As we discussed earlier, the U.S. government has a plan to eliminate the shadow economy, and that involves registering each citizen’s every purchase on a master computer. This emergent system is a multi-pronged plan of government monitoring the decisions and movements of its citizenry. The Universal Product Code (UPC) was an early and important part of the plan, and its swift and universal acceptance by the public is cause for concern. Some have taken notice of the numbered code below the bars and lines of the UPC code: They are the numbers 666. At the time the UPC code was being rushed into existence, Public Service announcements inundated with the virtues of Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT), which promised to lead us into the promised land of a “checkless, cashless society.” The ostensible virtue of this plan would be greater “convenience.” In the late 1970s, the Federal Reserve released a film on EFT which featured a businessman magically teleporting an astonished couple around bank vaults and check verification centers like Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past. The hapless couple, wide-eyed, exclaim, “Gee, Electronic Fund Transfer will really make my life convenient!” The EFT plan would ultimately lead to getting rid of credit/identification cards (too “inconvenient” and “risky”) in lieu of subcutaneous indentification number implants. There were a series of articles printed on the developing technology of laser tattooing, which has been used ever since in the 1970s in the tagging of cattle. This ties into the “Mark of the Beast” prophecy as foretold in the Book of Revelation, in which no one can buy or sell without the Mark of the Beast. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

There already exists a “hand-scan” machine, which has been implemented in a test with 3,000 army recruits at Ft. Benjamin, and is supposed to be established in the American market place at some point. The hand-scan machine will read the number tattooed into the consumer’s hand (seemingly invisible but readable to laser scanners), and will then feed the consumer’s bill into the legendary “SWIEFT” computer in Brussels, Belgium. The amount will be automatically debited from the consumer’s account. There is a demonic scenario that those lacking the hand tattoo as not being allowed to purchase food, or anything else. The internationalist flavor of the Belgian computer is allied with what is part is part of the “We Are the World” syndrome: a softening up of people’s minds by New Age charlatans and demonists’ manipulation of people’s altruistic emotions. The “World Instant of Cooperation,” “Hands Across America,” “Live Aid” and “World Peace Meditation” are among the recent major events of the “secular humanist” religion which is supposed to usher in worship of the false Messiah. Some people believe that Christ is here now and that he will speak to everyone “telepathically.” His presence guarantees there will be no third World War. Now that would be something. So many people speak about the last days and all the horror and hardship, but a lot of people forget that Jesus Christ is supposed to save us. Nonetheless, the Big Brother-style monetary and “criminal tracking” systems will usher in the final soul-killing regime of the anti-Christ, who will demand people’s souls in return for the privilege of surviving under the omniscient system of a demonic mafia. There is an experimental transponder system which is touted as relieving the overcrowding of prisons by making “criminals” prisoners of their own home. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Many people believe that the COVID-19 locks downs were the testing of the experimental transponder system. This technology has been further developed to track cars on all roads. More fine-tuning will make it possible for a master computer to track all people’s movements at all times. The concern is that the vast majority of the population will not have to be coerced into Satan worship, but may do so gladly. Agents of the Sinister Plot will perpetrate a kind of Orwellian double-think, and lead unknowing victims onto the Death Path. The most powerful of these agents are mixed up in the film, television and music industries, due to the enormous psychic influence they wield. There is a power that is given to certain people to do things that is not of God Almighty. Many people, for example, believed Michael Jackson was the second Christ. Some people believe that Satan is going to appear as a physical entity. Satan has chosen people, and it is believed that there are many of them on the planet. Satan will use his race of people to deceive the rest of the World. So many people are starting to embrace radical movements. The are number one today in practically every field in entertainment. So many people can relate to the Apartheid thing, the catalyst of which is hate. The deception is there, and you really have to look hard to see it. When the Messiah rises up in power, everybody will be able to relate to him. He will make peace and stop all the terrorism and solve everybody’s problems, and people are going to get sucked right into it. It is thought that the solution is not to become part of the one-World Mark of the Beast system and never, when the time comes, lay eyes on the False Messiah. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

