path: root/ch1.tex

\chapter{}

We are in the middle of that Great Transformation into what is called the Information Age, or
Post-Industrial Society. As in all Grand Transitions, \emph{fin du siecle's} and climacterics,
perceptions of reality are once again being redistorted by the insertion of a vast new mediational
system into an already multiplexed, historically accreted maze of mediations. In the context of this
forced march, the relationship of information to society and nature has to be rethought. 

Call information capital-intensive knowedge, a mechanelectronistic metaphor made to dominate more
and more of life. All knowledge is in the process of being converted to computer-compatibility. The
old philosopher's stone could convert base metals into gold. Now humans, real estate, social
relations \ldots\ are converted into electronic signs carried in an electronic plasma. This would
merely be an amusing game if people (in fact only a small subset of the world's population: 90\% of
all information processing is controlled by a small part of the \enquote{developed} world) weren't
being forced to use and live \emph{through} information processing and communications technology.
Call it Informatics; call it telematics. 

The components of telematics are mainframes, minis and personal computers, cathode ray tubes,
printers, copiers, automated bankteller machines, point-of-sale sensors, antennae, copper and fiber
optic wire, copiers, remote-sensing devices, robots (remotely run or otherwise), calculators,
integrated chips, software, mass-data-storages, tapes, discs, diagnostic equipment, a babble of
\enquote{appropriate} languages, telephones, modems, telexes, terminals, microwave relays, radio,
cable, satellites, switching and routing systems\ldots\ Alongside of this, one has to consider the
social communication systems and all the transcieving and routing operations there. Even the
simplest of conversations are seperated, reconfigured, sent and priced. And those who live in this
new world are losing their grip on an older reality. As for those who have no access to, no
participation in, this newly imposed world, they are out of the world's new information economy,
doomed to obsolescence and death. 

A glorious, transcendant and radiant future is promised us. Efficiency will increase, productivity
will rise, the office and factory of the future will be automated, we will be able to work at home,
teleconference, we will have hoards of instantly retrievable knowledge at our disposal,
record-keeping will be easier, we will be freed from work and the burdens of memory. That, or an
enormous disaster is in the making as parts of the world become metaphysical. For it's time for
Demiurge II. The Year 2,000 is coming. Apocalypse and creation in one. 

Whole nations, their economies, their peoples, their resources, their land, can be simulated and
displayed on some electronic input/output device. But worse, taken for the real thing. National
boundaries become porous and erode. America is no more as trans\-national data-flows penetrate
borders. Nations become illusions as foreign enterprises buy pieces of many lands. The informational
process has concrete results. True, this is nothing new. International cartels, merchants in past
ages accomplished the same thing. But as long as any enterprise becomes translated more and more
into its essences --- money and near-money, an all-purpose information, the blood and hormones of
business --- those essences cannot be held in containers called nations any longer. 

The technology can be likened to a nervous system, one external to humans yet connected to their
internal nervous systems by a variety of devices, becoming more fused, joined. For example, with the
onset of medical data-bases, monitoring, diagnostic and treatment machines, ancient dreams of being
directly connected, the world \enquote{wired} to the brain-nerve complex, leads to the hope that
thought alone will move reality. 

With the invention of new sensing devices, new perceptual systems come on line. All beings are some
function of their information intake, no matter how indirectly the information is recieved. What was
done in the mind must now be done through computers \ldots\ programs begin to become quasisolidified
thought. New procedures for action and behavior take the form of a ritual, requiring the playing of
an excruciating game called programming. People resist? The languages are too hard, the steps to
long and complicated? Money is now poured into developing computers that \enquote{talk English,} are
touch-responsive or voice-activated. Computers for dummies. 

But above all, price is attached to these mediational meditations. Price is a seasonally adjusted,
value-added medium in this invented medium, a carrier of values standing for the signs of things
sent along a carrier wave. The computer, and its languages, represent a frozen and hard-wired
\emph{habituation of thought.} The programs are a way of trying to introduce flexibility, variety
and reference into the relative intractability of the machine. However, by itself, and with its
operators, and its languages, it is impossible to truly metaphorize --- an essence of human brain
activity and thought --- that is to say, fuse into one homgeneity any two or more disparate
sensation-terms. 

Each \enquote{new age} rewrites the history of the past (while thinking it has discarded the
obsolescent past). The last great age of reinvention and rationalization of past and future took
place, more or less, from the 15th to the 19th centuries. New world views were created. But does the
process of rethinking and reorganizing the past really free any age from that past? Has modern
rationalization taken a secret rider, an incubus along in its intellectual and institutional
baggage? 

