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The Fixed is Better than the Evolutionary

They appeared as though out of nowhere, or so it must have seemed to the countless pedestrians who came across the black-clad missionaries hawking their books and pamphlets on the streets of major U.S. cities. They were members of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. Their message was one of Apocalyptic prophecy infused with an odd theology of Christian/Satanic reconciliation. Of their origins, intentions and activities, there has been much dispute and allegation. One thing, however, remains certain: The Process has left an indelible watermark upon the post-psychedelic era, and have become a part of that era’s urban folklore. The Process is characterized as a cult that never quite got off the ground and which experienced a major theological and organizational schism from the mid-1970s. Some allude that their existence is a sort of modern Thuggee or Satanic underground, in which the Process is a central organizing factor. There used to be and still may be a family residence for The Process house in the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco, California. There was rumored to be a lot of dark goings-on within. The Process was allegedly part of a vast cryptocracy of serial murders who supposedly had links with the police and judicial establishment, thereby evading responsibility for their cultic crimes. However, The Process nor its founders were every personally accused of these crimes—but there is an overall impression that they are guilty nonetheless. The Process is known for having “chant sessions,” “midnight meditations,” and other activities. They at one time and still may have The Process coffee house in Chicago. The Process discusses how soulless technology and bureaucracy has imposed on our lives. Ecology had not yet become the catch slogan yuppie materialists, yahoo politicians and quarterly stockholder reports. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

Much like now, people felt constricted under the thumb of a debased age in which advertising slogans supplanted poetry, contractual agreements replaced love, and televangelism masqueraded as spirituality. Unlike the alien and decadent garb of the Guru cults from the East, The Process had a distinctly Westerly, neo-Gothic exterior: Neatly-trimmed shoulder-length hair and equally neat beards, all set-off by tailored magician’s capes with matching black uniforms. My earliest memories of The Process are associated with bitter subzero nights, accompanied by a group of friends as we hurried down deserted back streets on Chicago’s North side, a section of the city where some of the last remaining cobblestones had not yet been covered with asphalt. The glitter of stars could still be seen in the night sky as the mercury vapor lamps had not yet been installed there. Process headquarters was a four-story Victorian house that also doubled as living quarters for the majordomos of the Chicago chapter. We entered that bitter chill Winter night past the yellow exterior porch lights and encountered several young men in black uniforms with black caps who stood talking to a small group of people in conventional clothes. A tall thin man with a neat fringe of beard greeted us cheerfully with the salutation, “As It Is.” I rejoindered, “So Be It.” I asked him about the coffee house some other Processians told me about, and he directed us toward a back room, where we would find a staircase leading to the coffee house in the basement. Were descended the narrow, curving stairs to a room in the basement where some music emanated from. “As It Is,” hailed an attractive, petite woman with an upper-class British accent. “So Be It,” we replied. She seated us at a table and gave us menus. We ordered tea and listened to the recorded folk music of John Renbourn and Pentangle. It seemed the perfect accompaniment to the setting. The coffee house was low ceilinged, with curtains hanging on the ground-level windows. Second-hand tables, chairs and benches comprised the sparse décor. A candle burned in the center of each table. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Several days earlier I had run into a pretty young woman with an English accent dressed in Process garb on Wabash Avenue Downtown Chicago. She handed me a leaflet listing the group’s activities and invited us to the group’s coffee house. Later that day I stopped by at a psychedelic head shop where I was hawking my poster art. One of the workers was familiar with the Process and showed me the Fear issue. The colors and graphics were very eye-catching and impressively put-together, and I pored over its contents. At the coffee house we experienced no hard-sell proselytizing, in fact we were all a bit disappointed until it was announced that the “Sabbath assembly” was to begin in several minutes on the top floor of the house. Anticipating the adventure of it, we climbed the narrow stairs to the unfinished attic of the building, the roof-beams and wooden rafters rising sharply to the roof’s steep peak. A could dozen people were already seated in a semi-circle on floor cushions. At the center of the circle was a low round table upon which a black and red altar cloth hung down to the floor in neat folds. In front of the windows hung a back curtain with a red Goat of Mendes in its center. To its left was a large gong. To one side of the altar was a steel container of water, to the other side a steel container with a burning pyre. Standing in front of the goat’s head symbol was a man wearing a tabard, a ceremonial device such as a Catholic or Anglican priest might wear. In the center of the tabard was a symbol of a sort of omega confirmation. We were to learn later that this man was called the Sacrifist. At the entrance of the room stood another man dressed in an ankle-length black robe underneath a tabard. On the center of it was the Process Symbol of Four P’s, which formed a swastika-like device. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

This celebrant was known as the Evangelist. The Sacrifist carried a red-leather bound book at his side and the Evangelist a similar one of black. By the early 1970s, the decline of the counterculture and the use of hallucinogens led to a waning popular interest in the occult. Spiritual realization and wicca groups lost membership as people once more became fixated on material goals. The “me” generation, forerunners of the yuppies, came into prominence. For a while, groups like the Church of Satan, which exhorted egotism and a pragmatic, selfish brand of ritual magic, thrived, but by 1975, interest in all magical groups dropped as the economy took an upturn and people got what they wanted through more practical means. Around the Zarathustrian doctrine, which it resists it, the question grows and grows, till the West Iranian religion develops the myth of Zurvan, Time Unbonded in reply. We only know it from a later version, but its original content is unmistakable. Zurvan arises out of the primal sleep, as it seems, and sacrifices murmuring (the song of the generation of the gods, of which we know through Herodotus, is presumably meant), for a thousand years, to obtain the son, Ahura Mazdah, who would create Heaven and Earth. It would be beside the point to ask to whom he is sacrificing: similarly without recipient, the primeval Indian gods also sacrifice (or sacrifice themselves) that out of them may arise the World. After all the vain sacrifice, Zurvan is overcome by doubt: “What avails sacrifice? Perhaps being is not?” Then arose two in the womb: the Wise Lord from the sacrifice, from the doubt the Wicked Spirit. But Zurvan is obviously “fluid” deity. Evil arises in him through his Fall. He does not choose, he doubts. Doubt is unchoice, indecision. Out of it arises evil. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

We must note that the Wicked Spirit, Angra Mainyu, the well-known Ahriman, is here not the son of Ahura Mazdah, but his brother; Ahura Mazdah, Ormuzd, is, however, no longer a primal god, he enters at the beginning into being, and now precisely as the Only-good One. Thus here too the twins stand in radical antithesis to one another, but here, in contradistinction to the twin-myth of the Avesta, the antithesis of the one to the other is not explicitly stated, nor is the coming World-process between the two of them announced; we hear nothing of good and evil and their mutual relationship; we merely watch the appearance of the protagonists in the nascent cosmic conflict. Yet by what is recounted of the primal god himself we are led not less deep than there, and perhaps deeper, into the sphere of the question what good and evil are. There is was deception and truth, deception in sense of being deceptive, truth in the sense of being true, which confronted one another; here doubt of being is the evil, the good is “knowledge,” belief in being, against which Zurvan transgresses. Here it is ultimately a question of fidelity and infidelity to being. However, some within the Zurvan community could not tolerate the notion of a divine Fall. Of these, some supposed that the time-god had gone astray as to being at a particular moment, but that from the beginning something bad, either bad thinking or a corruption of the essence, had been admixed into him, and from this evil made its start; these are evidently reverting to the Avestic doctrine, though a modified form. However, others said Zurvan brought forth both, in order to mingle good with evil, from which it is clearly inferred that only through the gradated abundance of such inter-mixtures can the full manifoldness of things arise; here the fundament of the Iranian tradition is abandoned: good and evil are no longer irreconcilable principia, but utilizable qualities, before whose utilisability the question of an absolute worth and worthlessness vanishes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

The fundament of another tradition is adopted, when in the opinion of a third of these sects Ahriman is an outcast angel who was cursed for his disobedience. About that, so end the report in this connection, much can be said. However, there is a fragment of the Avesta which runs: “All good thoughts, all good words, all good deed, I do consciously. All evil thoughts, all evil words, all evil deeds, I do unconsciously.” From here a path leads to the psychological problem of evil, as it first evolved in early Christendom. The character of the experience Socrates represents is important because it is the soul of the university. The rich drama of Socrates, the early philosopher, who came to the attention of the city because he was a philosopher, presents all the questions of freedom of thought from all the angles, without any kind of doctrinairism, and hence provides us with a fresh view of the importance and also of the difficulties of such freedom. From the Republic, which really takes seriously only the demands of knowledge, to the Laws, which gives full attention to the competing demands of political life, Socrates as perfecter and as dissolver of the community reveals all the facets of his activity. The difficulty he and the other philosophers contend with from the law is not to be confounded with society’s prejudice against outsiders, dissenters or nonconformists but is, at least apparently, a result of an essential opposition between the two highest claims of a man’s loyalty—his community and his reason. That opposition can only be overcome if the state is rational, as in Hegel, of if reason is abandoned, as in Nietzsche. However that may be, we have a record, unparalleled in its detail and depth, of this first appearance of philosophy, and we can apprehend the natural, or at least primitive, responses to it, prior to philosophy’s effect on the World. This provides a view of the beginning at a time when we may be witnessing the end, partly because we no longer know that beginning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

The poetry written about Socrates by Plato and Xenophon is already in the defensive mode, a rehabilitation of the condemned man. The first statement of the city’s reaction to Socrates is made by Aristophanes. What luck Socrates had! Not only did he command the pens of Plato and Xenophon; he also was the central figure of the greatest work of the consummate genius of the comedy. The Clouds often arouses indignation in those who care little for Socrates but think serious matters are not laughing matters. Socrates’ fate and Aristophanes’ possible contribution to it trouble them. However, Socrates was probably not of their persuasion. He laughed and joked on the day of his death. He and Aristophanes share a certain levity. Aristophanes does present a ridiculous Socrates and takes the point of view of the vulgar, to whom Socrates does look ridiculous. However, Aristophanes also ridicules the vulgar. Reading him we, indeed, laugh at the wise as do the unwise, but we also laugh at the unwise as to the wise. Above all we laugh at the anger of the unwise against the wise. The Socrates of The Clouds is a man who despises what other people care about and cares about what they despise. He spends his life investigating nature, worrying about gnats and stars, denying the existence of the gods because they are not to be found in nature. His maps have only a tiny dot where Athens looms large to its citizens. Law and convention (nomos) mean nothing to him, because they are not natural but manmade. His companions are pale-faced young men totally devoid of common sense. In this academy, which has established itself in the free atmosphere of Athens, these eccentrics carry on their activities without appearing to be other than harmless cranks. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

