Once upon a time, wealth was elemental. One had it or one did not have it. It was solid. It was material. And it was easy to understand that wealth gave power, and power wealth. It was simple because both were based on land. Land was the most important capital of all. Land was finite—meaning that if one used it, no one else could use it at the same time. Better yet, it was eminently touchable. One could measure it, dig it, turn it, plant one’s feet on it, feel it between one’s toes, and run it through one’s fingers. Generations of our ancestors either had it or (literally) hungered for it. When smokestacks began to stab the skies, wealth was transformed. Machines and materials for industrial production, rather than land, now became the most critically needed form of capital: steel furnaces, textile looms and assembly lines, spot welders and sewing machines, bauxite, copper, and nickel. This industrial capital was still finite. If you used a furnace in a steel foundry making cast-iron engine blocks, no one else could use that furnace at the same time. Capital was still material as well. When J.P. Morgan or other bankers invested in a company, they looked for “hard assets” on its balance sheet. When bankers considered a loan, they wanted “underlying” physical, tangible collateral. Hardware. However, unlike most landowners who knew their wealthy intimately, who knew each hill, each field, each spring and orchard, few industrial-age investors ever saw, let alone touched, the machines and minerals on which their wealth was based. An investor received paper instead, a mere symbol, a bond or stock certificate representing some fraction of the value of the corporation using the capital. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Marx spoke of the alienation of the worker from his or her product. However, might also have spoken of the alienation of the investor from the source of his or her wealth. Today, at a pace that would have blinded Marx and/or Morgan, capital is being transformed again. As service and information sectors grow in the advanced economies, as manufacturing itself is computerized, the nature of wealth necessarily changes. While investors in backward sectors of industry still regard the traditional “hard assets”—plant, equipment, and inventories—as critical, investors in the fastest growing, most advanced sectors rely on radically different factors to back their investments. No one buys a share of Apple Computer or IMB stock because of the firm’s material assets. What counts are not the company’s buildings or machines, but the contacts and power of its marketing and sales force, the organizational capacity of its management, and the ideas crackling inside the heads of its employees. The same is of course true throughout the Third Wave sectors of the economy—in companies like Fujitsu or NEC in Japan, Siemens of West Germany, France’s Groupe Bull, in firms like Digital Equipment, Genentech, or Federal Express. This symbolic share of stock represents, to a startling degree, nothing more than other symbols. The shift to this new form of capital explodes the assumptions that underpin both Marxist ideology and classical economies, premised alike on the finite character of traditional capital. For unlike land or machines, which can be used by only one person or firm at a time, the same knowledge can be applied by many different users at the same time—and if used cleverly by them, it can generate even more knowledge. It is inherently inexhaustible and nonexclusive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Even this, however, only hints at the full scope of the revolution in capital. For if the shift toward knowledge-capital is real, then capital itself is increasingly “unreal”—it consists largely of symbols that represent nothing more than other symbols inside the memories and thoughtware of people and computers. Capital has therefore gone from its tangible form, to a paper form that symbolized tangible assets, to paper symbolizing symbols in the skulls of a continually changing work force. And, finally, to electronic blips symbolizing the paper. At the very same time that capital increasingly disguised by obsolete accounting rules and tax regulations), the instruments traded in the financial markets are similarly growing ever more remote from tangibility. In Chicago, London, Sydney, Singapore, and Osaka, billions are traded in the form of so-called “derivative” instruments—such as securities based not on the stock of individual companies but on various indices of the market. A step even further removed from “fundamentals” are options based on these indices. And beyond that, in a kind of shadow World, are so-called “synthetics,” which through a series of complex transactions, offer an investor results that simulate or mirror those of an existing bond, stock, index, or option. We are speeding toward even more rarified investments based on indices of indices of indices, derivatives of derivatives, synthetics mirroring synthetics. Capital is fast becoming “super-symbolic.” Just as much of the power of modern science lies in longer and longer chains of reasoning, just as mathematicians build more and more extended structures, piling theorem upon theorem to yield a body of knowledge that yields still more abstract theorems, precisely as artificial intelligences and “knowledge engineers” construct dizzying architectures of inference, so, too, we are creating a capital of progressive derivation, or—some might say—of infinitely receding mirrors. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

