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From: [email protected] (Sourcerer)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: From Sourcerer In His Convalescence
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 95 16:19:42 GMT
Organization: The Grimwit Factory
Lines: 217
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
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In article <[email protected]>,
[email protected] (Kevin O' Gorman) wrote:
>[email protected] (Sourcerer) writes:

>>We are in a state of novelty -- all that change everyone's been rattlin'
>>on about for decades. It is not now tightly controlled. There is no
>>evidence it can be tightly controlled. People desire control. They
want
>>to know; they want certainty.
>
>But society can and has been tightly controlled. And the rate of change
>of technology can do little to stop it.
>The availability of faxes to Chinese students did little other than to
>let a hamstrung world know what was going on.

Societies get out of control...the sixties for example. In the US a lot
of the social & physical engineering by the social power for the past few
decades has resulted from a meditation on that.

The social power does have optimal access for exercising control:
consider the decade of fine-tuning the broadcast media's access to
military operations (a result of a meditation on the out of control
sixties).

One may configure all that data about media-access from Greneda to Desert
Storm as the progress of dystopia, extrapolating from it the inevitable
process of tighter and tighter control. Then again, one might see it as a
return to a norm, and see the out of control aspect of the sixties as an
anomoly in the relationship between the media and the war machine.

The dystopic pov in the sixties imagined the media (i.e., television)
turning us into a nation of complaisant couch potatoes. Instead it got a
nation of wired channel surfers, zapping uncontrollably and unpredictably,
cynical unbelievers, phantasts and conspiracy theorists, rather than the
nice commodified sheep they expected; the three networks conspiring as
one...I mean wasn't it inevitable?

The dystopic pov in the sixties imagined the Imperialistic Presidencey,
leading to a simulation of dictatorship in the US by the executive branch
of our government...look at the progression of presidential power from
Rooselvelt to Johnson...I mean wasn't it inevitable?

The dystopic pov in the sixties imagined that we would become a polarized
society, instead we've splintered into a constantly morphing configuration
of groups, gangs, coalitions, subcultures, moving with fluid ease in
response to the ongoing situation.

Of course, for the determined dystopiac, the wired channel surfer is
rootless and isolated and powerless, not being part of a larger social
context; the discontents of the Presidency are embematic of our lack of
direction, leadership, optimism and vision; and our splintering into
pragmatic alliances or weird subcultures is evidence that we have lost our
idealism and our concern for humanity at large.

There is no arguing with a determined dystopiac. It's much like a drug
addiction.

What impresses me about the nineties is that, like the sixties, things are
getting out of control, which is to say unpredictable.

>>Just as he counts the numbers, decrypts the signs in the Bible, and
learns
>>the date of the 2nd Coming, Joe Ordinary, can also configure the present
>>and project it horrifically into the future, telling the runes to
>>Armageddon.
>
>Your wording implies that they make predictions about the distant future.

Oh no. You must understand that Jesus is *always* coming immediately if
not sooner...there's no time to waste, we're snowballing right into
Armageddon. The evidence is on your tv, on the pages of your daily paper.
Isn't it obvious? Nobody has ever read the runes and said, "whelp...looks
like we got several centures afor we gotta worry 'bout the end of the
world, so let's just relax and enjoy life."

You *do* understand the psychological power of using dystopianism for
hacking people, don't you? For getting one's hooks into their anger and
discontent...it's propagandistic power?

>Imagine some Haight-Ashbury hippy getting up on a foggy sixties morning,
>and declaiming to his fellows that the Man was watching them in the 7-11.
>They'd probably have asked him where he got such good dope.

We invented paranoia.

Have you ever seen The Anderson Tapes? It was made in the late sixties.
Sean Connery. Thief gets released from prison and immediately begins to
contact his old gang and puts together a fine plan to sack and loot an
upscale apartment building. He is observed every step of the way by every
public, private and secret agency you can imagine, caught on film and
tape...and *none* of it was aimed at him (which was the point of the
film)...he was just captured by processes of other intentions.

Ever see The Prisoner?

>>Myself? Well, I've been a sf fan long enough to know even the brightest
>>and most imaginative and knowledgeable people don't have a clue, much
less
>>myself.
>
>Note: Tail-landing. reusable rockets, as described by Heinlein et al.,
are
> being touted as the best payload delivery system for orbit.
> Life imitates fiction?

