1 files changed, 70 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/preface.otx b/preface.otx
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eee660a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/preface.otx
@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+\chap Preface
+
+I have been dreading writing a preface for this, worried about my ability to remain emotionally composed while talking about what this is and why I'm reprinting it. Yet, I feel like I could provide too much assistance to understanding these artifacts to be able to comfortably abdicate this responsibility. Let me focus on relaying some objective matters, and try to save the hysterical meltdown for the end. 
+
+\Q{On a more sinister level, the security of the entire world now rests on the controls of the just such systems, and isn't it time we explored the outer limits of this for its impact effect on communication? Such systems are integral to all security systems at the military level, and even this terminal you are all using has more sophistication than I think some of you realize, e.g., for manipulating more complex programs in larger computers ranging in use from banking to missiles.}
+\Qs{Brendan O'Regan}
+
+These conferences occurred on the first global chat systems, on ARPANET. Our first figure of cultural interest was involved in the design of these systems: Jacques Vallée. Google, the sickening fuckers, credit him as being a computer scientist and venture capitalist (and, perhaps most impressively, misspell his name), despite the fact that I imagine he's most well-known as an UFOlogist to those reading this. 
+
+The transcripts themselves are dominated by Frank Gillette and Brendan O'Regan, two figures who couldn't possibly be more of-their-time. Let me introduce them.
+
+\dinkus
+
+To call Frank Gillette simply "an artist" is reductive, but enough contemporary documents do so to suggest this is a label he desired, so, fair enough: Frank Gillette is an artist. He is also occasionally called a \e{video artist}, which seems to cross the line into cruelty. I can elaborate!!
+
+Frank Gillette's most visible output---at least in this century---is the magazine \journaltitle{Radical Software}, the first issue of which came out July 1970. This magazine was a product of the Raindance Corporation, named in parody of the government-advising Rand Corporation; Raindance was founded and, \e{de facto} if not \e{de juro}, masterminded by Gillette. Article titles in the first few issues include \essaytitle{Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare} by Paul Ryan, \essaytitle{Expanded Education for the Paperless Society} by Nam Jun Paik and \essaytitle{A demand on the Networks: Serve the People} a statement written anonymously(?).
+
+It's understandable to misread all this as talking about some fledgling internet. Remember: this is from a decade before these teleconferences, and these teleconferences represent an embryonic stage of a then-hypothetical internet. No, my friend, in \journaltitle{Radical Software}, these folks were writing about \e{television}. \journaltitle{Radical Software} documents a strain of thought dedicated simultaneously to envisioning the incredible potential that a pro-social, humane cybernetic world offered to humanity and the brutal fight to realize this potential under an uncompromisingly cynical technocapitalist regime.
+
+That today \dq{television} is taken to symbolize the unidirectional medium \e{par excellence}, that it's difficult to understand \journaltitle{Radical Software} as even being \e{about} television, that everyone involved has had their identity compressed to \dq{video artist}---as the sort of art they were fighting to create was never allowed to exist, as there was \e{money} to be made!---serves to convey just how badly Raindance and peers lost this battle.
+
+Here, then: 1979. Gillette has found himself once again on the battleground. He is not unprepared. But, well, hey, look around you. You know how this is going to go already. Have you felt \e{empowered} recently?
+
+\dinkus
+
+Brendan O'Regan was the Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. (I pause here for the reader's overblown spit-take, which I watch curdle into a disgusted grimace.) \dq{Noetic Sciences}?? Uhh, who ordered \e{that}?! I'm not entirely sure---I ache to read a book or even some papers on how exactly this all came together---but it's not like this was so outlandish at the time. A 1977 paper \essaytitle{Direct Perception of Remote Geographical Locations} involves integrated experimentation with remote viewing aided by communications over ARPANET. It was presented at an IEEE conference, and the network communications teams probably overlapped. The screaming blue \dq{PARAPSYCHOLOGY} label that Wikipedia hits you with on the moment of page-load re: The Institute of Noetic Sciences would not remotely have the same cultural malignment at that time that it does now. At least not to government researchers.
