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+\chapter{}
+
+How did this development come to be?
+Surely more forces were at work than \enquote{Progress?} 
+This essay is not a history of the
+information
+revolution, but some
+mention
+must be made in passing. At some point
+during the Second
+World
+War, a series of
+decisions to computerize were reached. The
+overriding concerns were military and intelligence applications. It should be noted that
+private industry would never have invested
+in this, or any other development. Without
+government investment, bankers are paragons of timidity.
+
+The founders of the information, or cybernetic age, were Alan Turing, John Von
+Neuman, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon
+and later, Noam Chomsky. Hordes of electrical engineers --- whether they understood
+what they were doing or not --- reworked almost every philosophical problem known to
+humans in terms of circuitry and programming languages. These problems began, of
+course, centuries ago. For instance the epistimological question: what is knowledge,
+how do we know, how do we know we
+know, how does it relate to the world outside, who controls knowledge, who has it
+and who does not, what is it worth, how do
+we talk about it (which is the question of
+what language we shall use and how shall
+we talk), and what instrumentalities we perceive through.
+
+Questions of the technology of knowing
+must be interwoven with political and economic
+considerations (within the confines
+of what is scientifically and technologically
+possible), which is to say knowledge systems are structured like intelligence and
+counter-intelligence systems. There is to be
+written a whole history of secret and coded
+knowledges... priestly systems, rites, hierarchies and ceremonies of learning and
+passage, memory systems, networks of initiates. . . In addition, one should ask: why did
+one set of systems triumph—that is to say,
+why were they preserved, and rrmembered—
+and others fail? There is room for a history of
+the politics of the promotion, funding and
+triumph of intellectual knowledge systems
+and this includes the rememberance of the
+major streams of philosophy. Philosophy is
+one of the atmospheric backgrounds which
+provides for a general and unified state of
+perception against which day to day knowledge is learned.
+
+The original choices for computers, binary, Boolean (Leibnizian, as Wiener would
+have it) logic, reflected a dialectical, even a
+Manichean approach and was an unfortunate decision. Why these choices? It was
+easier to design electrical circuits that could
+carry out the logic operations.
+
+The system began slowly, went on line
+massively with mainframes and minis in the
+fifties, mostly
+in defense
+and intelligence
+applications, followed closely by banking
+and business.
+
+In the seventies, a massive campaign was
+mounted to \enquote{democratize} the computer.
+The micro was developed by small, innovative businessmen-technicians.
+Sales propaganda was disseminated
+in the name of enlightenment, efficiency, transcendance
+and power. Every possible sales technique
+known to public relations, advertising and
+mythology was employed to sell the computer.
+Not only were ancient and modern
+symbols deployed, but also fear. It became
+possible, we were told, to have a computer in
+the home that was once as large as a building
+... and did the same work.
+
+One notes the parallel developments and
+\enquote{needs}: The committment to the Great
+Theater of perpetual war as the pressure
+system out of which innovation and invention and progress came. This generated a
+need for a vast corps of mind-workers. Cheap
+education produced intellectuals. This led
+not only to the further proliferation of mindworkers, but of mediators and mediational
+systems. Intelligence and police (and their
+surveillance systems); psychologists and
+their theories; many schools of psychotherapy; sociologists; anthropologists; analysts;
+coders and decoders; cryptographers and decryption experts; 
+disinformation-propagating operatives; advertisers; public-relations
+flacks; consultants; historians in fifty modes;
+economists, both practical and theoretical;
+financial manipulators, and the buyers of
+their services (bankers, securities dealers,
+brokers, currency dialecticians); new critics;
+hermeneuticists; structuralists; semioticians;
+deconstructionists; quantifiers; metricians;
+statisticians; propagandists; accountants and
+auditors; lawyers and proliferators of law;
+interactivists (and their connecting machineries); cosmic and microcosmic theoreticians;
+agronomists; doctors; philosophical logicians
+and inventors of yet newer and newer mathematics; salesmen; priests and ministers and
+inventors of yet-new religions; logical and
+scientific astrologers... And now, in the
+present age, all this to be machined.