They are poor, without any fixed means of support. Socrates receives gifts and apparently countenances minor thefts, literally to keep body and soul together. There is no morality, but they are not vicious people, because their only concern is their studies. Socrates is utterly indifferent to honor or luxury. Aristophanes recaptures for us the absurdity of a grown man who spends his time thinking about gnats’ anuses. We have been too persuaded of the utility of science to perceive how far the scientist’s perspective is from that of a gentleman, how shocking and petty the scientist’s interests appear to a man who is concerned with war and peace, justice, freedom and glory. Aside from the occasional surfacing of an adolescent outlaw group, such as the Black Magic Cult in Northglenn, or a similar cult of high schoolers in Lake County, Illinois, in 1972, and a flurry of rumors of Satanic cattle sacrifices in the Midwest, all was quiet on the Satanic front. As we stood in front of the goat’s head altar at The Process house, slowly our eyes adjusted to the light of white and red candles. After a moment of hushed silence, the two began to chant: “Contact reaching to the stars through the spirit of Christ; knowledge of the Universe, He is the way of life.” Sacrifist: “The Final Reckoning.” Evangelist: “An End a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “Christ and Satan joined!” Evangelist: “The Lamb and the Goat.” Together: “Pure Love, descended from the Pinnacle of Heaven, united with Pure Hatred raised from the Depths of Hell.” Sacrifist: “Repayment of the Debt.” Evangelist: “Fulfillment of the Promise.” Sacrifist: “All Conflicts are Resolved.” Evangelists: “An End and a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “The End of Hell and the Beginning of Heaven.” Evangelists: “The End of Darkness and the Beginning of Light.” Sacrifist: “The End of War and the Beginning of Peace.” Evangelist: “The Hatred and the Beginning of Love.” Sacrifist: “The End is Now. The Beginning is yet to come.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

After the pronouncements, we read a series of positive and up-tempo hymns from books that had been passed around. Another Processian got up and read Process material concerning the Gods Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan and Christ, and their respective roles in the Universe. Another Processian strummed a guitar in accompaniment. At the conclusion, the Sacrifist rung the gong. The Evangelist began reciting and was followed by more singing. The gong sounded again and the Sacrifist spoke: “All those Initiates who wish to rededicate their lives on the service of Christ and the three great Gods of the Universe, come forward and kneel before me.” A woman got up from the circle and knelt before the Sacrifist, and the Sacrifist continued: “In the name of the Lord Christ, and in the name of the Lord Satan, I accept you as an initiate of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. As It Is.” The kneeling initiate countered: “So Be It.” My friends and I discussed our experience at Process headquarters could only agree that it was pleasant, but we had not yet drawn any hard conclusions. In the following months I noticed the presence of biker-types at the coffee hose, who seem to be employed as bodyguards for the headquarters. Little of a theological nature was discussed at the coffee house, and occasionally a Processian would play guitar and sing Process-inspired songs, much of it beautifully melodic. In the Spring the Victorian headquarters on Demming Place was set aside as living quarters for full-time members and was thereafter closed to the general public. Public activities were moved to a newly acquired lost above a store in Chicago’s Old Town District on North Wall Street. Old Town, like Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury, was the countercultural headquarters. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Focusing on the nation, problems arise when a politician appears to have little chance of reflection. The problem becomes even more acute with a lame duck. From the point of view of the public, a Politian facing an end of career can be dangerous because of the increased temptation to seek private goals rather than maintain a pattern of cooperation with the electorate for the attainment of mutually rewarding goals. Since the turnover of political leaders is a necessary part of democratic control, the problem must be solved another way. Here, political parties are useful because they can be held accountable by the public for the acts of their elected members. The voters and the parties are in a long-term relationship, and this gives the parties an incentive to select candidates who will not abuse their responsibilities. And if a leader is discovered giving in to temptation, the voters can take this into account in evaluating the other candidates of the same party in the next election. The punishment of the Republican party by the electorate after Watergate shows that parties are indeed held responsible for the defections of their leaders, which is something many politicians should keep in mind. In general, the institutional solutions to turnover need to involve accountability beyond the individual’s term in a particular position. In an organizational or business setting, the best way to secure this accountability would be to keep track not only of the person’s success in that position, but also the state in which the position was left to the next occupant. For example, if an executive sought a quick gain by double-crossing a colleague just before transferring to a new plant, this fact should be taken into account in evaluating that executive’s performance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Cooperation Theory has implications for individual choice as well as for the design of institutions. Speaking personally, one of my biggest surprises in working on this project has been the value of provocability. I came to this project believing one should be slow to anger. The results of the Prisoner’s Dilemma indicates that it is actually better to respond quickly to a provocation. It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay. And the more strongly this patterned is established, the harder it will be to break it. The implication is that it is better to be provocable sooner, rather than later. The success of TIT FOR TAT certainly illustrates this point. By responding right away, it gives the quickest possible feedback that a defection will not pay. The response to potential violations of arms control agreements illustrates this point. Russian has occasionally taken step which appear to be designed to probe the limits of its agreement with the United States of America. The sooner the United States of America detects and responds to these Russian probes, the better. Waiting for them to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble. The speed of response depends upon the time required to detect a given choice by the other players. The shorter this time is, the more stable cooperation can be. A rapid detection means that the next move in the interaction comes quickly, thereby increasing the shadow of the future as represented by the parameter. For this reason, the only arms control agreement which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate to such an extent that the victim’s provocability is no longer enough to prevent the challenger from having an incentive to defect. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

The results concerning the value of provocability are complemented by the theoretical analysis of what it takes for a nice rule to be collectively stable. In order for a nice rule to be able to resist invasion, the rule must be provocable by the very first direction of the other individual. Theoretically, the response need not come immediately, and it need not occur with certainty, but it must have a real probability of coming eventually. The important thing is that the other individual does not wind up having an incentive to defect. Of course, provocability has a danger. The danger is that is the other individual does try a defection, retaliation will lead to further retaliation, and the conflict will degenerate into an unending strong of mutual defections. This can certainly be a serious problem. For example, in many cultures blood feuds between clans can continue to undimished for years and even generations (Black-Michaud 1975). This continuation of the conflict is due to the echo effect: each side responds to the other’s last defection with a new defection of its own. One solution is to find a central authority to police both sides, imposing a rule of law. Unfortunately this solution is often not available. And even when there is a rule of law, the costs of using the courts for routine affairs such as enforcement of business contracts can be prohibitive. When the use of a central authority is impossible or too expensive, the best method is to rely on a strategy which will be self-policing. Such a self-policing strategy must be provocable, but the response must not be too great lest it lead to an unending echo of defections. For example, suppose that Russia (then the Soviet Union) in conjunction with the other Warsaw Pact countries undertakes a partial mobilization of its armed forces throughout Eastern Europe. This mobilization would give the Soviets an added advantage if conventional war were to break out. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

A useful response from NATO would be to increase its own state of alter. If additional troops moved from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe, NATO should respond with additional troops moved from the United States of America. It is also recommended that this type of response be automatic so that it can be made clear t the Soviets that such increases in NATO readiness are standard procedure and take place only after Soviet mobilizations. It is also recommended that the response be limited, say one American division moved for every three Soviet divisions mobilized. In effect, this would help limit the echo effects. Limited provocability is a useful feature of a strategy designed to achieve stable cooperation. While TIT FOR TAT responds with an amount of defection exactly equal to the other’s defection, in many circumstances the stability of cooperation would be enhanced if the response were slightly less than the provocation. Otherwise, it would be all too easy to get into a rut of unending responses to each other’s last defection. There are several ways for an echo effect to be controlled. One way is for the individual who first defected to realize that the other’s response need not call for yet another defection. For example, the Soviets might realize that NATO’s mobilization was merely a response to their own, and hence need not be regarded as threatening. Of course the Soviets might not see it that way, even if the NATO response was automatic and predictable. Therefore, it is also useful if the NATO response is somewhat less than proportional to the Soviet mobilization. Then if the Soviet response is also somewhat less than the NATO mobilization, the escalation of preparations can become stabilized, and then possibly reversed for a return to normal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