If this were all, it would be revolutionary. However, the process is pushed even further by parallel changes in the nature of money. When we think of dollars, francs, yen, rubles, or deutsche marks, most of us hear the rustle of paper. Yet nothing would have seemed odder to one of our great-great—grandparents who miraculously time-traveled into the present. He or she would never have accepted “useless” paper for a bolt of wearable calico or a bushel of edible corn. Throughout the agricultural age or First Wave civilization, money consisted of some material substance that had a built-in value. Gold and silver, of course. However, also salt, tobacco, coral, cotton cloth, copper, and cowrie shells. An endless list of other useful things also served, at one time or another, as money. (Paper, ironically, had only limited use in daily life prior to the spread of mass literacy, and was therefore seldom—if ever—used as money.) At the dawn of the industrial era, however, strange new ideas began to circulate about money. In 1650, for example, a man named William Potter published a prescient tract in England suggesting something previously unthinkable—that “symbolic wealth was to take the place of real wealth.” Forty years later, when people like Thomas Savery were tinkering with early steam engines, the idea was actually tried out. It was the American colonists, forbidden by the British to mint gold or silver coins, who for the first time—in the Western World at least—began printing money. This switch, from an inherently valuable commodity like gold or tobacco or furs to virtually worthless paper, required a tremendous leap of faith on the part of users. For unless a person believed that others would accept paper, and deliver goods for it, it had no value at all. Paper money was based almost entirely on trust. And paper money dominated the industrial society—the civilization of the Second Wave. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Today, as a more advanced Third Wave economy emerges, paper money faces near-total obsolescence. It is now clear with crypto currencies, paper money, like assembly lines and smokestacks, is an artifact of the dying industrial era. Except for economically backward countries and quite secondary uses, paper money will go the way of the coral shell and copper bracelet currency. By any material standard, most Americans today are far better off than, say, their grandparents were in the 1950s, when the “new” economy began. At that time the ordinary American family paid out nearly a 20 percent of its disposable personal income just to feed itself. By 2022, only 15 percent was needed of American’s income was needed. Shoppers are now expected to spend $611 per month on groceries, an increase of about $79, over their projected food budget for 2021. Clothing in those long-ago days ate up 11 percent of personal spending. By 2022, despite all the razzle-dazzle about fashion, the number was down to 7 percent. Back then, only 55 percent of Americans owned their homes. Today it is about 66 percent, and the homes are, on average, much larger. Indeed, by 2022, 15 percent of housing sales were for second homes. As far as health is concerned, despite all the problems, average life expectancy has risen from 68.2 years in 1950 to 76.60 years, which is a 0.3 percent decrease from 2000. However, if all this is true—and a mountain of evidence confirms that it is—why are Americans so seemingly unhappy? The key is because we are living in a material World—which is the opposite of intangible. Thus, as both the money economy and its non-money counterpart shift from muscles and metal-bending toward knowledge-based wealth creation and the intangibility it brings, we see yet another historic change: The resurrection of values as a central concern. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

It is necessary to sink back into the depths of the human past, to uncover the unifying elements of control which unite the additive and subtractive. As a primary clue, we may note that either state, manifested to its extreme, includes the necessity of raising powerfully altered states of awareness based on overstimulation and understimulation of the senses. These altered states may be sorted according to maximal “gravity” (for the fat fetish) and maximal “levity” (for the thin fetish). Five to ten thousand years ago, the worship of the great above average weight Goddess of crop fertility and abundant supply was still in its heyday, as evidenced in the strikingly voluptuous “Venus” figurines found at Willendorf, Austria, Dolni Vestonice in Czshoslovakia, Laussel, in France, and hundreds of other sites ranging from Spain to the Steppes of Russian and Central Asia The one European site which stands out as clearly suggesting the possibility of a well-organized Neolithic cult whose idol was a force-fed and fattened oracular priestess, is found on the island of Malta, just south of Sicily. A complement of several large temples, constructed out of huge, megalithic slabs create a series of artificial “underground” grottoes or caves. The temples are constructed in curving forms that echo the rounded contours of the abundant Goddess. Found in the burial excavations on one of the temple sites were several impressive statuettes of massively above average sized women, reclining on low couches with their eyes closed, as if dreaming or listening to an inner voice. Jean McMann’s Riddles of the Stone Age: Rock Carvings of Ancient Europe, suggests a confirmation for the idea that over-consumption of food was actually used to create the “gravitic” mediumship that parallels the “levitational” ekstasis of the under-consumer…Further, in the National Museum of Valetta (in Malta) one can see…a wonderful “Sleeping Lady” discovered in the main chamber of Hypogeum (a word meaning “under the Earth”)…Tiny yet monumental, she reclines as though she were a goddess receiving a dream. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