In Belgium, there is a large Satanic following that has to stay underground because of an old witchcraft law still on the books. European souls were obviously not ripe for conversion, and when the bickering broke out, the experiment in Amsterdam only confirmed LaVey’s conviction that the grotto system did not work and that the church had gotten away from its philosophical essence—egotism. The cell concept was good, he decided, but its purpose was defeated when socialization became an end in itself—what LaVey terms the “Moose Lodge Syndrome.” The word “occult,” the High Priest points up, merely means “hidden,” or “secret,” which was the antithesis of what his grottoes had been practicing. LaVey decided to create a network of “true” occultists—“underground men,” in the Dostoyevskian sense of the term. The mind of Western man, as he saw it, was being anesthetized and controlled through the manipulation of the electronic media; in particular, television. It is the ultimate goal of the political powers that be, LaVey believes, to create through television the uniform society in which individualism is stifled and the masses are preprogrammed to march to whatever tune is played. For mainstream society, the rights teachings established the framework and the atmosphere for the modern university. A regime founded on the inclinations of its members is one where freedom, rightly understood, is primary. And the right to know immediately follows from the right to pursue one’s own preservation, and to be the judge of the means to that preservation. And the right to know, of those who desire to know and can know, as a special status. The universities flourish because they were perceived to serve society as it wants to be served, not as Socrates served it or Thales failed to serve it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Thus it is indeed true that there is a special kinship between the liberal university and liberal democracy, not because the professors are the running dogs of the “system,” but because this is the only regime where the powerful are persuaded that letting the professor do what they want is good. Without this “liberal” framework, the rights that professors claim for themselves are meaningless. The very notion of rights was first enunciated by the founders of liberalism, and its only home is in liberal society, in both theory and practice. All of this meant that the philosopher switched parties from the aristocratic to the democratic. The people, who were by definition uneducated and the seat of prejudice, could be educated, if the meaning of education were changed from experience of things beautiful to enlightened self-interest. The aristocrats, with their pride, their love of glory, their sense that they are born with the right to rule, now appear to be impediments to the rule of reason. The new philosophers dedicated themselves to reducing the aristocrats back into the commons, removing their psychological underpinnings and denigrating their tastes. This turn to the people can be understood as an appreciation of their decent desire for equality and willingness to contract not to do injustice in return for not suffering injustice, as opposed to the nobles’ rejection of equality and willingness to risk suffering injustice in order to be first. Or it can be understood as a hardheaded strategy adopted in order to make use of the people’s power. In this the modern philosophers imitated the ancient tyrants who found it easier to satisfy the people than the nobles who dared to rival them. No one has naturally privileged position other than the knowers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

This turn should not be interpreted as a movement in philosophy from Right to Left. The emergence of a Right and a Let was a consequence of this turn to political activism, away from political accommodationism. The Left is the vehicle of modern philosophy and the Right is the opposition, largely religious, to it. Center is only the old liberalism, when a schism occurs in the philosophical party at the end of the eighteenth century, and a more radical egalitarianism threatens the project of science from within. Left means the transformation of society by Enlightenment, a possibility either not envisaged, or rejected, by all older thinkers. In modernity it is possible for there to be a right-wing philosopher, id est, one who opposes the philosophic attempt to rationalize society; but in antiquity all philosophers had the same practical politics, inasmuch as none believed it feasible or salutary to change the relations between rich and poor in a fundamental or permanently progressive way. Democratic politics with a moral and intellectual foundation which commands the suffrage of the wise is strictly a modern invention, part and parcel of Enlightenment broadly conceived. The philosophers, however, had no illusions about democracy. As I mentioned, they knew they were substituting one kind of misunderstanding for another. The gentleman thought that philosophic equanimity in the face of death comes from gentlemanly or heroic courage exercised for the sake of the noble. The man of the people, on the other hand, takes the philosopher’s reasonableness about avoiding death to be a product of the passionate fear of death that motivates him. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

However, the philosopher knows that the rational, calculating, economic man seeks immortality just as irrationally as, or even more so than, the man who hopes for eternal fame or for another life, of which the only sign or guarantee is lodged in his hopes but for which he organizes his life. The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die. He does everything reasonable to put off the day of his death—providing for defense, peace, order, health and wealth—but actively suppresses the fact that the day must come. His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such. He gives way without reserve to his most powerful passion and the wishes it engenders. The hero and the pious man are at least taking account of eternity. Although their wishes may make them mythologize about it, the posture they assume is somehow more reasonable. The philosopher always thinks and acts as though he were immortal, while always being fully aware that he is mortal. He tries to stay alive as long as possible in order to philosophize, but will not change his way of life or his thought in order to do so. He is sensible in a way that heroes can never be; he looks at things under the guise of eternity, as the bourgeois can never do. Therefore he is at one with neither. Only the life devoted to knowing can unite these opposites. Socrates is the tragic hero whose mind is full of the things artisans think about. The great modern philosophers were as much philosophers as were the ancients. They were