Fortunately, friendship is not necessary for cooperation to evolve. As the trench warfare example demonstrates, even antagonists can learn to develop cooperation based upon reciprocity. The requirement for the relationship is not friendship, but durability. The good thing about international relations is that the major powers can be quite certain they will be interacting with each other year after year. Their relationship may not always be mutually rewarding, but it is durable. Therefore, next year’s interactions should cast a large shadow on this year’s choices, and cooperation has a good chance to evolve eventually. Foresight is not necessary either, as the biological examples demonstrate. However, without foresight, the evolutionary process can take a very long time. Fortunately, humans do have foresight and use it to speed up what would otherwise be a blind process of evolution. The individuals who were able to use the result of the first round in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, including the value of reciprocity, to anticipate what would work well on the second round end up gaining foresight. Foresight pays off with substantially more rewarding results. The result for the second round of negotiations is typically more sophisticated than the first. Cooperation based upon reciprocity was firmly established. The various attempts at exploitation of the unsophisticated entries of the first round all failed in the environment of the second round, demonstrating that the reciprocity of strategies like TIT FOR TAT is extraordinarily robust. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that people can use the surrogate experience of these rules to learn the value of reciprocity for their own Prisoner’s Dilemma interactions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Once the word gets out that reciprocity works, it becomes the thing to do. If you expect others to reciprocate your defections as well as your cooperations, you will be wise to avoid trying to start any trouble. Moreover, you will be wise to defect after someone else defects, showing that you will not be exploited. Thus you too will be wise to use a strategy based upon reciprocity. So will everyone else. In this manner the appreciation of the value of reciprocity becomes self-reinforcing. Once it gets going, it gets stronger and stronger. This is the essence of the ratchet effect which was established in a past reports: once cooperation based upon reciprocity gets established in a population, it cannot be overcome even by a cluster of individuals who try to exploit the others. The establishment of stable cooperation can take a long time if it is based upon blind forces of evolution, or it can happen rather quickly if its operations can be appreciated by intelligent individuals. The empirical and theoretical results of these reports might help people see more clearly the opportunities for reciprocity latent in their World. Knowing the concepts that accounted for the results of the two rounds of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and knowing the reasons and conditions for the success of reciprocity, might provide some additional foresight. We might come to see more clearly that there is a lesson in the fact that TIT FOR TAT succeeds without doing better than anyone with whom it interacts. It succeeds by eliciting cooperation from others, not by defeating them. We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. However, the World is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Today, the most important problems facing humanity are in the arena of international relations, where independent, egoistic nations face each other in a state of near anarchy. Many of these problems take the form of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Examples can include arms races, nuclear proliferation, crisis bargaining, and military escalation. Of course, a realistic understanding of these problems would have to take into account many factors not incorporated into the simple Prisoner’s Dilemma formulation, such as ideology, bureaucratic policies, commitments, coalitions, mediation, and leadership. Nevertheless, we can use all the insights we can get. From the ancient Greeks to contemporary scholarship all political theory addresses one fundamental question: How can the human race, whether for selfish or more cosmopolitan ends, understand and control the seemingly blind forces of history? In the contemporary World this question has become especially acute because of the development of nuclear weapons. The advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: do not be envious, do not be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and do not be too clever. Likewise, techniques we have discussed for promoting cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma might also be useful in promoting cooperation in international politics. The core of the problem of how to achieve rewards from cooperation is that trial and error in learning is slow and painful. The conditions may all be favorable for long-run developments, but we may not have the time to wait for blind processes to move us slowly toward mutually rewarding strategies based upon reciprocity. Perhaps if we understand the process better, we can use our foresight to speed up the evolution of cooperation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Though HAGOTH, with program that could detect if someone over the phone was being dishonest, has virtually disappeared, its idea survives—for example, in the machines called “lie detectors.” In American these are taken very seriously by police officers, lawyers, and corporate executive who ever more frequently insist that their employees be subjected to lie-detector tests. As for intelligence tests, they not only survive but flourish, and have been supplemented by vocational aptitude tests, creativity test, mental-health tests, tests that base attractions on pleasures of the flesh, and even material compatibility tests. One would think that two people who have lived together for a number of years would have noticed for themselves whether they get along or not. However, in Technopoly, these subjective forms of knowledge have no official status, and must be confirmed by tests administered by experts. Individual judgments, after all, are notoriously unreliable, filled with ambiguity and plagued by doubt. Tests and machines are not. Philosophers may agonize over the questions “What is truth?” “What is intelligence?” “What is the good life?” However, in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and the provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with. They tell us that when eight green lights go on someone is speaking the truth. That is all there is to it. They tell us that a score of 136 means more brains than a score of 104. This is Technopoly’s version of magic. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place. And by doing so, evokes in us a sense of wonder rather than understanding. In Technopoly, we are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Which means we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies. In considering here the ideological biases of medical technology, let us begin with a few relevant facts. Although the U.S.A. and England have equivalent life-expectancy rates, American doctors perform six times ad many cardiac bypass operations per capita as English doctors do. American doctors perform more diagnostic tests than doctors do in France, Germany, or England. An American woman has two to three times the chance of having a hysterectomy as her counterpart in Europe; 60 percent of the hysterectomies performed in America are done on women under the age of forty-four. American doctors do more prostate surgery per capita than do doctors anywhere in Europe, and the United States of America leads the industrialized World in the rate of cesarean-section operations—50 to 200 percent higher than in most other countries. When American doctors decide to forgo surgery in favor of treatment by drugs, they give higher dosages than doctors elsewhere. They prescribe about twice as many antibiotics as do doctors in the United Kingdom and commonly prescribe antibiotics when bacteria are likely to be present, whereas European doctors tend to prescribe antibiotics only if they know that the infection is caused by bacteria and is also serious. American doctors use far more X-rays per patient than doctors in other countries. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

In one review of the extent of X-ray use, a radiologist discovered cases in which fifty t one hundred X-rays had been taken of a single patient when five would have been sufficient. Other surveys have shown that, for almost one-third of the patients, the X-ray could have been omitted or deferred on the basis of available clinical data. We have been able to use basic principles to design and build a simple molecule that folds up the way we want it to. This is really the first real example of a design protein structure, designed from scratch, not by taking an already existing structure and tinkering with it. Although scientists do the work, the work itself is really a form of engineering. The process makes this clear: After you have made it, the next step is to find out whether our protein did what you expected it to do. Did it fold? Did it pass ions across bilayers [such as cell membranes]? Does it have a catalytic function [speeding specific chemical reactions]? And that is tested using the appropriate experiment. More than likely, it will not have done what you wanted it to do, so you have to find out why. Now, a good design has in it a contingency plan for failure and helps you learn from mistakes. Rather than designing a structure that would take a year or more to analyze, you design it so that it can be assayed for given function or structure in a matter of days. Many groups are pursuing design today, including academic researchers like Jane and Dave Richardson at the Duke University, Bruce Erickson at the University of North Carolina, and Tom Blundell, Robin Leatherbarrow, and Alan Fersht in Britain. The successes have stated to roll in. Japan, however, is unique in having an organization devoted exclusively to such projects: the Protein Engineering Research Institute (PERI) in Osaka. In 1990, PERI announced the successful designs and construction of de novo protein several times larger than any built before. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Extra-intelligence can squeeze untold billions of fat and waste out of the economy. It potentially represents an enormous leap forward—the substitution of brainpower and imagination not merely for capital, energy, and resources, but for brutalizing labor as well. However, whether extra-intelligence produces a “better” way of life will depend partly on the social and political intelligence that guides its overall development. The more automated and extra-intelligent our networks become, the more human decision-making is hidden from view, and the more dependent we all become on preprogrammed events based on concepts and assumptions that few understand and that are sometimes not even willingly disclosed. Before long the power of computers will leap forward because f parallel processing, artificial intelligence, and other studding innovations. Speech recognition and automatic translation will, no doubt, come into wide use, along with high-definition visual displays ad concert-class sounds. The same networks now routinely carry voice, data, imagines, cable, Internet, and other information in other forms. All this raises profound philosophical questions. Some see in all this the coming monopolization of knowledge. The moment of truth comes when the matter of the ownership and control of the new information banks…[strikes] with a vengeance. This is the specter of a global private monopoly of information. That fear is now far too simple. The issue is not whether one giant global private monopoly will control all information—which seems highly unlikely—but who will control the endless conversations and reconversions of it made possible by extra-intelligence, as data, information, and knowledge flow through the nervous system of the super-symbolic economy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

Baffling new issues about the uses and misuses of knowledge will arise to confront business and society as a whole. They will no longer simply reflect Bacon’s truth that knowledge is power, but the higher level of truth that, in the super-symbolic economy, it is knowledge about knowledge that counts most. I.T. and telecommunications, however, are not the only advanced technologies that can contribute to a real war on poverty. India has one of the most successful operational space programs running in the developing World, with capabilities to design, develop, fabricate and launch its own communications and remote sensing satellite. It is also planning to send a scientific payload to go around the moon using its own rocket. Once more, this may seem irrelevant to the less affluent—your land is subject to sudden flooding or you are among the thousands saved from drowning with the help of satellite-based disaster-warning systems and remote sensing technologies. Or if you are among the 100,000 patients of the Regional Cancer Center in Thiruvananthapuram who once had to travel extremely long distance, often more than one, and at high cost, for treatment or follow-up care. The RCC has now set up six peripheral centers. All six are teleclinics linked to the main facility by the Internet—and the number of necessary follow-up visits has fallen by more than 30 percent. The Indian Space Research Organization has also created satellite links between big, multi-specialty hospitals and eight remote healthy centers to allow the exchange of patients’ records, imagines and data from medical instruments, along with live video and audio contact. All this means that doctors in central locations can help guide medics in the remote rural villages. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

In biotechnology, India could generate $5 billion and up to a million new jobs in the coming five years. India’s Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority has agreed to allow insurance firms to put money into biotech, and the government has made it easier for foreign venture capitalist to invest. It is in this sector, as we will see shortly, that some of the most important tools for the reduction of poverty may well be found. And not just in India. Many of the advances we see in India are still either experimental or limited. They are patchy and not yet systemically integrated. However, as more pieces of the knowledge-based wealth system are laid in place and begin to interact and reinforce one another, their payoffs will increase combinatorially, if not exponentially, as happened in the past when different components of the industrial wealth system—social, institutional, political and culture—came together. India faces many of the same social, political and cultural challenges we find in China—corruption, infirmary, massive environmental problems, the need for institutional reinvention and generational conflict, to name a few. Externally, while China worries about Taiwan, India worries about a shaky, nuclear-armed Pakistan and the ever-bloody struggle against Muslim secessionists in Kashmir. What is more, and unlike China ate present, India faces caste conflict and intermittent murderous battles between Hindu and Muslim fanatics. Despite all this, India knows it cannot delay a fresh assault on poverty—and it cannot win that attack with smokestacks alone. It also cannot win so long as most of its population remains doomed to a low-productivity peasant existence, no matter how much small-scale “appropriate technology” is introduced. Neither a Second Wave strategy nor a First Wave strategy is enough. “Believest thou that there is no God? I say unto you, Nay, thou knowest that there is a God, but thou lovest that lucre more than Him,” reports Alma 11.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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Find a Way to Have Your Own Mind

Everyone is God and the Devil, for together Satan and Christ inhabit everyone. Like Christ and Satan, many people are both metaphorically crucified and sent to hell. Anything that is not created out of the depths of loneliness is not a creation, only a production, and has no soul to sustain it. Many people who claim to be waiting for the second coming are not genuine, often they are just waiting for a chance to get on the second crucifixion. A few of them are already bargaining for the television rights lest they get caught with their pants down by an unknown contender making a surprise bid for the number one spot. What they fail to realize is that the twenty first-century savior is going to outfox them all by, yes, he is going t crucify himself, thus getting a jump on his competitors. Not only that, but his loyal followers will be standing there beside him, not just gawking or taking notes, but yes, sports lovers, actually crucifying themselves right along with their leader. And they stand, eyes wild. It is hard to see because the light is getting so bright, but it seems that each one of these men and women is armed with a golden hammer and a handful of plutonium spikes. They are standing in a circle around a tower, on the breast of a hill in the midst of a slum, and they are actually nailing themselves to the ground, fellow Americans, and some of them are nailing each other to the ground—let us have a slow motion replay of that last bit of actions—wonderful—and now it appears that these people are actually driving these spikes in rhythm and singing some sort of spiritual or worksong!—word just in from our computers indicates that the language they are singing in has never been spoke on Earth before—perhaps that is why they are singing it instead—and ladies and gentlemen, the modern messiah has just announced that as soon as he is sure these spikes have been driven deeply enough, he and his disciples will rise, that is right, folks, they are going to rise into the Heavens, and since they are so, well, attached to the Earth, they are going to drag it along behind them! #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Wow! Sounds like they have got their work cut out for them, eh? Lucky you can just sit in your armchair and wait for it to come on tv! They seem to be nearly ready for the Big Drag now…hard to tell what is actually happening from down here, though, what with all the blood and thunder and fire and screaming—maybe I will just step up the hill here a bit, and get a closer look…might be a little risky, but it is my job to get the truth, before it gets me. The Enlightenment thinkers understood themselves to be making a most daring innovation: according to Machiavelli, modern philosophy was to be politically effective, while Plato and Aristotle, and all the ancients who followed them since Socrates founded political philosophy were politically ineffective. Machiavelli follows Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, who ridicules Socrates for being unable to defend himself, to avert insults or slaps in the face. The vulnerability of the philosopher would seem to be the starting place for the new reflection and the renewal of philosophy. This may seem trivial to many today, but the entire philosophic tradition, ancient and modern, took the relation of mind to society as the most fruitful beginning point for understanding the human situation. Certainly the first philosophy of which we have a full account begins with the trial and execution of the philosopher. And Machiavelli, the inspirer of the great philosophical systems of modernity, starts from this vulnerability of reason within the political order and makes it his business to correct it. Some might say it was not concern with the fate of philosophers but the wish, In Bacon’s phrase, to ease man’s estate that motivated the modern thinkers. This, however, comes down to the same thing—a criticism of the ancient philosophers for their impotence, and a reflection on the relation of knowledge to civil society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The ancients were always praising virtue, but men were not made more virtuous as a result. Everywhere there were rotten regimes, tyrants persecuting peoples, rich exploiting the less affluent, computer hackers robbing people of their hard earn money through various means, nobles keeping down citizens men insufficiently protected by laws or arms, et cetera. Wise men saw clearly what was wrong in all this, but their wisdom did not generate power to do anything about it. The new philosophy claimed to have discovered the means to reform society and to secure the theoretical life. If the two purposes were not identical, they were intended to be complementary. It must be remembered that this was a dispute within philosophy and that there was an agreement among the parties to it about what philosophy is. The moderns looked to and disagreed with the Greek philosophers and their heirs, the Roman philosophers. However, they shared the view that philosophy, and with it what we call science, came to be in Greece and had never, so far as is known, come to be elsewhere. Philosophy is the rational account of the whole, or of nature. Nature is a notion that itself is of Greek origin and requisite to science. The principle of contradiction guided the discourse of all, and the moderns presented reasoned arguments against those of their predecessors with who they disagree. The moderns simply took over a large part of ancient astronomy and mathematics. And they, above all, agreed that the philosophic life is the highest life. Their quarrel is not like the difference between Moses and Socrates, or Jesus and Lucretius, where there is no common universe of discourse, but more like the differences between Newton and Einstein. It is a struggle for the struggle for the possession of rationalism by rationalists. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