There has been some guesswork about the possibility of a “dream cult” connected with the structures. Perhaps, like a vestal virgin, or better, a queen bee, this goddess in human form was fed on titbits and delicacies, lived in the temple and dreamed rich dreams for the priests to interpret. By being fed to bursting, the priestess actually embodies the ideal of the obese Goddess, whose favor insured rich crops. The control of feast or famine resided in the very flesh of the ritually fattened priestess. By stuffing these women constantly, there were also kept in a perpetual state of dream-trance which made them the perfect oracles as well as the embodiments of the Goddess. Their huge bodies became laboratories for neurochemically altered frames of awareness, as well as pleasure palaces of the Goddess. Aleister Crowley perfectly describes this ritual fattening into a “gravtic” mediumship in his novel Moonchild. In service to the Lunar Goddess, Crowley’s character, Lisa, gradually fattens into the archetypically obsess sibylline figure: “It was part of the general theory of the operation thus to keep her concealed and recumbent for the greater part of the day…with soft singing and music or with the recital of slow voluptuous poetry, her natural disinclination to sleep was overcome and she began to enjoy the delicious laziness of her existence, and to sleep the clock round without turning in her bed. She lived almost entirely upon milk and cream, and cheese soft-curdled, with little crescent cakes made of rye with white of egg and cane sugar; as for meat, venison, as sacred to the huntress Artemis, was her only dish. However, certain shellfish were permitted, and all soft and succulent vegetables and fruits. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

“She put on flesh rapidly; the fierce, active impetuous girl of October, with taut muscles and dark-flushed mobile face, had become pale, heavy, languid and indifferent to events, all before the beginning of February, and it was clearly in this month that she was encouraged by her first waking vision of the Moon…for she had become extremely fat; her skin was of a white and heavy pallor; her eyes were almost closed by their perpetual droop. Her habit of life had become infinitely sensuous and languid; when she rose from recumbency she lolled rather than walked; her lassitude was such that she hardly cared to feed herself; yet she managed to consumer five or six times a normal dietary. She seemed utterly attracted to the Moon. She held out her body to it like an offering…She was more languid then ever before; that night, it seemed to her as if her body were altogether too heavy for her; she had the feeling, so well-known to opium smokers, which they call ‘clove a terre.’ It is as if the body clung desperately to the Earth, by its own weight, and yet in the same way as a tired child nestles to its mother’s breast….It may be that it is the counterpart of the freedom of the soul which it is the herald and companion…and gradually, as comes also to the smoker of opium, the process of bodily repose became complete; the Earth was one with the Earth, and no longer troubled or trammeled her truer self…She had become acutely conscious that she was not the body that lay supine in the cradle, with the Moon gleaming upon its bloodless countenance…” Crowley captures the essence of the obese/mediumistic priestess, bound and controlled by the sheer volume of her own flesh, into harmony with Earth and sky. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Dr. Douglas Baker, in this Esoteric Anatomy notes a direct link between the hypothalamus, high Serotonin levels and obesity in those subjects who have a sudden awakening of the mediumistic ability. The traditional association of women who are above average weight and mediumship (probably derived from the more than ample form of Madame Blavatsky, 19^th century founder of the Theosophical movement) reaches back to the very roots of human culture. Joseph Caezza, in his article “Fat Holy Men” establishes a clear link between sanctity and obesity, based upon somatic/aetheric aspects of the belly as a storage device for subtle energies. Likewise, the “Tarbfeis” or ritual gorging of the Druid priests upon the blood and flesh of the sacred white bull was intended to create a state of divine exaltation and oracular sleep. On the opposite side of the coin, the subtractive side, Crowley also mentions the surgical/cannibal aspect in Moonchild, occurring during a powerful and disturbingly erotic vision encountered during Lisa’s period of lunar “captivity.” “Actual phantoms took shape for her, some seductive, some menacing, but even the most hideous and cruel symbols had a fierce fascination for her. There was a stag-beetle, with flaming eyes, a creature as big as an elephant, with claws in constant motion, that threatened her continually. Horribly as this frightened her, she gloated on it; pictured its sudden plunge with those ghastly mandibles upon her flanks. Her own fatness was a source of curious perverse pleasure for her; one of her favorite reveries was to imagine herself the center of a group of cannibals, watch them chop off great lumps from her body and sear them in the pot, or roast them on a spear, hissing and dripping blood and grease, upon the fire. In some insane or atavistic confusion of the mind, this dream was always recognized as being a dream of love.