+
+They sought both unity and fragmentation. Now one must admit that there is a
+propensity in some humans to generate new
+unifying theories and technologies while
+at the same time inventing and proliferating new explanatory systems and new subtheories . . . all of which promise to explain
+everything. This seems to be a function of
+the density of intellectuals, in terms of availability of jobs and competition, both relative
+and absolute, to a general and non-theorizing
+population. This insures that a fair percentage of those theories will be nonsensical, if
+not fraudulent... which is no impediment to
+their triumph.
+
+In addition, general systems theory took
+hold, and every aspect of the universe was
+designated a sub-system of some larger system and the largest --- and unknown --- system
+of all was a function of these bureaucratically
+minded spinners of holisms.
+
+The early cyberneticians thought that this
+development would add to—if not exponentially, then at least incrementally—the sum of
+human knowledge. Accompanying this development was an ancient agenda: the compulsion to impose order, predictability, to
+eliminate risk and uncertainty. But as far as
+this ancient agenda was concerned, the commitment should be shared, paid for by some
+part of the public. New processes would in
+turn create still newer knowledge. And, as all
+things happen in this modern society, the
+\enquote{system,}
+with
+all of its attendant
+confusions, complexities and corruptions, with its
+intense conflicts among the different programs, systems and equipment 
+manufacturers, with its political and business battles, has
+been laid on in the most haphazard, ridiculous, expensive, inefficient and disorganized
+way (repeating our earlier history of canals,
+railroads, highways, transit systems, communications and technology in general). We
+now have a conflict of computer, communicating and language-conversion systems
+with many fundamental problems still unsolved.
+
+
+(And here, lest we forget that the problem
+is not merely \enquote{intellectual,} we must remember concrete institutions with which
+intellectuals are connected,
+and who provide their funding. How, and to whom, ideas
+are sold: we must think about AT\&T, Sperry-Rand, IT\&T, IBM, Citicorp and Chase... We
+must also not forget that there are unwritten
+and true histories to be done of the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the CIA, all intelligence agencies of the
+world, and how the intellectual thought of
+these agencies permeates every aspect of
+everyday life. We must think about the politics of international and national communications policy and how these issues are
+fought out in corporations, legislative bodies
+and regulatory agencies. We must think of
+pricing, advertising, marketing, promotion,
+generations of faulty computers, paper computers, imbecilic
+competiton, suppression of innovation, influence-peddling, lobbying,
+bribes, kickbacks and the rest of the common
+paraphenalia of business ... especially at a
+time when business becomes ever-more
+\enquote{intellectualized.})
+
+There was a nescessity to translate all
+living and non-living forms, to simulate
+events and natural processes, to chart their
+interactions and simulate thse interrelations
+and to begin to fill the memory and data
+banks. This growing assemblage gradually
+becomes the total environment ... at least
+for a few. These developments are new but
+are also, at the same time, the fulfillment of
+an ancient desire: to control the material
+world by the manipulation of secret know]ledge (secret, in modern times, by being
+priced, being made into intellectual property, being classified). How does this differ
+from the practices of ancient priests, shamans, magicians?
+
+Ancient magicians thought they could
+control the environment. How did information 
+control the material world in the past?
+By assuming a connection between the 
+internal system of intellectual order and the 
+\emph{external} system of \emph{material} order. One 
+controlled the cosmos by the uses of resonances
+and dissonances, rhythms compatible with
+the true natural rhythm of the spheres, by the
+use of a chant, an incantation, a dance, a 
+ritual; or one could apply sacred geometry,
+controlling shapes that were analogous to
+the shape of the worlds one wanted to dominate\ldots\ magic. Magic embodies a primitive
+theory of electromagnetism and telecommunication. 
+Magic desires to achieve telepathy
+and teleportation. Voodoo, for instance, contains 
+the notion of a communicating medium
+and the communicants who believe in it.
+The Catholic Church is a communicating
+organism with an apparatus of switches and
+relays and a communicating language for
+the input of prayers through a churchly
+switchboard up to Heaven, and outputs returned 
+to the supplicant. And above all, all
+ancient and primitive systems implicitly
+propose the notion of an ordered, coherant
+universe, expressible in a certain set of languages,
+the manipulation of which manipulates 
+the universe. The question is: do these
+systems manipulate the universe or a simulation 
+of the universe? What certain intellectuals 
+in modern society propose is electromagic.
+