This fact is lost sight of, partly because scholasticism, the use of Aristotle by the Roman Catholic Church, was the phantom of philosophy within the older order that was violently attacked by the modern philosophy. Another reason why the essential agreement between ancients and moderns is no longer clear is the modern science of intellectual history, which tends to see all differences of opinion as differences of “Worldview,” which blurs the distinction between disagreements founded on reason and those founded on faith. They very term Enlightenment is connected with Plato’s most powerful image about the relation between thinker and society, the cave. In the Republic, Socrates presents men as prisoners in a dark cave, bound and forced to look at a wall against which are projected images that they take to be the beings and that are for them the only reality. Freedom for man means escaping the bonds, civil society’s conventions, leaving the cave and going up to where the run illuminates the beings and seeing them as they really are. Contemplating them is at once freedom, truth and the greatest pleasure. Socrates’ presentation is meant to show that we begin from deceptions, or myths, but that it is possible to aspire to a nonconventional World, to nature, by the use of reason. The false opinions can be corrected, and their inner contradictions impel thoughtful men to seek the truth. Education is the movement from darkness to light. Rason projected on the beings about which at first we only darkly opine produces enlightenment. The moderns accepted that reason can comprehend the beings, that there is a light to which science aspires. The entire difference between ancients and moderns concerns the cave, or non-metaphorically, the relation between knowledge and civil society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Socrates never suggests that, even in the unlikely event that philosophers should be kings and possess absolute wisdom, the nature of the cave could be altered or that a civil society, a people, a demos, could not make any but the happy few able to see the beings as they really are. They would guide the city reasonable, but in their absence the city would revert to unreason. Or to put it in another way, the unwise could not recognize the wise. Men like Bacon and Descartes, by contrast, thought that it was possible to make all men reasonable, to change what had always and everywhere been the case. Enlightenment meant to shine the light of being in the cave and forever to dim the images on the wall. Then there would be unity between the people and the philosopher. The whole issue turns on whether the cave is intractable, as Plato thought, or can be changed by a new kind of education, as the greatest philosophic figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth century taught. As Plato tells us, Socrates was charged with impiety, of not holding the same gods the city held, and he was found guilty. Plato always presents Socrates as the archetypical philosopher. The events of Socrates’ life, the problems he faced, represent what the philosopher as such must face. The Apology tells us that the political problem for the philosopher is the gods. It makes clear that the images on the wall of the cave about which me will not brook contradiction represent the gods. Socrates’ reaction to the accusation is not to assert the right of academic freedom to pursue investigations into the things in the Heavens and under the Earth. He accepts they city’s right to demand his belief. His defense, not very convincing, is that he is not a subversive. He asserts the great dignity of philosophy and tries as much as possible to reduce the gap between it and good citizenship. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

In other words, he temporizes or is insincere. His defense cannot be characterized as “intellectual honest” and is not quite to contemporary taste. He only wants to be left alone as much as possible, but is fully aware that a man who doubts what every good citizen is supposed to know and spends his life sitting around talking about virtue, rather than doing virtuous deeds, comes into conflict with the city. Characteristically, Socrates lives with the essential conflicts and illustrated them, rather than trying to abolish them. In the Republic he attempts to unite citizenship with philosophy. The only possible solution is for philosophers to rule, so there would be no opposition between the city’s commands and what philosophy requires, or between power and wisdom. However, this outline of a solution is ironic and impossible. It only serves to show what one must live with. The regime of philosopher-kings is usually ridiculed and regarded as totalitarian, but it contains much of what we really want. Practically everyone wants reason to rule, and no one thinks man like Socrates should be ruled by inferiors or have to adjust what he thinks to them. What the Republic actually traches is that none of this is possible and that our situation requires both much compromise and much intransigence, great risks and few hopes. The important thing is not speaking one’s own mind, but finding a way to have one’s own mind. Contrary to common opinion, it is Enlightenment that was intent on philosophers’ ruling, taking Socrates’ ironies seriously. If they did not have the title of king, their political schemes were, all the same, designed to be put into practice. And they were put into practice, not by begging princes to listen to them but by philosophy’s generating sufficient power to force princes to give way. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The rule of philosophy is recognized in the insistence that regimes be constructed to protect the rights of man. The anger we experience on reading Socrates’ censorship of the poets is unselfconscious, if we agree, as we willy-nilly do, that children must be taught the scientific method prior to any claims of the imagination on their belief or conduct. Enlightenment education really does what Socrates only tentatively proposes. Socrates, at least, tries to preserver poetry, whereas Enlightenment is almost indifferent to its fate. The fact that we think there should be poetry classes as well as education in reasoning helps us to miss the point: What happens to poetic imagination when the soul has been subjected to a rigorous discipline that resists poetry’s greatest charms? The Enlightenment thinkers were very clear on this point. There is no discontinuity in the tradition about it. They were simply solving the problem to the advantage of reason, as Socrates wished it could be solved but thought it could not. Enlightenment is Socrates respected and free to study what he wants, and thereby it is civil society reconstituted. In the Apology, Socrates, who lives in thousands fold poverty because he neither works nor has inherited, purposes with ultimate insolence that he be fed at public expense at city hall. However, what is the modern university, with its pay and tenure, other than a free lunch for philosophy and scientists? Moreover, the Enlightenment’s explicit effort to remove the religious passion from politics, resulting in distinctions like that between church and state, is motivated by the wish to prevent the highest principle in political life from being hostile to reason. This is the intention in the Republic of Socrates’ reform of the stories about the gods told by the poets. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Nothing that denies the principle of contradiction is allowed to be authoritative, for that is the reef against which Socrates foundered. However, Socrates did not think that church and state could be separated. He would have treated both terms as artificial. The gods are believed to be the founders of every city and are its most important beings. He would not have dared to banish them in defense of himself. The Enlightenment thinkers took on his case and carried on a way against the continuing threat to science posed by first causes that are irrational or beyond reason. The gradual but never perfect success of that war turns the desire to be reasonable into the right to be reasonable, into academic freedom. In the process, political life was rebuilt in ways that have proved intolerable to many statesmen and thinkers, and have gradually led to the reintroduction of religion and the irrational in new and often terrifying guises. This is what Socrates would have feared. However, here I am only indicating the unity of the tradition, that Enlightenment is an attempt to give political status to what Socrates represents. The academy and the university are the institutions that incorporate the Socratic spirit more or less well. Yet the existence of these institutions underlines at the same time how they differ from Socrates, who founded no institutions and had only friends. And these attacks on these institutions made first by Rousseau and then by Nietzsche are attacks on Socratic rationalism made in a Socratic spirit. The history of Western thought and learning can be encapsulated in the fate of Socrates, beginning with Plato defending him, passing through the Enlightenment institutionalizing him, and ending with Nietzsche accusing on him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The cherishing, for two and a half millennia, of the memory of this man, who was put to death by the city for philosophizing, ends with his spiritual execution in the name of culture at the hands of the latest of great philosophers. Both city and culture are authorized by the sacred. The meditation on Socrates is the inspiring theme of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle, through Farabi and Maimonides, Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau and Hegel, to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Socrates is the complementary man whose enigmatic being leads to reflection of the nature of the knowers. Sometimes the problem of slowing down rather than promoting cooperation. An example is the prevention of collusive business practices by avoiding the very conditions which would promote cooperation. Unfortunately, the very ease with which cooperation can evolve even among egoists suggests that the prevention of collusion is not an easy task. Cooperation certainly does not require formal agreements or even face-to-face negotiations. The fact that cooperation based upon reciprocity can emerge and prove stable suggests that antitrust activities should pay more attention to preventing the conditions that foster collusion than to search for secret meetings among executives of competing firms. Consider, for example, the practice of the government selecting two companies for competitive development contracts for a new military airplane. Since aerospace companies specialize to some degree in planes for either Air Force or the Nav, there is a tendency for firms with the same specialty to face each other in the final competition. This frequency of interaction between two given companies makes tacit collusion relatively easy to achieve. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