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Clearly, the removal of flesh, in this example, operates within the context of the fat fetish. If we consider that the addition of flesh via food physically binds one to gravitic mediumship in a perpetual oracular dream state, then the subtraction of flesh, whether by starvation or surgery, must serve to release the Spirit in a rush of levitational ascesis. One binds to Earth, the other to sky. Here, we find the archetypal mythos of the marriage of Heaven and Earth, thin and fat, the conjunctio oppositorum of Alchemy; the wedding of all opposites. Within this perspective, we can begin to understand the more extreme aspects of the subtractive fetish as the ascetic/erotic mirror of the flesh and blood for the sake of a sexual or erotic ecstasy. The range of subtractive activities moves from the largely symbolic practices as piercing, scarification and tattooing, all of which have distinct mind-altering ritual and decorative aspects, to much more extreme forms, such as self-starvation, anorexia, the various forms of cosmetic surgery (especially liposuction!), fetishistic surgery, and what we might even term “folk” surgery. In the subtractive fetish, dread of surgery transforms into a sexual stimulant in its own right. The psychological roots of this fascination foes back to the Neolithic era, which gave birth to the rise of ritual fattening cults. Surgical rites of passage quite literally remove the soul in a state of ekstasis (literally, “out of oneself”) or levitation, through an actual hole in the body. Folk surgery, with its strong shamanic overtones, dates back tens of thousands of years. Clear evidence of trepanation operations (the cutting of a hole in the skull to espose the brain) has been found in early Neolithic skeletal remains. This early surgery was perhaps at first employed to shamanically remove possessing spirits from the head. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

This early surgery was perhaps at first employed to shamanically remove possessing spirits from the head. As late as the first few decades of our century, Tibetan Buddhist priests were still performing amazing trepanning operations, during which they drilled a hole between and above the eyebrows, and inserted a long, sharp, wooden needle directly into the pituitary gland to stimulate the development of second sight. Moreover, ideology is no longer very distinctly tied to economics, nor is it simply determined. It has been cut loose from necessity’s apron strings in creativity’s realm. Rational causality just does not, since Nietzsche, seem sufficient to explain the historically unique event or thought. Capitalist ideology is now instinctively taken to be something more like the Protestant ethic than what is described in Capital. When one talks to Marxists these days and asks them to explain philosophers or artists in terms of objective economic conditions, they smile contemptuously and respond, “That is vulgar Marxism,” as if to ask, “Where have you been for the last seventy-five years?” No one likes to be considered vulgar, so people tend to fall back into embarrassed silence. Vulgar Marxism is, of course, Marxism. Nonvulgar Marxism is Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, as well as the host of later Leftists who drank at their trough—such as Lukacs, Kojeve, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre—and hoped to enroll them in the class struggle. To do this, they had to jettison that embarrassing economic determinism. The game is surely up when Marxists start talking about “the sacred.” Very early in this century the effects of the encounter with Nietzsche began to be felt within Marxism. An example is the significance of revolution. Revolution and the violence that accompanies it are, as we have seen, justified in modern political philosophy and provide the most arresting spectacles of modern political history. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Revolution took the place of rebellion, faction, or civil war, all of which are obviously bad things, while revolution is the best and greatest event—officially and in the popular imagination of Englishmen, Americas, Frenchmen and Russians. Germany was the only one of the great powers not to have had one, and Marxism was partly invented to provide a bigger and better revolution for Germany, the natural fulfillment of Germany philosophy, as French philosophy culminated in the French Revolution. Of course, the spilling of blood is involved in revolution, proof of men’s preferring liberty to life. However, great amounts of blood were not required, and the violence was not thought to be good in itself. The old regime was tottering and needed a push; behind it were the developed conditions for the new order, an order fully justified by nature, reason and history. A mechanism for avoiding the need for recognition is to guarantee the uniqueness of the pairing of individual s by employing a fixed place of meeting. Consider, for example, mutualisms based on cleaning in which a small dish or a crustacean removes and eats parasites from the body (or even from the inside of the mouth) of a larger fish that is its potential predator. These aquatic cleaner mutualisms occur in coastal and reef situations where animals live in fixed home ranges or territories. They seem to be unknown in the free-mixing circumstances of the open sea. Other mutualisms are also characteristic of situations where continued association is likely, and normally they involve quasi-permanent pairing of individuals with such stocks. Conversely, conditions of free-mixing, and transitory pairing conditions where recognition is impossible, are much more likely to result in exploitation—parasitism, disease, and the like. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Thus, whereas ant colonies participate in many symbioses and are sometimes largely dependent on them, honeybee colonies—which are much less permanent in place of abode—have no known symbionts but many parasites. The small freshwater animal Chlorohydra viridissima has a permanent, stable association with green algae that are always naturally found in its tissues and are very difficult to remove. In this species the alga is transmitted to new generations by way of the egg. Hydra vulgaris and H. attentuata also associate with algae but do not have egg transmission. In these species it is said that “infection is preceded by enfeeblement of the animals and is accompanied by pathological symptoms indicating a definite parasitism by the plant. Again, it is seen that impermanence of association tends to destabilize symbiosis. In species with a limited ability to discriminate between other members of the same species, reciprocal cooperation can be table with the aid of a mechanism that reduces the amount of discrimination necessary. Territoriality can serve this purpose. The phrase “stable territories” means that there are two quite different kinds of interaction: with those in neighbouring territories where the probability of interaction is high, and with strangers whose probability of future interaction is low. In the case of male territorial birds, songs are used to allow neighbours to recognize each other. Consistent with the theory, such male territorial birds show much more aggressive reactions when the song of an unfamiliar male rather than a neighbour is reproduced nearby. If discrimination can cover a wide variety of others with less reliance on supplementary cues such as location, reciprocal cooperation can be stable with a larger range of individuals. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

In humans this ability is well developed, and is largely based on the recognition of faces. The extent to which this function has become specialized is revealed by a brain disorder called prosopagnosia. Even if the features have changed substantially over the years, a normal person can name someone from facial features alone. People with prosopagnosia are not able to make this association, but have few other neurological symptoms other than a loss of some part of the visual field. The lesions responsible for the disorder occur in an identifiable part of the brain: the underside of both occipital lobes, extending forward to the inner surface of the temporal lobes. This localization of cause, and specificity of effect, indicates that the recognition of individual faces has been an important enough task for a significant portion of the brain’s resources to be devoted to it. Just as the ability to recognize the other player is invaluable in extending the range of stable cooperation, the ability to monitor cues for the likelihood of continued interaction is helpful as an indication of when reciprocal cooperation is or is not stable. In particular, when the relative importance of future interactions falls below the threshold for stability, it will no longer pay to reciprocate the other’s cooperation. Illness in one partner leading to reduced viability would be one detectable sign of declining. Both animals in a partnership would then be expected to become less cooperative. Aging of a partner would be very like disease in this respect, resulting in an incentive to defect so as to take a one-time gain when the probability of future interaction becomes small enough. These mechanisms could operate even at the microbial level. Any symbiont that still has a chance to spread to other hosts by some process of infection would be expected to shift from mutualism to parasitism when the probability of continued interaction with the original host lessened. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

