\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.