To make tacit collusion more difficult, the government should seek methods of reducing specialization or compensating for its effects. Paris of companies which shared a specialization would then expect to interact less often in the final competitions. This would cause later interactions between them to be worth relatively less, reducing the shadow of the future. If the nest expected interaction is sufficiently far off, reciprocal cooperation in the form of tacit collusion cases to be a stable policy. The potential for attaining cooperation without formal agreements has its bright side in other contexts. For example, it means that cooperation on the control of the arms race does not have to be sought entirely through the formal mechanism of negotiated treaties. Arms control could also evolve tacitly. Certainly, the fact that the United States of America and Russia know that they will both be dealing with each other for a very long time should help establish the necessary conditions. The leaders may not like each other, but neither did the soldiers in World War I who learned to live and let live. Occasionally a political leader gets the idea that cooperation with another major power should not be sought because a better plan would be to drive them into bankruptcy. This is an extraordinarily risky enterprise because the target need not limit its response to the withholding of normal cooperation, but would also have a strong incentive to escalate the conflict before it was irreversibly weakened. Japan’s despairing gamble at Pearl Harbor, for example, was a response to power American economic sanctions aimed at stopping Japanese intervention in China. Rather than give up what it regarded as a vital sphere, Japan decided to attack America before becoming even further weakened. Japan understood that American was much more powerful, but decided that the cumulative effects of the sanctions made it better to attack rather than to wait for the situation to get even more desperate. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Trying to drive someone bankrupt changes the time perspective of the participants by placing the future of the interaction very much in doubt. And without the shadow of the future, cooperation becomes impossible to sustain. Thus, the role of time perspectives is critical in the maintenance of cooperation. When the interaction is likely to continue for a long time, and the players care enough about their future together, the conditions are ripe for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship. When the conditions are right, the players can come to cooperate with each other through trial-and-error learning about possibilities for mutual rewards, through imitation of other successful players, or even through a blind process of selection of the more successful strategies with a weeding out of the less successful ones. Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other. Just as the future is important for the establishment of the conditions for cooperation, the past is important for the monitoring of actual behavior. It is essential that they players are able to observe and respond to each other’s prior choices. Without this ability to use the past, defections could not be punished, and the incentive to cooperate would disappear. Fortunately, the ability to monitor the prior behavior of the other player does not have to be perfect. When dealing with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people sometimes assume perfect knowledge of the other individual. In many settings, however, an individual may occasionally misperceive the choice made by the other. A defection may go undetected, or a cooperation may be misinterpreted as a defection. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The role of time perspective has important implications for the design of institutions. In large organizations, such as business corporations and governmental bureaucracies, executives are often transferred from one position to another approximately every two years. This gives executive a strong incentive to do well in the short run, regardless of the consequences for the organization in the long run. They know that soon they will be in some other position, and the consequences of their choices in the previous post are not likely to be attributed to them after they have left their position. This gives two executives a mutual incentive to defect when either of their terms is drawing to an end. The result of rapid turnover could therefore be a lessening of cooperation within the organization. Economics of the past, whether agricultural or industrial, were built around long-lasting structures. In place of these, we are laying the electronic basis for an accelerative kaleidoscopic economy capable of instantly reshuffling itself into new patterns without blowing itself apart. The new extra-intelligence is part of the necessary adaptive equipment. In the confusing new flux, businesses can use extra-intelligence to launch surprise attacks on entirely fresh territory, which means that companies can no longer be sure where the next competitive push will come from. The classic blitzkrieg—much analyzed in the network literature—was Merrill Lynch’s launch of its Cash Management Account in 1977, an early use of information technology for a strategic, as distinct from merely administrative, purpose. The Cash Management Account, or CMA, was a new financial product that combined four previously separate services for the customer: a checking account, a deposit account, a credit card, and a securities account. The customer could move money back and forth among these at will. There was no float and the checking account paid interest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The integration of these previously disparate products into a single offering was made possible only by Merrill Lynch’s sophisticate computer technology electronic networks. In twelve months, Merrill sucked in $5 billion of customer fund and by 1984, according to consultant Peter Keen, $70 billion had flooded into Merrill Lynch’s hands. Keen calls it a “preemptive strike” against the banks, which saw vast sums withdrawn by customers who preferred the CMA to an ordinary bank checking account. A securities house, not subject to ban regulations and not regarded as a bank, devastated the bank. Since then, many banks and other financial institutions have offered similar packages, but Merrill has a several-year head start on them. The strange new hybrid patterns of competition—which reflect a restructuring of markets as a result of extra-intelligence—are seen in the move of retailers like Japan’s Seibu Saison group into the financial services business. A Seibu subsidiary is planning to install electronic cash dispensers in railroad stations. British Petroleum, having set up its own internal bank, sells banking services to outsiders. Extra-intelligent networks help explain the widespread push for deregulation of industry, and they suggest that existing government regulations will prove less and less effective. For existing regulations are based on categories and divisions among industries that no longer exist in the age of extra-intelligence. Should banking regulations apply to nonbanks? What, after all, is a bank these days? By linking actual operations across company lines, by making it possible for companies to compete in fields once regarded as alien, extra-intelligent networks break up the old specialization, the old institutional division of labor. In their place come new constellations and cluster of companies, densely interrelated not merely by money but by shared information. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Ironically, it is the disruption cased by this drastic restructuring of the economy around knowledge that explains many of today’s breakdowns and inefficiencies—the misplaced bills, the computer errors, the inadequate service, the sense that nothing works properly. The old smokestack economy is disintegrating; the new super-symbolic economy is still being built, and the electronic infrastructure on which it depends is still in a primitive stage of development. Information is the most fluid of resources, and fluidity is the hallmark of an economy in which the production and distribution of food, energy, goods, and services increasingly depend on symbolic exchange. What emerges is an economy that itself looks more like a nervous system than anything else, and which runs according to rules no one has as yet formulated coherently. Indeed, the unprecedented rise of extra-intelligence raises profound, sometimes chilling questions for society as a whole, quite different from those raised by earlier communications revolutions. The World media today focus on the striking changes wrought by the outsourcing of jobs to India from the United States of America and elsewhere. Indeed, the story of I.T. jobs flowing to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon, and Jaipur has made front-page headlines around the World. By 2021, India was earning $157 billion a year by manning call centers, writing software, performing back-office work, accounting and even financial analysis for American and other foreign firms. And India’s projected revenue from firms being outsourced to that nation is $245 billion by 2022. But the charge that outsourcing takes jobs away from Americans overlooks a reserves effect. For instance, Bangalore Central, a new shopping mall offering such imported brands as Levi’s, Polo, Lacoste and Jockey. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

The outsourcing boom—insourcing from India’s point of view—is unlikely to continue at its present pace of growth, but it has helped create a segment of nouveaux riches who are young, middle-class, focused on “now” and very witty, too much so for their elders. The 2004 election in India resurrected the Congress Party, whose roots in quasi-socialism led it to view development conventionally as a matter of factories and smokestacks rather than the transition to a knowledge-based wealth system. However, even longtime holdouts are coming around, including Communists, who are theoretically farther to the let than the Congress Party. A reporter not long ago chided the Communist chief minister of the state of West Bengal, where Calcutta is located, pointing out that “your party helped protect the advent of computers.” The chief minister’s response: “That was in the 1970s—that was foolish, foolish. It stated when they were going to introduce computers in bans and [insurance companies]. Their employees protested and we supported it. Nowadays they have understood…We have entered a century where industries will be talent-based.” Now even Calcutta, once the World symbol of urban misery, has reached out and attracted IMB. Article after article has pictured India’s talented young I.T. workers as a greedy, socially irresponsible, yuppiesque middle class. Less attention has been paid to the fact that, because of computers over 8 million people in the state of Karnataka can now, for the equivalent of thirty cents, get a printout of land records securing their property from takeover by corrupt, farm-grabbing landlords. On a wider scale, a consortium of Indian and U.S. corporations, along with the World Bank, and the Indian government set up Internet kiosks in five thousand Karnataka villages that allow rural residents access to banking, education and government services. Karnataka is held up as a model for the rest of the nation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

An enterprising company made available a machine called HAGOTH, of which it might be said, this was Technopoly’s most ambitions hour. The machine cost $1,5000, the baragen of the century, for it was able to reveal to its owner whether someone talking on the telephone was telling the truth. It did this by measuring the “stress content” of a human voice as indicated by its oscillations. You connected HAGOTH to your telephone and, in the course of conversation, asked your caller some key questions, such as “Where did you go last Saturday night?” HAGOTH had sixteen lights—eight green and eight red—and when the caller replied, HAGOTH went to work. Red lights went on when there was much stress in the voice, green lights when there was little. As an advertisement for HAGOTH said, “Green indicates no stress, hence truthfulness.” In other words, according to HAGOTH, it is not possible to speak the truth in a quivering voice or to lie in a steady one—an idea that would doubtless amuse Richard Nixon. At the very least, we must say that HAGOTH’s definition of truthfulness was peculiar, but so precise and exquisitely technical as to command any bureaucrat’s admiration. The same may be said of the definition of intelligence as expressed in a standard-brand intelligence test. In fact, an intelligence test works exactly like HAGOTH. You connect a pencil to the fingers of a young person and address some key questions to one; from the replies a computer can calculate exactly how much intelligence exists in the young person’s brain. HAGOTH has mercifully disappeared from the market, for what reason I do not know. Perhaps it was sexist or culturally biased or, worse, could not measure oscillations accurately enough. When it comes to machinery, what Technopoly insists upon most is accuracy. The idea embedded in the machine is largely ignored, no matter how peculiar. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Some may wonder, how can protein engineering build molecular machines? Proteins can self-assemble into working molecular machines, objects that do something, such as cutting and splicing other molecules or making muscles contract. They also join with other molecules to form huge assemblies like the ribosome (about the size of a washing machine, in our simulation view). Ribosomes—programmable machines for manufacturing proteins—are nature’s closet approach to a molecular assembler. The genetic-engineering industry is chiefly in the business of reprogramming natural nanomachines, the ribosomes, to make new proteins is termed protein engineering. Since biomolecules already form such complex devices, it is easy to see that advanced protein engineering could be used to build first-generation nanomachines. Making proteins is easier than designing them. Protein chemists began by studying proteins found in nature, but have only recently moved on to the problem of engineering new ones. These are called de novo proteins, meaning completely new, made from scratch. Designing proteins is difficult because of the way they are constructed. A characteristic of proteins is that their activities depend on their three-dimensional structures. These activities may range from hormonal action to a function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function, it is always essential to have a definite three-dimensional shape or structure. This three-dimensional structure forms when a chain folds to form a compact molecular object. To get a feel for how tough it is to predict the natural folding of a protein chain, picture a straight piece of cord with hundreds of magnets and sticky knots along its length. In this state, it is easy to make and easy to understand. Now pick it up, put it in a glass jar, and shake it for a long time. Could you predict its final shape? Certainly not: it is a tangled mess. One might call this effort at predation “the sticky-cord-folding problem”; protein chemists call theirs “the protein-folding problem.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Given the correct conditions, a protein chain always folds into one special shape, but that shape is hard to predict from just the straightened structure. Protein designers, though, face the different job of first determining a desired final shape, and then figuring out what linear sequence of amino acids to use to make that shape. Without solving the classic protein-folding problem, they have begun to solve the protein-design problem. Now many people wonder why so much pleasures of the flesh and so much skin is shown on television? Well, it is because lust is better television than satisfaction. Ebullience and anxiety are better than tranquility. On the other hand, anger is better than anxiety. Jealousy is better television than acceptance. All of these work more easily than love. Passionate love is more communicable than brotherly and sisterly love. Competition is inherently more televisable than cooperation as it involves drama, winning, wanting and loss. Cooperation offers no conflict and becomes boring. Materialism, acquisitiveness and ambition, all highly focused attitudes, work better than spirituality, nonseeking, openness and yielding. The medium cannot deal with ambiguity, subtlety and diversity. Doing is also easier to convey than being. Activity will always be chosen over inactivity. When dealing with tribal peoples, objective events such as hunting, building, fighting or dancing are easier to convey through television than subjective details of qualities of experience, ways of mind, alternative perceptions. The latter qualities, which form the heart of life for tribal people, are dropped out in favor of the former. Lound is easier to televise than soft. Close is easer than distant. Large is easier than small. Too large is harder than medium. The narrow is easier than the wide. Therefore, television is not an accurately display of live, culture, people, or civilization, and it does not really teach a lot of values one wants their kids to follow. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Therefore, do not let the news teach you how to profile situations or people, nor let them teach you how to predict future events. Local news tends to be fake. They are just trying to get ratings and they can keep their thoughts and prayers to themselves. Who knows what they are thinking and praying about besides a way to strike fear into people and spread ignorance in the community. Like the God of Heaven, man makes in himself the choice between good and evil, both of which, like Him, he bears within himself. Between God and man, however, stand the primal spirits, they too choosing, but in pure paradox. They neither contain nor confront a duplicity, each possesses only himself in the most extreme differentiation; the other one, the other thing, he only has as his absolute computer; such is the situation in which he chooses himself, his own kind and the work commensurate wit it. Choosing, each acknowledges himself. The evil chooses and acknowledges himself, not however merely as created thus and not otherwise, but precisely as the evil, and for his followers he does not merely posit that after death they shall abide with him, but that it is just the worst existence which shall fall to their lot (in this doctrines there is no distinction of category between bad and evil: the bad is precisely that which cases evil, and in the last analysis there is no other evil than that which it causes.) He desires evil as such; and thereby he fulfills the will of the highest god, who brought forth him and his twin: only through mastering unmitigated evil does existence attain to transfiguration. Here the most harassing of questions remains unasked: how can the God of Heavens, the primal being, have contained and encompassed evil? “And they hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord, because of their wicked combinations; wherefore, there began to be wars and contentions in all the land, and also may famines and pestilences, insomuch that there was a great destruction such and one as never had been known upon the face of the Earth; and all this came to pass in the days of Shiblom. And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them, reports Ether 10.7-8. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19


