From 0f06769132e2299219073faa3fe78ef31998a84e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: p <grr@lo2.org>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2024 01:21:18 -0500
Subject: begin optexification

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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\ldots\ priestly systems, rites, hierarchies and
-ceremonies of learning and passage, memory systems, networks of initiates\ldots\ In addition, one should
-ask: why did one set of systems triumph---that is to say, why were they preserved, and
-remembered---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\ldots\ 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\ldots\ 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\ldots\ 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\ldots\ 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\ldots\ 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\ldots\ 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\ldots\ 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. 
-
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