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+\chapter{}% 13
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.)
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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?
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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?
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Or maybe he wanted regularity and predictability because he lost money in speculation.
+
+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.
+