New institutions advertise themselves, using the old images of domination to promote the transition.
They draw their sales-imagery out of a central bank of symbolic forms. Knowledge of the past is
simplified. Epochs are erased (perhaps there was too much that was embarressing in the past). New
pasts, whole aeons are invented. Complex existence is simplified, and then recomplexified in another
way. Forgetfullness follows. Scramble and resequence; but, in the process of borrowing symbolic
energy from the past, new simultaneities and odd juxtapositions, like dreams, emerge. 

To look up, to see the stars, the galaxies (in their past and glowing glories) with new kinds of
lenses is to have recourse to addresses in data banks where long runs (projected in a short time) of
computer-modeled, cosmological statistics are stored (with certain assumptions built in). Look
closely at these computer-simulated, eons-long histories of distant stellar objects projected on the
cathode-ray tube. Watch them appear to recede. What are we \enquote{seeing}? Are the simulations
guided by an underlying compulsion to \emph{aesthetics,} and does this become the ultimate
gravitational lens? And those great galactic streamers of stars, and the great gouts of gas jetting
off into the blackness\ldots\ how like the monetary jet-streams that banks draw off into the black
holes of their balance-sheets from once luminous nations, entropizing and then rematerializing as
investments elsewhere. Transubstantiation? Is that what underlies the very concept of the
preservation of matter and energy? 

Celestial bookkeeping? But see the flaw; the images are seen in squared-off pixels, reconstructions
based on a relatively few observations, structured by certain recurring theories. All observational
technology is, within limits, the concretization of a speculation. And what we see is all based on
some initializing, mythic event: The Beginning. 

Troubles in paradise. While trumpeting the imminent emergence of the grand, unifying theory, the
unifying theories fall apart. Fundamental forces and particles proliferate. The original central
dogma of genetics is riddled with heresies. And even forms of credit go off and multiply. They
become desperate to unify and simplify (an ancient compulsion). Unification also implies
structuring, measuring, concentration, monopolization, a center, a central intelligence, heirarchies
of knowledge, a control room. However, without general acceptance, credibility, faith in new forms
of knowledge, these become mere scholastic games. They turn away from observation to their animated
projections, assuming them to have been the fruits of experiment, since they cannot journey to the
heart of a star, visit a black hole, or distant galaxies, except in imagination. Nor will they be
able to make journeys to putative planets without a complete transformation of the body. But they
must journey on: after all, their reputations and belief systems, their funding, is at stake.
Scientists seem to have reached the end of the line. They have decided that the observing Mind plays
an \emph{active instrumental role} in the cosmos (indeterminacy), perhaps once played by god or
demiurge. 

Modern observational machinery resurrects ancient epistomological problems and incorporates them
into itself. Ether, having once failed as a concept, is in the process of being reinvented.
Information is the ultimate mediational ether. Light doesn't travel through space; it is information
that travels through information as information\ldots\ at a heavy price. The scientists, reacting,
are now on their knees, abjectly populating the cosmological and sub-atomic realms with
\enquote{god,} \enquote{purpose,} \enquote{design,} \enquote{progress,} \enquote{ascent,}
\enquote{transcendance,} "cosmic frequency dances"\ldots\ And if quantum physics tells us that
observation intervenes in the observed, and becomes part of it, this also holds true for pure
theories of finance, or for that matter, evolutionary genetics, at least according to the
sociobiologists. The atom and credit court secrecy. Higher and higher levels of indeterminacy fill
every aspect of life. 

Scientists cannot seem to live with the possibility that there might be anamolies in the universe.
For instance, that:  
\begin{enumerate}
\item this might be the only planet in the universe with life on it; 
\item the universe is infinite and unbounded and, what's more, its contents are not uniformly distributed;
\item that there was, consequently, no Big Bang; 
\item there are no black holes; 
\item the universe neither contracts nor expands\ldots\ it was always this way and always will be; 
\item there are no quarks or pre-quarks, other than as a function of the activity in reactors\ldots
\end{enumerate}
After all, cosmological evidence is a sparse series of stats, stills taken in a short period of
time, arranged into an aesthetic, evolutionary, dynamic sequence. Like the ancient mystics, the
scientists are projecting themselves into a space they cannot hope to reach, at least in human form.
They are colonizing the void with a concept. Like the world's telebanking system with its
computer-assisted bankers, they are now inflating space like some financial bubble. Indeed, there is
now an inflation model of the universe\ldots\ finance similized into space. Well, if all is one, why
not? 