perfectly conscious of what separates then from all other men, and they knew that the gulf is unbridgeable. They knew that their connection with other men would always be mediated by unreason. They took a dare on the peculiar form of reasoning that comes from the natural inclinations. They seem to have been confident that they could benefit from the rational aspect and keep the irrational one from overwhelming them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The theoretical life remained as distinct from the practical life in their view as in the ancient one—theory looking to the universal and unchangeable while understanding its relation to the particular and changing; practice, totally absorbed by the latter, seeing the whole only in terms of it, as a theodicy or an anthropodicy, presented as God or History. Philosophy and philosophers always see through such hopes for individual salvation and are hence isolated. The modern philosophers know that theory is pursed for its own sake but took an interest in promoting the opinion that, to paraphrase Clausewitz, theory is just practice pursued by other means. The philosophers in their closets or their academics have entirely different ends than the rest of mankind. The vision of the harmony of theory and practice is only apparent. The moderns did not think, as did the ancients, that they would lose sight of the distinction between the two in identifying them. This is the most precise definition of their daring. What the ancients almost religiously kept apart, the moderns though they could join without risk. The issue is: Does a society based on reason necessarily make unreasonable demands on reason, or does it approach more closely to reason and submit to the ministrations of the reason and submit to the ministrations of the reasonable? The difficulty is illuminated by the popular contemporary misuse of a Greek word, praxis. It now means that there is no theory and no practice, that politics has been theocratized and philosophy politicized. It expresses the overcoming of the distinction between the eternal and the temporal. This is surely a result of Enlightenment, although it goes counter to the intentions of the Enlighteners. The question is whether it is a necessary or only accidental result. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

It has long been fashionable in some quarters to treat the thinkers of the Enlightenment as optimistic and superficial. This was a view promoted in the wake of the French Revolution by reactionaries and romantics, the counter-coup of the religions and the poetic, which has had considerable and enduring success. The modern philosophers are alleged to have believed in a new dawn in which men would become reasonable and everything would be for the best. They did not, according to this popular view, understand the ineradicable character of evil, nor did they know, or at least take sufficient account of, the power of the irrational of which our later, profounder age is so fully aware. This, however, is a skewed and self-serving interpretation. No one who looks carefully at the project these philosophers outlined can accuse them of being optimistic in the sense of expecting a simple triumph of reason or of underestimating the power of evil. It is not sufficiently taken into account how Machiavellian they were, in all senses of that word, and that they were actually Machiavelli’s disciples. It was not by forgetting about the evil in man that they hoped to better his lot but by giving way to it rather than opposing it. By lowering standards. The very qualified rationality that they expected from most men was founded self-consciously on encouraging the greatest of all irrationalities. Selfishness was to be the means to the common good, and they never thought that the moral or artistic splendor of past nations was going to be reproduced in the World they were planning. The combination of hardness and playfulness found in their writings should dispel all suspicion of unfounded hopefulness. If anything, what they plotted was “realistic.” And as to superficiality, everything turns on what the deepest human experience is. The philosophers, ancient and modern, agreed that the fulfillment of humanity is the use of reason. Man is the particular being that can know the universal, the temporal being that is aware of eternity, the part that can survey the whole, the effect that seeks the cause. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Whether it is wonder at the apprehension of being or just figuring things out, reason is the end for which the irrational things exist, and all that seems to be merely brutish in man is informed by his rational vocation—so thought the philosophers. Christopher Marlowe understood both philosophy and Machiavelli very well when he put in the latter’s mouth the phrase, “I hold there is no sin but ignorance.” There are other experiences, always the religious, and in modern times the poetic, which make competing claims. However, it is not immediately evident that their claims are superior to those of philosophy. The issue comes back again to the relative dignity of reason vs. revelation. The fact that popularized rationalism is, indeed, superficial is no argument against the philosophers. They knew it would be that way. (And, even in this, the democratic citizen, knowing and exercising his rights, is not the most contemptible of beings.) They were trying to make the central human good central to society, and Enlightenment was and remains the only plausible scheme for doing so. On the face of this, it seems absurd to me to say that Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Montesquieu and even Voltaire (who might be considered a mere popularizer of these others) were less deep than Jacques Maritain or T.S. Eliot—to mention two famous contemporaries from whose mouths I learned as a young man that the Enlightenment was shallow. Rousseau, who initiated the profound school of criticism of Enlightenment’s effects, nevertheless say that Bacon, Descartes and Newton were very great men, and he speaks of the “wise Locke.” He knew that these were his theoretical kin, although he disagreed with them in crucial respects. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The vulgarity of modern society, the object of so many complaints by intellectuals, is something the philosophers were willing to live with. After all, as Socrates points out, all societies look pretty much the same from the heights, be they Periclean Athens or Des Moines, Iowa. A peaceful, wealthy society where the people look up to science and have enough money to support it is worth more than splendid imperia where there are slaves and no philosophy. Locke appears superficial because he was not a snob. There is no way he could make a parade of the magnificence of what he saw. There is no doubt that these were serious men and that their contrivances have had a pubic effect unlike that of any philosophers or scientists before or since. They only comparable political events are the founding of what Machiavelli called new modes and orders by prophets—by Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, Romulus and (he implies) Jesus—which he called on the philosophers to imitate. Modernity is largely of these philosophers’ marking, and our self-awareness depends on understanding that they wanted to do and what they did do, grasping thus why our situation is different from all other situations. However contrary it may be to contemporary historical wisdom, the leading thread that runs through all the accidents of modern history is the philosophical doctrine of the Enlightenment. Modern regimes were conceived by reason and depend on the reasonableness of their members. And those regimes required the reason of natural science in every aspect of their activity, and the requirements of scientific advance largely determine their policy. Whether it is called liberal democracy or bourgeois society, whether the regime of the rights of man or that of acquisitiveness, whether technology is used in positive or negative sense, everyone knows that these terms describe the central aspects of our World. They are demonstrably the results of the thought of a small group of men with deep insight into the nature of things, who collaborated in an enterprise the success of which is almost beyond belief. It penetrated and informed every detail of life. These are not men to be dismissed—but they can be questioned. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The less affluent are not stupid. If they were, they could not survive. They know their tiny patch of Earth. They know the smell of an oncoming storm. They know when the dry season is due. However, what they know is a minute fraction of what they could know. And that delta—that difference—helps keep them poor. Even smart farmers in rich countries waste labor, energy, water, fertilizers and pesticides; cause serious ecological damage; and grow less product than is possible because of what they do not know in detail about their land. Help, however, is on the way, from twelve thousand miles in space. Until now farmers—including agribusiness companies—have usually applied the same treatment to an entire field—a one-size-fits-all strategy. However, we are approaching the point at which a handheld Global Positioning System receiver in a village—or one shared by several villages—will receive increasingly detailed information from currently orbiting satellites about the specific fertilizer, nutrients, water and other needs of every individual plot, if not plant. This will customize farming, allowing a grower to apply fertilizer, say, only where, when and in the least amount needed. It can also transform current water systems by improving irrigation and recycling methods and even make possible higher-value-added water for specialized uses. In fact, according to a National Research Council study, “improvements in irrigation technology alone can reduce the anticipated Worldwide demand for additional water resources by one half during the next 25 years.” Good for farmers and good for the environment, “precision agriculture” and customized purification methods bring de-massification to the field. And this points to a larger, indeed, transformatory change. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

We know that industrial-style agriculture leads to environmentally dangerous monocrops and monoculture. By contrast, what we see here is a first hint of potential movement in the opposite direction, not by a reversion to pre-industrial methods but by an advance far beyond them. As markets, at least in the rich World, call for increasingly customized foods and healthy products, we can expert to see new, varied methods and technologies that will ultimately draw on more varied crops from around the World—something that environmentalists should anticipate and welcome. Today precision agriculture and many of these other new methods are still nascent—and expensive but cost will plummet. Molecular nanotechnology will emerge step by step. Major milestones, such as the engineering of proteins and the positioning of individual atoms, have already been passed. To get sense of the likely pace of developments, we need to look at how various trends fit together. Computer-based molecular-modeling tools are spawning computer-aided design tools. These will grow more capable. The underlying technology base—computer hardware—has for decades been improving in price and performance on a steeply rising curve, which is generally expected to continue for many years. These advances are quite independent of progress in molecular engineering, but they make molecular engineering easier, speeding advances. Computer models of molecular machines are beginning to appear, and these will whet the appetites of researchers. Progress in engineering molecular machines, whether using proximal probes or self-assembly, will eventually achieve striking success; understanding of the long-term promise of molecular engineering will become more widespread. Some combination of these developments will eventually lead to a serious, public appraisal of what these technologies can achieve—and then the World of opinion, funding, and research fashion will change. