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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.