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Love Does Not Exists Only in Rare Fleeting Moments

Overpopulated and over-proselytized, The Earth’s land which houses the generation’s of oscillating cities and suburbs began to erode as quickly as quickly as the illusion has. The green lawns and pavement echo with love’s demise. The discarded remains of “youthquake” were now street-smart hustlers. Those left behind after the COVID pandemic can only anesthetize themselves from the World’s mourning and especially, the confusion at hand. The whitewashing euphoria of a pre-tyrannical America turned into an interment camp left behind faces that were convoluted, masked, and void of expression. All that remained was paranoia, phobia and frustration. Hate became the first turned-on revelation. The masses continued to recruit mask police to make sure everyone had on a mask, even if it was dirty and had been worn several times. Men, women, and children were starving in the street. Minds and bodies have become maimed as we watched a much larger scaled model of 9/11. Now someone had to have an answer. The remnants of those evaporated souls awaited remedy by a savior. In the coming years, saviors appeared to supply the demand: pimps, pushers, scientologists, yang, yin, payday loans. Well dressed, Jesuses in silk suits, draped in gold jewelry and driving brand new BMWs and Cadillac Escalades. The Process Church of the Final Judgment. The witches from “Charmed,” who claimed “In love there is no wrong.” Anyone who posed an answer to a perennial question was God-for-a-day. The preachers pontificated, “To all who would know, I am the truth and I speak the truth. In all humility I tell you that I am the greatest an in the World and it does not trouble me in the least. I am going to attack everything you believe in, everything you cling to and put this New Man in you. I am going to shed light on your dark truths.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The preachers when on to announce, “Love does not exist, but only in rare feeling moments. Therefore, wives, cleave unto your husbands and honor his wishes. For love is something you become after there is no more you. This takes complete sacrifice of the personality, mind, body, heart and soul to Jesus Christ. You must give up everything you want for yourself. All these weaklings who are not clinging to God for support are just putting off their own crucifixions. And you must be reborn in Jesus Christ. Amen.” The COVID pandemic presciently brought on this apocalyptic conundrum, regeneration for the price of self-sacrifice. Manson would have called it, “losing the ego” or “cease to exist.” Baptists translate it as being reborn. Either way, breaking oneself down to be built up again was not hard for the lost souls of Hate and Socialism. They were already broken. However, for many, the vaccine and masks took on the role of God, and to a degree, many were convinced they were. The vaccine and these masks secured themselves as a legend, a cure all. They took getting a vaccine and using a mask as a request from God Himself. These tools began to seduce the nation’s press. There was something strange about people walking around with their faces covered, and making galactic claims about the vaccine. These tools, however, answered the prayers emanating from the deathbeat of Americana. They became quit the perfect garden variety God in a materialist World turned upside-down. The vaccines and masks became the World’s universal savior as they eased most everyone’s inner torment, but the COVID measures also fostered their isolation. Many people were too full of dope and alcohol to know what was good anyone, as the Churches had shutdown, but the liquor stores and neighborhood pushers were still open for business. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

The cities started to drain the people of their souls and financial resources with these empty slogans of “flattening the curve” and convincing them that the President would support them with “$2,000 a month stimulus checks until the pandemic was over,” and “cancel student load dept.” Yet, many Americans are left homeless, farms have gone bankrupt, cattle are starving, people had to decide to buy fuel for their cars so they could get to work or food to put on the table, as their heads got more wrinkled and their hair turned grey waiting for theses unfulfilled promises. The original intention of the reformed academies and universities was to provide a publicly respectable place—and a means of support—for theoretical men, of whom at best there are only few in any nation, to meet, exchange their thoughts and train young persons in the ways of science. The academies and universities were to be engines in the progress of science. The right that reformers attempted to establish was for scientists to be unhindered in the use of their reason, in the areas in which they are competent, to solve the problems posed by nature. Reason and competence are to be underlined here. “Intellectual honesty,” “commitment” and that kind of thing have nothing to do with the university, belong in the arenas of religious and political struggle, only get in the way of the university’s activity, and open it to suspicion and criticism of which it has no need. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech were proposed in theory, and in the practice of serious political reformers, in order to encourage the still voice of reason in a World that had always been comminated by fanaticisms and interests. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

How freedom of thought and speech came to mean the special encouragement and protection of fanaticism and interests is another of those miracles connected with the decay of the ideal of the rational political order. The authors of The Federalist hoped their scheme of government would result in the preponderance of reason and rational men in the United States of America. They were not particularly concerned with protecting eccentric or mad opinions or life-styles. Such protection, which we now often regard as the Founders’ central intention, is only an incidental result of the protection of reason, and it loses plausibility if reason is rejected. These authors did not respect the many religious sects or desire diversity for its own sake. The existence of many sects was permitted only to prevent the emergence of a single dominant one. The moment of the Enlightenment’s success seems also to have been the beginning of its decay. The obscuring of its intention as a result of its democratization is symptomatic of the inner difficulties of its project. That project entailed freedom for the rare theoretical men to engage in rational inquiry in rational inquiry in the small number of disciplines that treat the first principles of all things. This requires an atmosphere where the voice of reason is not drowned by the loud voices of the various “commitments” prevailing in political life. Knowledge is the goal; competence and reason are required of those who pursue it. The disciplines are philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and the science of man, meaning a political science that discerns the nature of man and the end of government. This is the academy. Dependent on it are a number of applied sciences—particularly engineering, medicine and law—that are lower in dignity and derivative in knowledge, but produce the fruits of science that benefit the unscientific and make them respectful of science. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Thus the advantage of the knowers, who want to pursue knowledge, and that of those who do not know, those who want to pursue their well-being, are served simultaneously, establishing a harmony between them. And thus the age-old gulf separating the wise from those who hold power is bridged, and the problem of the wise in civil society is solved. The project was unity reflecting the unity of the intelligible order of nature, its parts organized according to the order of the parts of the whole, joined together finally in a survey of the articulated whole made by the culminating science-philosophy. This project has lost its unity and is in crisis. Reason is unable to establish its unity, to decide what should be in it, to divide up the intellectual labor. It floats without compass or rudder. If the university is indeed the product of the Enlightenment and is its visible presence in modern democracy, and if Enlightenment was a political project that undertook to alter the age-old character of the relation between wisdom and power, knowledge and society, it might be suspected that the crisis of knowledge that has become politically useful—id est, the crisis of university—and the crisis of liberal democracy, the political order dependent on knowledge, have something to do with the new relationship between the two promoted by Enlightenment. I have included among the Enlightenment philosophers men like Machiavelli, Bacon, Montaigne, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke, along with the eighteenth-century thinkers like Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire, whose teachings are usually held to constitute the Enlightenment, because these latter were quite explicit about their debt to the originators of what the Enlightenment was in large measure only popularizing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

The men of the Enlightenment proper were the first whose teachings were addressed not only, or primarily, to other philosophers or potential philosophers of the same rank, and who were concerned not only with those who understand but also with changing the opinions of mankind at large. Enlightenment was the first philosophically inspired “movement,” a theoretical school that is a political force at the same time. The very word Enlightenment conveys this mixture of elements, as does Marxism, whereas Platonism and Epicureanism refer strictly to theories—which may have had this or that effect but whose essence is only theoretical. Although Plato and Aristotle had political philosophies, there is no regime to which one can point as a Platonic or an Aristotelian regime, in the sense that either thinker had founded the movement or party that actually established the regime. However, Enlightenment is certainly responsible for liberal democracy, as is Marxism for communism. Intellectual historians have frequently been too impressed by these recent events in philosophy and politics to recognize how recent they are, that they constitute a new phenomenon in both domains, and that what is most profound and interesting about Enlightenment is its radical and self-conscious break with the philosophical tradition in the mode and degree of its political activity. The scale of the electronic war rises when whole industries mobilize to do battle. Rather than individual firms, industry-wide groups are taking collective action. Such industry-wide networks are especially notable in Japan, where their formation is strongly encouraged by the ubiquitous Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Thus MITI is prodding the petroleum industry to complete a net that will link refiners, oil tank facilities, and retailers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