Almost every day, new arrays of satellites are hurled into the air: switchboards in the sky,
hovering in geosynchronous orbit, remitting messages, insensitive to earthly distances. Other
satellites circle the earth rapidly, surveying weather, land, minerals, people. New lines are laid
down; optical fiberglass replaces wire (mourn for the slaves of the old copper mines of Cyprus, or
for those who died in Chile for Kennecott and think a while of hands cut off for Union Miniere in
the old days in the Congo). Every year new computers come on line and are re-interconnected as
manufacturers try to configure incompatible computer architectures and languages, requiring the
manufacture of new networking devices, plug-compatible hard and software as new models render old
ones obsolete. 

Data bases for every conceivable aspect of life are created. However to gather data, to even think
data, requires a vast language project. For every item must be distilled, rendered and specified
before the computer can handle it; the old, fuzzier specifications must be translated. Given the
costs of translating old knowledge (the price of intellectuals and their thought) into new forms
(what room for ambiguity is there?), costs of storage, heavy doses of electricity to run and chill
the machine, much must be abandoned. Paper libraries, for instance (of course, promising the
paperless society, more paper than ever is generated). Certain central markets (like the New York
Stock Exchange, which depends on personal interaction, much secret knowledge and \enquote{tribal}
networks) die hard and slow. Stocks and commodities, the securities markets, banking, currency,
options, futures... all these markets must now be rethought and restructured. Banks become stock
brokers. Brokerage houses sell insurance. Shopping centers sell securities. Where once precious
metals were carried, where once paper was exchanged, new electronic signs and signals verify and
celebrate the exchanges. And if the age of the counterfeit cosmos has come, it is also the age of
easily counterfeitable currency. 

Informational essences become more real than tangible humans. The very body itself begins to
evanesce, just as in those folk tales where the shaman's body-parts were scattered to the winds and
reassembled. Medicine promises to be delivered from a distance. Experimentors consult case histories
on tapes or discs thousands of miles away. Once-free knowledge becomes priced. At the same time the
electromagnetic spectrum for transmission becomes used up, gets scarce, high-priced. 

As for ordinary life, we are exhorted to become compatible with all this. We are urged to fill our
homes with personal computers; to become computer-literate; to write, learn, do office work; get
medical examinations and treatment at a distance; do accounting, banking, law; buy and sell equity;
shop with computers; do mathematics (without understanding), logic, all with computers; do factory
work with robots; confer, and even eat with computer assistance. A vast proliferation of books are
produced to explain how to use our computers, to rectify the outpouring of incomprehensible manuals
written by and for technicians. We play games, draw story elements out of storages and arrange new
entertainments with the computer; we have them watch our fuel, shop, have the lights turned on or
off for us, and even in time, fall in love with far-distant strangers, perhaps even mate with the
gods... as the ancients were reputed to have done. 

People seated at their terminals forget time, sitting mesmerized, their fingers jerking spastically
at the keys, their eyes blearing. In time, so the sales pitch goes, computers will achieve
artificial intelligence (and perhaps even use \enquote{biochips} and so live) and what's more, they
will be more rational, organize knowledge more neatly than our poor brain can, once certain problems
of miniaturization, heat, switching speeds, and the development of sophisticated,
\enquote{humanlike,} or artificial intelligence languages have been solved. Perhaps then they will
be able to attain that kind of \enquote{randomness} and \enquote{intuitive} leap humans make so
easily without having to scan and compare lists. Having been talked into surrendering our spirit,
our knowledge, our bodies will become useless. We will, like Jesus, like Faust, like Dante, achieve
immortality and \enquote{evolve} into computer-compatible and re-programmed history, one with
Babylon, Nineveh, Rome. Our essences will be preserved in that great memory bank in the sky. 

But in the meantime, on the peasant land (what's left of it), in the jungles (what's left of those),
in the world's ghettos (which proliferate), in the poisoned seas, rivers, and lakes, the
contaminated land, sky and earth, a lot of humans must be phased out. Prices decline for technology,
but overall, costs rise because of mundane deregulatory decisions, questions of intellectual
property (the pricing of ideas), ironic anti-trust decisions (AT\&T, IBM), national
information-conflict policies, the classified (or priestly, if you want to look at it that way)
intelligence approach to knowledge... all contribute to the expansion of ignorance. Knowledge
purveyors block the sun's rays and the rain's fall, offering to sell sunlight and rainfall... as
signs. Where once you might look up and see the clouds passing by, you can --- but you don't have
the eyes for it --- look up and see the spy satellites, the earth/weather/sea/resources sensing
satellites hovering, or count the streams of invisible electronic gold flowing by. Perhaps you can
sense the meta-weather, almost as natural as monsoons. For a deluge of money --- inflation --- is a
\enquote{natural} disaster, creating floods, leaving some lands sodden and others a desert.