+
+In anticipation of how a 2024 reader might react to this revelation, can I---humbly---suggest that this isn't a bad or scary thing? That, in fact, this likely aligned research efforts to be more humane than they would've otherwise been (for whatever that was worth), and profoundly more humane than anything poised to operate under the banner of \dq{research} today?
+
+As Henry Flynt repeatedly observes in \ul{Ruinous Spirituality}, \dq{Needless to say, scientific materialism---what I call the contemporary prestige frame of reference---has no way to recognize dignity [or human interiority in general].}\ednote{\booktitle{Ruinous Spirituality}, p. 15.} \dq{[Scientific materialism (or mechanical materialism)] arose from the fanatical mysticism of depersonalization.}\ednote{ibid., p. 234.}
+
+While I know far less about Brendan O'Regan and the Institute of Noetic Sciences than I do about Gillette, and I can't assume anything about the legitimacy of their research, would it be wrong of me to regard their inclusion as at least an effort to \e{disclose personness}---to use Flynt's terminology---in the endeavor? Certainly the directions of Google, Meta et al would be recognized more readily as the epistemological catastrophes they are in a context less eager to discard any sense of human interiority, or deny any value whatsoever to it.
+
+\dinkus
+
+At any rate, of these two, it is often O'Regan who is the more grounded. Gillette is stunningly erudite---though he is holding back here from the density he operates at in \booktitle{Between Paradigms}, his sole published text---and understandibly excitable. The forces of history have  placed him, twice now, on the very rim of a revolutionary explosion of potential; or at least the potential of potential. 
+
+Presenting these documents would be unthinkable without the preservation efforts of Roy Skodnick, who originally presented them in \journaltitle{All Area} \#2, then again on the Franklin Furnace website for their \dq{In The Flow} programme. I have saught to include here the other articles in that issue referenced in the introductory material, as well as the section divisions and further introductory materials provided with the Franklin Furnace presentation. Additionally, I've included all the images---ranging, as they do, from highly germane to a more whimsical relationship with the text---that accompanied these writings in \journaltitle{All Area}. Illustrative materials for Franklin Furnace's presentation have been lost; illustrating instead, I guess, how precarious a state this all had been existing in.
+
+Roy Skodnick is, at the time of my writing this, unable to afford retirement. Consider donating to his GoFundMe: 
+
+\vskip 2em
+
+\noindent\centerline{{\tt \ul{https://www.gofundme.com/f/byab7-roy-skodnick}}}
+
+\vskip 2em
+
+\dinkus
+
+Anyway, as to how I feel about these transcripts: I feel an aching, overwhelming sense of disgust. If it is not clear, I am rescuing these from the trash---no institution or corporation seeming to care. For all the effort and thought put in here, Gillette lost a second battle. Massive corporations harvest far greater wealth than the human mind can fathom by foreclosing on entire modalities: employees enact a combination non-metaphorical Hell and habitrail for themselves, their children, and the entire human race to be reduced to profoundly psychically ill livestock inside of. 
+
+Corporations theatrically establish \dq{AI Ethics Boards,} as if they care. If any of these bodies gave the smallest fragment of something even distantly resembling a shit, they would instead establish ethics boards around user interfaces, human-computer interaction---they would return to these, this square 0, after having destroyed every single thing they had ever created. 
+
+Then, ideally, the C-suites would go on CSPAN and publically broadcast themselves blowing their fucking brains out. 
+
+\vskip 3em
+
+{\leftskip=0pt plus1fil\rightskip=0pt\parindent=0pt\parskip=0pt\parfillskip=0pt\it
+Phoebe Jenkins
+
+Providence, RI
+
+November 2024
+
+}
+
+\vfill
+\vfill
+
+\break
+\ No newline at end of file