Industry-wide Value Added Networks have already appeared in fields as disparate as frozen foods, eyeglasses, and sporting goods. Similar industry-wide nets are springing up elsewhere. In Australia two competing Value Added Networks, Woolcom and a service offered by Talman Pty., Ltd., for wool brokers and exporters, are vying for business and looking ahead to link-ups with Tradegate, an international trade net, and EXIT, an export clearance system. In the United States of America a major drive is under way to complete a network that will tie together not only textile manufacturers like Burlington, but apparel makers and the giant retailers like Wal-Mart and K Mart. To stoke up support for this effort, business leaders like Roger Millikin, chairman of Millikin & Company, make speeches, hold seminars, fund studies, and preach the network gospel. A key problem in the industry has been slow response time. Clothing fashions change swiftly, so the industry wants to compress the time between order and delivery from weeks to days by installing an electronic network that runs from the textile mill to the retail checkout counter. By speeding response, huge cuts in inventory become possible. The electronic system allows retailers to order smaller batches and replace the fast-sellers more frequently as styles and consumer tastes change, instead of sitting on slow-moving merchandise. Milliken cites the experience of one department store chain that was able to sell 25 percent more slacks while, at the same time, carrying 25 percent fewer slacks in its inventory. Indeed, with the system only partly in place, results have been dramatic. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

The campaign began in 1986. By 1989, according to Arthur Andersen & Company, more than seventy-five retailers had invested an estimated $3.6 billion in the system, called Quick Response, and had already benefited to the tine of $9.6 billion. In fact, Millikin and many others believe so many more billions can be saved that electronic intelligence can serve as a weapon in international trade wars. If efficiency can be raised enough, and rapidly enough, the reasoning goes, the American textile and apparel industries would be able to compete more effectively against affordable labor imports. As individual companies and entire industries race to position themselves for the future by building their own special-purpose networks, other giants are racing to lay in place global multipurpose networks that will carry message for anyone. What we are seeing, therefore, is the emergence of several types or layers of electronic networks: private nets primarily designed for the employees of a single firm; EDI hookups between individual companies and their customers and/or vendors; and industry-wide networks. To these, however, must now be added generic networks—so-called common carriers—which are needed to connect these lower-level networks to one another and to transport messages for everyone else. The volume of messages and data now surging through this neural system is so huge that an even larger-scale battle has erupted among big companies who wish to dominate this common carrier service. Giants like British Telecom, AT&T, and Japan’s KDD are racing to expand their capacity and speed up data flows. To complicate matters, large companies that have their own global nets sell services to outsiders and compete with the common carriers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Thus Toyota, for example, and IBM fight for business that might otherwise go to one of the old telephone companies. General Electric operates a network in more than 180 countries, and Benetton, based in Italy, relies on GE to connect 90 percent of its employees. What is forming under our eyes, therefore, the entirely new, multilayered system, the economy’s infrastructure of the 21st century. Meanwhile, a short man with a friendly face and a helmet of long silver hair falling over his ears climbed a few steps onto the stage, clipped a microphone to his gray Nehru jacket, and began speaking in a voice so soft and gentle that one strained to hear it even over the loudspeakers as he called up slide after slide in his presentation. We were in New Delhi in 2003 at a conference entitled “India—Giant or Pygmy?” Although his name is little known outside India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, son of an impoverished boatbuilder, is a Muslim in a predominately Hindu nation and the former chief scientist/engineer behind India’s satellite, missile and nuclear programs. He is also president of India. Kalam does not govern the nation—politicians do that. However, he is a widely admired symbol of up-from-poverty success and a commitment to interreligious harmony. He is also coauthor of India 2020—a Vision for the New Millennium. Kalam’s priority project, when we spoke with him later in the residential palace, was connectivity. Now among technologies but among villages—tiny, remote villages distant from one another. Kalam has developed a program to slow urbanization by linking villages physically, electronically, economically—and in terms of access to knowledge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Counter to the belief that advanced technologies do nothing for the poor, it is the knowledge economy and the technologies associated with it that have awakened India from a half century of postcolonial slumber, helping to life more than 100 millions Indians out of poverty and placing it, according to some estimates, only ten or fifteen years behind China. That lag, according to some, may be offset by three advantages that India brings to the race. First, the wide prevalence of English makes contact and communication with the Anglophone World easier. Second, India is less export-dependent than China, thus less vulnerable to currency and other risks. And third, its less authoritarian, relatively open society is more likely to promote innovation. The growth of the developing World is causing new struggles for the control of knowledge and communication, struggles that are shifting power among people, companies, industries, sectors, and countries. Yet the “neuralization” of the economy has scarcely begun and new players enter the power game every day. They include credit card companies, the great Japanese trading houses, equipment manufacturers, and many others. Crucial to this emerging system is the plastic card in the consumer’s wallet. Whether it is an automatic teller machine card, a conventional credit card, or a “smart” debit card, the card is a network’s link to the individual. That link can, in principle, be expanded vastly. As everyone from banks and oil companies to local merchants moves more deeply into the electronic age…as the cards themselves become smarter, carrying and conveying vast amounts of information…and as money itself becomes “super-symbolic,” no longer pegged to either metal or paper…the card provides the missing link in the emerging neural system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Whoever controls the card—bankers or their rivals—has a priceless channel into the home and daily life. Thus we see a push to link individual customers to the specialized networks. In Japan, JCB. Co., a credit card firm, together with NTT Data Communications, is launching a card women can use at their hairdressers’. It hopes to connect 35,000 hairdressers with 10 million card-carrying customers in a two-year period. The long-rage dream of the World’s network builders is a single integrated loop, running from the customer (who will electronically tell business what goods or services to make)…to the producer…through what remains of distribution intermediary firms…to the retailer or the electronic home shopping service…to the ATM or the credit card payment system…and ultimately back into the home of the consumer. Any company or industrial group that can seize control of the main steps in this cycle will wield decisive economic power—and hence considerable political power as well. However, seizing it will depend less on capital than on brains—intelligence embedded in computers, software, and electronic networks. In order for cooperation to get started in the first place, one more condition is required. The problem is that in a World of unconditional defection, a single individual who offers cooperation cannot prosper unless others are around who will reciprocate. On the other hand, cooperation can emerge from small clusters of discriminating individuals as long as these individuals have even a small proportion of their interactions with each other. So there must be some clustering of individuals who use strategies with two properties: the strategies will be the first to cooperate, and they will discriminate between those who respond to the cooperation and those who do not. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

Television is not a great way to get people to cooperate. Verbal information is easier to convey than sensory information since television can deliver words with little information loss. If the former is confined to two operative sense of television, sensory information is easier to convey than intuitive information. Intuitive information, which has no form at all, can barely be sent or received. Feelings of conflict, and their embodiment in actions, work better on television than feelings of agreement and their embodiment in calm and unity. Conflict is outward, agreement is inward, and so the former is more visible than the latter. This is often why President visit states they are seeking votes from. Not only to show they care, but also so the crowd can not only hear, but feel the message they are sending out, and ask questions or make comments. It is a great way to get people to cooperate. The conditions for the evolution of cooperation tell what is necessary, but do not, by themselves, tell what strategies will be most successful. For this question, there is evidence in favor of the robust success for the simplest of all discriminating strategies: TIT FOR TAT. By cooperating on the first move, and then doing whatever the other individual did on the previous move, TIT FOR TAT managed to do well with a wide variety of more or less sophisticated decision rules. It also usually a win when it comes to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. TIT FOR TAT again is the most successful rule, indicating that it can do well with good and bad rules alike. “Do unto others as you would have then do unto you,” reports Luke 6.31. TIT FOR TAT is close to the “Golden Rule,” which simply means to treat others the way we want them to treat us, but it also goes a step further that we must learn to watch and gauge their behavior so we are not taken advantage of. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

TIT FOR TAT’s robust success is due to being nice, provocable, forgiving, and clear. Its niceness means that it is never the first to defect, and this property precents it from getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side from persisting whenever defection is tired. Its forgiveness helps restore mutual cooperation. And its clarity makes its behavioral pattern easy to recognize; and once recognized, it is easy to perceive that the best way of dealing with TIT FOR TAT is to cooperate with it. However, this contradicts what was said earlier. Despite its robust success, TIT FOR TAT cannot be called the ideal strategy to play in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. For one thing, TIT FOR TAT and other nice rules require for their effectiveness that the shadow of the future be sufficiently great. However, even then there is no ideal strategy independent of the strategies used by the others. In some extreme environments, even TIT FOR TAT would do poorly—as would be the case if there were not enough others who would ever reciprocate its initial cooperative choice. And TIT FOR TAT does have its strategic weakness as well. For example, if the other individual defect once, TIT FOR TAT will always respond with a defection, and then if the other party does the same in response, the result would be an unending echo of alternating defections. In this sense, TIT FOR TAT is not forgiving enough. However, another problem is that TIT FOR TAT is too forgiving to those rules which are totally unresponsive, such as a completely random rule. What can be said for TIT FOR TAT is that it does indeed perform well in a wide variety of settings where the other players are all using more or less sophisticated strategies which themselves are designed to do well. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

If a nice strategy, such as TIT FOR TAT, does eventually come to be adopted by virtually everyone, then individuals using this nice strategy can afford to be generous in dealing with any others. In fact, a population of nice rules can also protect itself from clusters of individuals using any other strategy just as well as they can protect themselves against single individuals. These results give a chronological picture for the evolution of cooperation. Cooperation can begin with small clusters. It can thrive with rules that are, nice, provocable, and somewhat forgiving. And once established in a population, individuals using such discriminating strategies can protect themselves from invasion. The overall level of cooperation tends to go up and not down. In other words, the machinery for the evolution of cooperation contains a rachet. The operation of this ratchet was seen in the development of the norm of reciprocity in the United States of America’s Congress. In the early days of the republic, members of Congress were known for their deceit and treachery. They were quite unscrupulous and frequently lied to each other. Yet, over the years, cooperative patterns of behavior emerged and proved stable. These patterns were based upon the norm of reciprocity. Many other institutions have developed stable patters of cooperation based upon similar norms. Diamond markets, for example, are famous for the way their members exchanged millions of dollars worth of good with only a verbal pledge and a handshake. The key factors is that the participants know they will be dealing with each other again and again. Therefore any attempts to exploit the situation will simply not pay. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