In the more parasitic phase, it could exploit the host more severely by producing more of the forms able to disperse and infect. This phase would be expected when the host is severely by producing more of the forms able to disperse and infect. This phase would be expected when the host is severely injured, has contracted some other wholly parasitic infection that threatens death, or when it manifests signs of age. In fact, bacteria that are normal and seemingly harmless or even beneficial in the gut can be found contributing to sepsis in the body when the gut is perforated, implying a severe wound. And normal inhabitants of the body surface (like Candida albicans) can become invasive and dangerous in either sick or elderly persons. It is possible also that this argument has some bearing on the causes of cancer, insofar as it turns out to be due to viruses potentially latent in the genome. Cancers do tend to have their onset at ages when the chances of transmission from one generation to the next are rapidly declining. One tumor-causing a virus, that of Burkitt’s lymphoma, may have alternatives of slow or fast productions of infectious stages. The slow form appears as a chronic mononucleosis, the fast as an acute mononucleosis or as a lymphoma. The point of interest is that, as some evidence suggests, lymphoma can be triggered by the host’s contracting malaria. The lymphoma grows extremely fast and so can probably compete with malaria for transmission (possibly by mosquitoes) before death results. Considering other cases of simultaneous infection by two or more species of pathogen, or by two strains of the same one, the present theory may have relevance more generally to whether a disease will follow a slow, jointly optimal exploitation course (“chronic” for the host) or a rapid severe exploitation might—as dictated by implied payoff functions—begin immediately, or have onset later at an appropriate stage of aging. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The model of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma could also be tentatively applied to the increase with maternal age of certain kinds of genetic defect. This effect leads to various conditions of severely handicapped offspring, Down’s syndrome (caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21) being the most familiar example. It depends almost entirely on the failure of the normal separation of the paired chromosomes in the mother, and this suggest the possible connection with theory. Cell divisions during formation of the ovum (but usually not the sperm) are characteristically asymmetrical, with rejection (as a so-called polar body) of chromosomes that go to the unlucky pole of the cell. It seems possible that, while homologous chromosomes generally stand to gain by steadily cooperating in a diploid organism, the situation is a Prisoner’s Dilemma: a chromosome which can be “first to defect” can get itself into the egg nucleus rather than the polar body. One may hypothesize that such action triggers similar attempts by the homologue in subsequent divisions, and when both members of a homologue in subsequent divisions, and when both members of a homologous pair try it at once, an extra chromosome in the offspring could be the occasional result. The fitness of the bearers of extra chromosomes is generally extremely low, but a chromosome that lets itself be sent to the polar body makes a fitness contribution zero. For the model to work, an incident of “defection” in one developing egg would have to be perceptible by others still waiting. That this triggering action would occur is pure speculation, as is the feasibility of self-promoting behavior by chromosomes during such a cell division. However, the effects do not seem inconceivable: a bacterium, after all, with its single chromosome, can do complex conditional things. Given such effects, the model would explain the much greater incidence of abnormal chromosome increase in eggs (and not sperm) with parental age. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Darwin’s emphasis on individual advantage has been formalized in terms of game theory. This formulation established conditions under which cooperation in biological systems based on reciprocity can evolve even without foresight by the participants. Although the Scopes trial has much to recommend it as an expression of the ultimate repudiation of an older World-view, I must let it pass. The trial had more to do with science and faith than technology as faith. To find an event that signaled the beginning of a technological theory, we must look to a slightly earlier and less dramatic confrontation. Not unmindful of its value as a pun, I choose what happened in the fall of 1910 as the critical symptom of the onset of Technopoly. From September through November of that year, the Interstate Commerce Commission held hearings on the application of Northeastern railroads for an increase in freight rates to compensate for the higher wages railroad workers had been awarded earlier in the year. The trade association, represented by Louis Brandeis, argued against the application by claiming that the railroads could increase their profits simply by operating more efficiently. To give substance to the argument, Brandeis brought forward witnesses—mostly engineers and industrial managers—who claimed that the railroads could both increase wages and lower their costs by using principles of scientific management. Although Frederick W. Taylor was not present at the hearings, his name was frequently invoked as the originator of scientific management, and experts assured the commission that the system developed by Taylor could solve everyone’s problem. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The commission ultimately ruled against the railroad’s application, mostly because it judged that the railroads were making enough money as things were, not because it believed in scientific management. However, many people did believe, and the hearings projected Taylor and his system onto the national scene. In the years that followed, attempts were made to apply the principles of the Taylor System in the armed forces, the legal profession, the home, the church, and education. Eventually, Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, contains the first explicit and formal outline of the assumptions of the thought-World of Technopoly. If not the only, these include the beliefs that the primary goal of human labour and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts. In fairness to Taylor (who did not invent the term “scientific management” and who used it reluctantly), it should be noted that his system was originally devised to apply only to industrial production. His intention was to make a science of the industrial workplace, which would not only increase profits but also result in higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions for labourers. In his system, which included “time and motion studies,” the judgment of individual workers was replaced by laws, rules, and principles of the “science” of their job. This did mean, of course, that workers would have to abandon any traditional rules of thumb they were accustomed to using; in fact, workers were relieved of any responsibility to think at all. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

The system would do their thinking for them. That is crucial, because it led to the idea that technique of any kind can do our thinking for us, which is among the basic principles of Technopoly. The assumptions that underlay the principles of scientific management did not spring, all at once, from the originality of Taylor’s mind. They were incubated and nurtured in the technocracies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And a fair argument can be made that the origins of Technopoly are to be found in the thought of the famous nineteenth-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, who founded both positivism and sociology in an effort to construct a science of society. Comte’s arguments for the unreality of anything that could not be seen and measured certainly laid the foundation for the future conception of human beings as objects. However, in a technocracy, such ideas exist only as by-products of the increased role of technology. Technocracies are concerned to invent machinery. That people’s lives are changed by machinery is taken as a matter of course, and that people must sometimes be treated as if they were machinery is considered a necessary and unfortunate condition of technological development. However, in technocracies, such a condition is not held to be a philosophy of culture. Technocracy does. In the work of Frederick Taylor we have, I believe, the first clear statement of the idea that society is best served when human beings are placed at the disposal of their techniques and technology, that human beings are, in a sense, worth less than their machinery. He and his followers described exactly what this means, and hailed their discovery as the beginnings of a brave New World. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Nanotechnology will be a bottom-up technology, building upward from the molecular scale. It will bring a revolution in human abilities like that brought by agriculture or power machinery. It can even be used to reverse many of the changes brought by agriculture and power machinery. However, we humans are huge creatures with no direct experience of the molecular World, and this can make nanotechnology hard to visualize, hence hard to understand. Scientists working with molecules will behave, but to understand that behaviour, they need more than heaps of numbers: they need pictures, movies, and interactive simulations, and so they are producing them at an ever-increasing pace. The U.S. National Science Foundation has launched a program in “scientific visualization,” in part to harness supercomputers to the problem of picturing the molecular World. Molecules are objects that exert forces on one another. If your hands were small enough, you could grab them, squeeze them, and bash them together. Understanding the molecular World is much like understanding any other physical World: it is a matter of understanding size, shape, strength, force, motion, and the like—a matter of understanding the differences between sand, water, and rock, or between steel and soap bubbles. Today’s visualization tools give a taste of what will become possible with tomorrow’s faster computers and better “virtual realities,” simulated environments that let you tour a World that “exists” only as a model inside the computer such as the Meta-Universe that Paris Hilton is known to be queen of. In this scenario of nanotechnology, events and technologies described as dating from 1900s or before are historically accurate; those with later dates are either projections or more scenario element. The descriptive details in the simulation are written to fit designs and calculations based on standard scientific data, so the science is not fiction. Some even believe that our souls will one day be based in a computer system, where we will live. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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MOVE-IN READY HOMESITE 70