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Before, advances will be steady but haphazard; afterward, advances will be driven with the energy that flows into major commercial, military, and medical research programs, because nanotechnology will be recognized as furthering major commercial, military, and medical goals. The timing of subsequent events depends largely on when this threshold of serious attention is reached. In making time estimates, people are prone to assume that a large change must take a long time. Most do, but not all. Pocket calculators had a dramatic effect on the slide-rule industry: they replaced it. The speed of this change caught the slide-rule moguls by surprise, but the pace of progress in electronics did not slow down merely to suit their expectations. One can argue that nanotechnology will be developed fast: many counties and companies will be competing to get there first. They will be driven onward both by the immense expected benefits—in many areas, including medicine and the environment—as well as by potential military applications. That is a powerful combination of motives, and competition is a powerful accelerator. A counterargument, though, suggest that development will be slow: anyone who has done anything of significance in the real World of technology—doing a scientific experiment, writing a computer program, brining a new product to market—knows that these goals take longer than expected. Indeed, Hofstadter’s Law states that projects take longer than expected, even when Hofstadter’s Law is taken into account. This principle is a good guide for the short term, and for a single project. The situation differs though, when many different approaches are being explored by many different groups over a period of years. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Most project may take longer than expected, but with many teams trying many approaches, one approach may prove faster than expected. The winner of a race is always faster than the average runner. The remarkable thing about molecular engineering is that is look like there are many different ways to get there and, at the moment, rapid progress is being made along every path—all at the same time. Also, technology development is like a race run over an unmapped course. When the first runners reach the top of a hill, they may see a shortcut. A trailing runner may decide to crash off into the bushes, and stumble across a bicycle and a paved road. The progress of technology is seldom predictable because progress often reveals new directions. So how can we estimate a date for the arrival of nanotechnology? Well, a lot of it is here. For instance, the BMW iX which can change exterior paint colors with the push of a button and the grill that can repair minor damages itself. However, it is safe to say that we should take the cautious approach: When anticipating benefits, assume it is still a little while in the future before seeing nanotechnology on a massive scale; when preparing for potential problems, assume it is right around the corner. The old folk saying applies: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Any dates assigned to “far off” and “right around the corner” can be no better than educated guesses—molecular behavior can be calculated, but not technology timetables of this sort. With those caveats, we would estimate that general-purpose molecular assemblers will likely be developed in the early decades of the twenty-first century, perhaps in the third and fourth. Many visionaries intimately familiar with the developments of silicon technology still forecast it would take between ten to twenty years more before vast molecular engineering becomes a reality. This is well beyond the planning horizon of most companies. However, recently, everything has begun to change. Based on the new developments, current progress suggests the revolution may happen within this decade, perhaps starting within five years. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The most chilling case of how deeply our language is absorbing the “machine as human” metaphor began on November 4, 1988, when the computers around the ARPANET network became sluggish, filled with extraneous data, and then clogged completely. The problem spread fairly quickly to six thousand computers across the United States of America and overseas. Th early hypothesis was that a software program had attached itself to other programs, a situation which is called (in another human-machine metaphor) a “virus.” As it happened, the intruder was a self-contained program explicitly designed to disable computers, which is called a “worm.” However, the technically incorrect term “virus” stuck, no doubt because of its familiarity and its human connections. As Raymond Gozzi, Jr., discovered in his analysis of how the mass media described the event, newspapers noted that the computers were “infected,” that the virus was “virulent” and “contagious,” that attempts were made to “quarantine” the infected computers, that attempts were also being made to “sterilize” the network, and that programmers hoped to develop a “vaccine” so that computers could be “inoculated” against new attacks. This kind of language is not merely picturesque anthropomorphism. It reflects a profound shift in perception about the relationship of computers to humans. If computers can become ill, then they can become healthy. Once healthy, they can think clearly and make decisions. The computer, it is implied, has will, has intentions, has reasons—which means that humans are relieved of responsibility for the computer’s decisions. Through a curious form of grammatical alchemy, the sentence “We use the computer to calculate” comes to mean “The computer calculates.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

