to an infinite amount of mass and energy, to an infinite amount of space, lives, energy, history, time\ld\ High technology, capital intensivity compresses the mass of commodities. Capitech-intensivity increases its mass-energy-time-velocity in relation to a slower-moving, starvation world. -All operations that can be performed with credit also indicates a relative immortality, for the possessor of the accumulation of credit possesses a huge accumulation of stored energy-lives, time, in a very small space: a great mass, which, because it still can't be metabolized, must manifest itself in certain expenditures; cars, houses, military potlatches, estates, hotel rooms, airplanes, pomp. This, of course, is reckoning backwards; we are deriving certain laws to explain the insane behavior of the rich. And yet, a dream persists: of one could only store enough mass-accumulation, then you can store, perhaps, enough time in a small enough space to transcend, or at least reach the speed of light. The question here is, of course, \emph{real}, \emph{actual} immortality (for whom and at what price to everyone else?) +All operations that can be performed with credit also indicates a relative immortality, for the possessor of the accumulation of credit possesses a huge accumulation of stored energy-lives, time, in a very small space: a great mass, which, because it still can't be metabolized, must manifest itself in certain expenditures; cars, houses, military potlatches, estates, hotel rooms, airplanes, pomp. This, of course, is reckoning backwards; we are deriving certain laws to explain the insane behavior of the rich. And yet, a dream persists: of one could only store enough mass-accumulation, then you can store, perhaps, enough time in a small enough space to transcend, or at least reach the speed of light. The question here is, of course, \e{real}, \e{actual} immortality (for whom and at what price to everyone else?) -The difficulty lies in any human's being able to \emph{metabolize} an extreme amount of time, or mass, or energy, or velocity, or convert information (which is also a function of all these terms) to something like flesh ... convert energy, etc., into usable energy in an assimilable form. (As Ahab, an insatiable hunter, desiring a sort of immortality, dreamed of swallowing the power of the sun concretized in the symbol of the White Whale, Moby Dick.) Thus, in the abstract and therefore in the real world, the rich create a vacuum around them by sucking up the abstractions, the information standing for the energies of the world, which then siphon off the actual energies of the universe. +The difficulty lies in any human's being able to \e{metabolize} an extreme amount of time, or mass, or energy, or velocity, or convert information (which is also a function of all these terms) to something like flesh\ld\ convert energy, etc., into usable energy in an assimilable form. (As Ahab, an insatiable hunter, desiring a sort of immortality, dreamed of swallowing the power of the sun concretized in the symbol of the White Whale, Moby Dick.) Thus, in the abstract and therefore in the real world, the rich create a vacuum around them by sucking up the abstractions, the information standing for the energies of the world, which then siphon off the actual energies of the universe. -But there is something saving after all. The real, ultimate constant may not be the speed of light at all, but \emph{felt duration}, after all, give or take a little of the average lived life. The felt duration of people ina different time and speed frame seems subjectively to be the same (although no one knows) even though the person in the fast lane is said to live aeons longer. It is such calculations that produce vast masses in time and timer-space, creating a blind impasse, the existence of the concept of black holes, out of which no light or energy escapes... Which yield amusing stories to frighten and amuse the young, but does not yield any Magellan's passage to an India-Paradiso. +But there is something saving after all. The real, ultimate constant may not be the speed of light at all, but \e{felt duration}, after all, give or take a little of the average lived life. The felt duration of people ina different time and speed frame seems subjectively to be the same (although no one knows) even though the person in the fast lane is said to live æons longer. It is such calculations that produce vast masses in time and timer-space, creating a blind impasse, the existence of the concept of black holes, out of which no light or energy escapes\ld\ Which yield amusing stories to frighten and amuse the young, but does not yield any Magellan's passage to an India-Paradiso. @@ -1,15 +1,15 @@ -\chapter{} +\chap\nl -If the \emph{mythology} of the past is \emph{everpresent}, at least in the \emph{memory} (distant signals presently felt, but not in any order) then it too is simultaneous even though the event is long gone. Seen this way, event, and thus time, and thus life, become merely informational; that is to say an abstraction that can be handled in a non-real way with real effects. This is, after all, what dreams and surrealism are all about. A financial institution is not only an information-handling and communicating company these days, but a clock, an observatory with \enquote{eyes} that see electronic impulses in which all the events it scans are simultaneous and fused. It is a dream state. +If the \e{mythology} of the past is \e{ever-present}, at least in the \e{memory} (distant signals presently felt, but not in any order) then it too is simultaneous even though the event is long gone. Seen this way, event, and thus time, and thus life, become merely informational; that is to say an abstraction that can be handled in a non-real way with real effects. This is, after all, what dreams and surrealism are all about. A financial institution is not only an information-handling and communicating company these days, but a clock, an observatory with \dq{eyes} that see electronic impulses in which all the events it scans are simultaneous and fused. It is a dream state. -As we continue to struggle on toward demonstrating this unified field theory as it is in practice, we see we have arrived at a dangerous, earth-devouring system of thought and illusion. We take the whole development of modern cosmological and physical theory to be, at the present time, a function of the \emph{culture} of modern transnational capital. When a certain level of interconnectedness is reached, what will happen is that the universe's symbolic energy (affecting real energy systems) will move so fast that it will burn itself out, explode into a nova (a cosmological financial-informational bubble), collapse and compress back into a black hole... leaving the universe outside quite the way it was for billions of years. +As we continue to struggle on toward demonstrating this unified field theory as it is in practice, we see we have arrived at a dangerous, earth-devouring system of thought and illusion. We take the whole development of modern cosmological and physical theory to be, at the present time, a function of the \e{culture} of modern transnational capital. When a certain level of interconnectedness is reached, what will happen is that the universe's symbolic energy (affecting real energy systems) will move so fast that it will burn itself out, explode into a nova (a cosmological financial-informational bubble), collapse and compress back into a black hole\ld\ leaving the universe outside quite the way it was for billions of years. -\emph{It is the logic of this mode of thinking that produces these wierd and surreal visions.} Welcome to Laputaland. +\e{It is the logic of this mode of thinking that produces these weird and surreal visions.} Welcome to Laputaland. -In the past, magical systems held the notion that there was a link between the microcosm (what happened in people's minds) and the macrocosm (what happened in the universe). The macro affected the micro. If one had the magical tools, then the micro could affect the macro. Electrical levers were substituted for magical levers. But the dream of \emph{magical} control has never been exorcised. We are still caught in a quasi-metaphysical system; one that expends enormous resources and money. It is this dream of intellectual magic that drives the present information revolution: the grasp for power and control. The thought of a small sub-set of the world's population devastates the earth. Perhaps, after all, modern capitalism is a great factory for the production of angels. +In the past, magical systems held the notion that there was a link between the microcosm (what happened in people's minds) and the macrocosm (what happened in the universe). The macro affected the micro. If one had the magical tools, then the micro could affect the macro. Electrical levers were substituted for magical levers. But the dream of \e{magical} control has never been exorcised. We are still caught in a quasi-metaphysical system; one that expends enormous resources and money. It is this dream of intellectual magic that drives the present information revolution: the grasp for power and control. The thought of a small sub-set of the world's population devastates the earth. Perhaps, after all, modern capitalism is a great factory for the production of angels. Illusion dominates. It doesn't matter yet since the information doesn't even have to be true. The ground is eaten out from beneath us. We will take Berkeley, Kant and the whole rout of idealists along to the stars, lured by worlds we have pre-populated but cannot reach. -The dream time is upon us. +The dream time is upon us.
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