JW Campbell used to go on and on about it in the early sixties in his
editorials in Analog. Esp. the economies of solid vs liquid rocket fuel.
Both Campbell and Heinlein, though, didn't understand that NASA is a
propaganda-publicity machine and not a space agency. Campbell couldn't
manage to see it as anything other than bad engineering vs good
engineering debates (well, there's always the bad guy getting a kickback,
the swine, but he wasn't a *real* engineer in the first place).

NASA has been a distortion of a space program for political ends.
Campbell and Heinlein, having engineering smarts, of course understood
what works best in a given context. That's not fiction, really.

Heinlein predicted nothing, iow.

>>But I am not an "optimist" about the future. The future is a construct,
>>an imaginary object, a toy...
>
>In other words, you "let it take care of itself", an inherently
optimistic
>viewpoint.

I'm saying the future doesn't exist except in our imaginations. I believe
we are responsible for what we imagine.

>Alright, I admit that was low. I take it back. But from what I've seen of
>the remains of that world and the one I live in, I do believe that the
pace
>of such life has become more frenetic, and that it has become harder.

Yes, it has become harder and more frenetic for those for whom it was once
easier and more serene. I really am not trying to jolly you out of your
dark mood.

Have you considered that your nettle-grubbing hippies (whom I assume are
optimists), if your dystopian vision is right, probably have odds of
surviving and you don't, no matter how rosily they perceive the situation?
Being able to survive on nettles, bark and the random tuber ought to keep
one alive in the dystopic future. Possibly they have something to be
optimistic about.

>>I simply can't be that enthusiastic.
>
>Again, excellent reversal. But yawning "I can't be arsed" when you come
>up against conviction, even the small degree of it I hold is really an
>annoying and cu-de-sac tactic.

My apologies. Enthusiasm has a technical meaning in the sociology of
religion and I ought not to have used it when I had reason to believe it
would not be appreciated.

>>...those who reacted like animals to the ordeal being clubbed
>>to death by the shamans.
>
>Indeed, a very human reaction.

Yes, isn't it. It takes place on a planet where such a rite is underway
among an alien species, and there are a group of humans observing under
what would come to be known in a few years as The Prime Directive. Some
of them with the best of intentions turn a young alien into a beloved pet.
They end up as participants in the rite. (It was Richard McKenna's Mine
Own Ways, btw.)

>>Living in the effulgence of that light, I, of course, am seen as the
most
>>horrible of creatures by both utopiacs and dystopiacs -- someone who is
>>unimpressed by their Vision...who does not stand there like a fawn
caught
>>in the headlights of a Mack truck..."Gorsh, Mickey..."
>
>Treading that fine (dashed white)line between similar metaphors,
Sourcerer
>avoids the multi-laned utopic and dystopic hells on both sides.
>This is all starting to sound very self-congratulatory.

Yes. Sorry . It's just that...I'm convalescing because I,
Sourcerer, become the object of discussion to the exclusion of everything
else for some folk...take Polecat, for example.

>I don't know,
>you might be far better off compromising your anti-ideological purity
>for long enought to see if anything useful resides in either camp.
>Ideologies in and of themselves aren't bad, so long as they're not
>rules, but guidelines, and Visions can actually serve as useful
>approximations, if one takes their more far-out notions as unsound,
>and in general unsupported.

I would hope for such reasonableness and modeling of scenarios. I argue
against the set-in-concrete insistence of the despairing that their
Vision, being personally persuasive to them, is accurate for that reason
alone (and of course the piling up of annectdotal evidence that proves
that Jesus II, The Final Battle is in post-production) for us all.

>>I hope you feel like developing that. The valuation of one's life in
the
>>risking of it, the uses of the mechanism of fear, and exploration
>>generally are worthy topics for discussion.
>
>Yes, but then we're into issues of courage, and then, once again, we come
around
>to self-congratulation, which I have no reason for and even if I did, no
time
>for. Some things are often best left undefined, if one is looking for
general
>cases. Isomorphism going only so far, after all.

Well, okay. I think we would have concluded that no matter how
differently we approached it, we agreed in the end.

(__) Sourcerer
/(<>)\ O|O|O|O||O||O "The vale of human suffering is basically a dump"
\../ |OO|||O|||O|O --Sterling
|| OO|||OO||O||O

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