If a computer calculates, then it may decide to miscalculate or not calculate at all. That is what bank tellers mean when they tell you that they cannot say how much money is in your checking account because “the computers are down.” The implication, of course, is that no person at the bank is responsible. Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame people? We may call this line of thinking an “agentic shift,” a term I borrow from Stanley Milgram to name the process whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. When this happens, we have relinquished control, which in the case of the computer can accomplish them or be imagined to accomplish them. Machines of various kinds will sometimes assume a human or, more likely superhuman aspect. Perhaps the most absurd case I know of is in a remark a student of mine once made on a sultry summer day in a room without air conditioning. On being told the thermometer read ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit, he replied “No wonder it’s so hot!” Nature was off the hook. If only thermometers would behave themselves, we could be comfortable. However, computers are fare more “human” than thermometers or almost any other kind of technology. Unlike most machines, computers do not work; they direct work. They are, as Norbert Wiener said, the technology of “command and control” and have little value without something to control. This is why they are of such importance to bureaucracies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Justin Harris is forty-eight years old and still married to his first wife. He works nearly sixty hours a week, in return for which he receives $162,000 a year. He also has come stock options and extra life insurance, but travels tourist of business class when he flies. He has been with his company for more than ten years and in his present job for nearly five. Just below the top rank in his firm, he dreams of becoming a Chief Executive Officer, but know his changes are remote. In the meantime, he wants parity with his company’s Chief Financial officer. The problem is that Tom is a specialist and his superiors think he does not know enough about general management. So he feels trapped in his specialty, and he reads enviously about colleagues who have left the profession behind and broken into the mainstream of corporate management at the highest levels—people like Jay Collins, who is vice chairman of Banking, Capital Markets, and Advisory at Citigroup, or Ms. Marie C. Pillai, a vice-present at General Mills, Inc., or, Ron Escue, senior vice president at Equicor, a joint venture of Equitable Life and Hospital Corporation of America. Justin is sharp, bright, clean-cut, and articulate, but he tends to lapse into a jaw-breaking jargon that leaves co-workers and superiors suitably puzzled and instantly brands him a “techie.” While Pillai, Escue, and Collins are real people who began as computer specialist and “migrated” outward from Information Systems, or “IS,” and upward into senior management, Justin is a fictional composite whose traits, according to a recent survey, match those of an increasingly restive and assertive group of executives known as “chief information officers.” In the United States of America today more than two hundred big corporations use the title “Chief Information Officer” or some close approximation of it. Not many years ago, there was no such thing. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Nomenclature varies, but in many firms the CIO title is a notch or two up from such related designations as “Manager of Data Processing,” “Vice-President of Information Systems,” or “Director, Management Information Systems.” CIOs are the men—only a few, so far, are women—whim ae responsible for spending the huge budgets corporations now allocate for computers, data processing, and information services. Because of this they find themselves at the hot center of the info-wars. Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and towards itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions. Although (or perhaps because) I came to “administration” late in my academic career, I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words “The computer shows…” or “The computer has determined…” It is Technopoly’s equivalent of the sentence “it is God’s will,” and the effect is roughly the same. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

You will not be surprised to know that I rarely resort to such humbug. However, on occasion, when pressed to the wall, I have yielded. No one has as yet replied, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Their defenselessness has something Kafkaesque about it. In The Trial, Josef K. is charged with a crime—of what nature, and by whom the charge is made, he does not know. The computer turns too many of us into Josef Ks. It often functions as a kind of impersonal accuser which does not reveal, and is not required to reveal, the sources of the judgments made against us. It is apparently sufficient that the computer has pronounced. Who has put the data in, for what purpose, for whose convenience, based on what assumptions are questions left unasked. This is the case not only in personal matters but in public decisions as well. Large institutions such as the Pentagon, the Internal Revenue Service, and multinational corporations tells us that their decisions are made on the basis of solutions generated by computers, and this is usually good enough to put our minds at ease or, rather, to sleep. In any case, it constrains us from making complaints or accusations. In part for this reason, the computer has strengthened bureaucratic institutions and suppressed the impulse toward significant social change. “The arrival of the Computer Revolution and the founding of the Computer Age have been announced many times,” Weizenbaum has written. “But if the triumph of a revolution is to be measures in terms of the social revision it entrained, then there has been no computer revolution. In automating the operation of political, social, and commercial enterprises, computers may or may not have made them more efficient but they have certainly diverted attention from the question whether or nor such enterprises are necessary or how they might be improved. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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