A wonderful illustration of this principle is provided in the memoirs of Ron Luciano, a baseball umpire who sometimes had his “bad days.” “Over a period of time I learned to trust certain catchers so much that I actually let them umpire for me on the bad days. The bad days usually followed the good nights. On those days there wasn’t much I could do but take two aspirins and call as little as possible. If someone I trusted was catching…I’d tell them, ‘Look, it’s a bad day. You’d better take it for me. If it’s a strike, hold you glove in place for an extra second. It it’s a ball, throw it right back. And please, don’t yell.” This reliance on the catcher could work because if Luciano ever suspected that he was being taken advantage of, he would have many opportunities to retaliate. “No one I worked with ever took advantage of the situation, and hitter ever figure out what I was doing. And only once, when Ed Herrman was calling the pitches, did a pitcher ever complain about a call. I smiled; I laughed; but I didn’t say a word. I was tempted, though, I was really tempted.” Ordinary business transactions are also based upon the idea that a continuing relation allows cooperation to develop without the assistance of a central authority. Even though the courts do provide a central authority for the resolution of business disputes, this authority is usually not invoked. A common business attitude is expressed by a purchasing agent who said that “if something comes up, you get the other man on the telephone and deal with the problem. You don’t real legalistic contract clauses at each other if you ever want to do business again.” This attitude is so ell established that when a large manufacturer of packaging materials inspected its records, it found that it had failed to create legally binding contracts in two-thirds of the orders from its customers. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

The fairness of the transactions is guaranteed not by the threat of a legal suit, but rather by the anticipation of mutually rewarding transactions in the future. It is precisely when this anticipation of future interaction breaks down that an external authority is invoked. Perhaps the most common type of business contracts case fought all the way to the appellate courts is an action for a wrongful termination of a dealer’s franchise by a parent company. This pattern of conflict makes sense because once a franchise is ended, there is no prospect for further mutually rewarding transactions between the franchiser and the parent company. Cooperation ends, and costly court battles are often the result. In other contexts, mutually rewarding relations become so commonplace that the separate identities of the participants can become blurred. For example, Lloyd’s of London began as a small group of independent insurance brokers. Since the insurance of ship and its cargo would be a large undertaking for one dealer, several brokers frequently made trades with each other to pool their risks. The frequency of the interactions was so great that the underwriters gradually developed into a federated organization with a formal structure of its own. The importance of future interactions can provide a guide to the design of institutions. To help promote cooperation among members of an organization, relationships should be structured so that there are frequent and durable interactions among specific individuals. Corporations and bureaucracies are often structured in just this way. As nowhere else in the early literature of the human race preserved to us, good and evil as principia are here brought together and put asunder. They came forth from a primary initial community, as “twins.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

From what seed and womb they steam is not told us, but another time we hear that the highest god, Ahura Mazdah, the “Wise Lord,” is the father of the benignant spirit. So the two primal opposites proceeded from him. Of a mother by whose participation the contradiction could be explained we learn nothing. The god indeed surrounds himself with good powers, makes them battle with the evil ones and will make them conquer the latter, but the opposite he is warring against was manifestly encompassed by himself and he put it out from himself into the begin of the principia. It is as thought he had first to discard evil in order to be able to subdue it. If, with the confrontation of the twins, creation which is effected through them is commence, then the god before creation is the not-yet-good one; but in the creation the god become good strives with that which he has cast out from himself. Thus understood, God’s primal act is a decision within himself, a primal choice, therefore, between still companionate good and evil, which prepares and makes possible their elected actions: The self-choice of good, which first renders it effectual and factual good, and the self-choice of evil, which renders it effectual and factual evil. However, the primal choice is not directed towards creation, the latter being done for the sake of the “turning point” at the end of the struggles. Created man is ordained into the struggle for salvation as one who is himself called upon to choose between good and evil. Since the Wise Lord, creating by His spirit made man’s life incarnate, the power of decision was entrusted to man. With a choice his daena, his self, embarked upon the Earthly path; but ever anew must he, confronted by fresh interminglings of deception and truth, divide, and decide. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

One must be assisted from above: “because the better path does not stand open to the choice,” says Zarathustra, “I come to you all that we may live according to the truth”; his task is “to place men before the choice” and show them the right path, so that, as the verse concerning the twins concludes, they may of their own decision accede to the Wise Lord with works of truth. Those who do so assist him “to bring this existence to transfiguration.” “And the chief judge stood before them, and smote them again, and said unto them: If ye have the power of God deliver yourselves from these bands, and then we will believe that the Lord will destroy this people according to your words,” reports Alma 14.24. When Catholic priests use spirits, wafers, and incantations to embody spiritual ideas, they acknowledge the mystery and the metaphor being used. However, experts of Technopoly acknowledge no such overtones or nuisances when they use forms, standardized tests, polls, and other machinery to give technical reality to ideas about intelligence, creativity, sensitivity, emotional imbalance, social deviance, or political opinion. They would have us believe that technology can plainly reveal the true nature of some human condition or belief because the score, statistic, or taxonomy has given it technical form. There is no denying that the technicalization of terms and problems is a serious form of information control. Institutions can make decisions on the basis of scores and statistics, and there certainly may be occasions where there is no reasonable alternative. However, unless such decisions are made with profound skepticism—that is, acknowledged as being made for administrative convenience—they are delusionary. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

In Technopoly, the delusion is sanctified by our granting inordinate prestige to experts who are armed with sophisticated technical machinery. All professionals are conspiracies against the laity. We can go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologist, some sociologist, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin “social deviance,” which is a statistical concept, and they call evil “psychopathology,” which is a medical concept, which alludes to the idea that sin (social deviance) and psychopathology (evil) can be corrected with medication. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts. As the power of traditional social institutions to organize perceptions and judgment declines, bureaucracies, expertise, and technical machinery become the principal means by which Technopoly hopes to control information and thereby provide itself with intelligibility and order. We will talk about why this cannot work, and the pain and balderdash that are the consequence in future reports. Now, some may be wonder, how far can proximal probes take us? Proximal probes have advantages as a tool for developing nanotechnology, but also weakness. Today, their working tips are rough and irregular. To make stable bonds form, John Foster’s group used a pulse of electricity, but the results proved hard to control. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

The “IMB” spelled out by Donald Eigler’s group when he made the World’s smallest logo with xenon atoms, it was very precise, but stable only at temperatures near absolute zero—such patterns vanish at room temperature because they are not based on stable chemical bonds. Building structures that are both table and precise is still a challenge. To form stable bonds in precise patterns is the next big challenge. John Foster says, “We’re exploring a concept which we call ‘molecular herding,’ using the STM to ‘herd’ molecules the way my Shetland sheep dog would hard sheep…Our ultimate goal with molecular herding is to make one particular molecule move to another particular one, and then essentially force them together. If you could put two molecules that might be small parts of a nanomachine on the surface, then this kind of herding would allow you to hual one of them up to the other. Instead of requiring random motion of a liquid and specific chemical lock-and-key interactions to give you exactly what you want in brining two molecules together [as in chemical and biochemical approaches], you could drive that rection on a local level with the STM. You could use the STM to put things where you want them to be.” Proximal-probe instruments may be a big help in building the first generation of nanomachines, but they have a basic limit: Each instrument is huge on a molecular scale, and each could bond only one molecular piece at a time. To make anything large—say, large enough to see with the unassisted eye—would take an absurdly long time. A device of this sort could add one piece per second, but even a pinhead contains more atoms than the number of seconds since the formation of Earth. Building a Pocket Library this would be a long-term project. How can such slow systems ever build anything big? Rabbits and dandelions contain structures put together one molecular piece at a time, yet they grow to reproduce quickly. How? They build in parallel, with many billions of molecular machines working at once. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

To gain the benefits of such enormous parallelism, researchers can either use proximal probes to build a better, next-generation technology, or use a different approach from the start. The techniques of chemistry and biomolecular engineering already have enormous parallelism and already build precise molecular structures. Their methods, however, are less direct than the still hypothetical proximal probe—based molecule-positioners. They use molecular building blocks shaped to fit together spontaneously, in a process of self-assembly. David Biegelsen, a physicist who works with STMs at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, put it this way at the nanotechnology conference: “Clearly, assembly using STMs and other variants will have to be tried. But biological systems are an existence proof that assembly and self-assembly can be done. I don’t see why one should try to deviate from something that already exists.” A huge technology bas for molecular construction already exists. Tools originally developed by biochemists and biotechnologist to deal with molecular machines found in nature can be redirected to make new molecular machines. The expertise built up by chemists in more than a century of steady progress will be crucial in molecular design and construction. Both disciplines routinely handle molecules by the billions and get them to form patterns by self-assembly. Biochemists, in particular, can begin by copying designs from nature. Molecular building-block strategies could work together with proximal-probe strategies, or could replace them, jumping directly to the construction of large numbers of molecular machines. Either way, protein molecules are likely to play a central role, as they do in nature. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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They Were Themselves Concerned with Getting from the Darkness to the Light

Although universities go back very far, the university as we know it, in its content and its aim, is the product of the Enlightenment. To enlighten is to bring light where there had previously been darkness, to replace opinion, id est, superstition, by scientific knowledge of nature, beginning from the phenomena available to all men and ending in rational demonstration possible for all men. All things must be investigated and understood by reason, id est, science or philosophy (the distinction between the two is of recent origin, coming to currency only in the nineteenth century). Knowledge of the nature of all things is Enlightenment’s goal. The past was characterized not by ignorance but by false opinions. Men always had opinion about everything, but those opinions were without ground and indemonstrable. Yet they governed the nations of men and were authoritative. Thus the problem of Enlightenment is not merely discover of the truth but the conflict between the truth and the beliefs of men, which are incorporated into the law. Enlightenment begins from the tension between what men are compelled to believe by city and religion, on the one hand, and the quest for scientific truth on the other. To think and speak doubts about, let alone to propose substitutes for, the fundamental opinions was forbidden by every regime previously known to man. Doing so was thought to be, and in fact was, disloyal and impious. Of course, the men of the Enlightenment were not the first to recognize this tension. It has existed and been known to exist since science emerged in Greece sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. Enlightenment thinkers were aware that there had been surpassingly great philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers and political scientists from that time on, who had suffered persecution and been compelled to live on the fringes of society. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

The learned society and the university, the publicly respected and supported communities of scientists—setting their own rules, pursuing knowledge according to the inner dictates of science, as opposed to civil or ecclesiastical authority, communicating freely among themselves—are the visible signs of that innovation. The earlier thinkers accepted the tension and lived accordingly. Their knowledge was essentially for themselves, and they had a private life very different from their public life. They were themselves concerned with getting from the darkness to the light. Enlightenment was a daring attempt to shine that light on all men, partly for the sake of the progress of science. The success of this attempt depended on scientists’ freedom to associate with and speak to one another. And only if the rulers believed that the scientists were not a threat to them, could freedom be won. Enlightenment was not only, or perhaps not even primarily, a scientific project but a political one. It began from the premise that the rulers could be educated, a premise not held by the Enlightenment’s ancient brethren. This project was a conspiracy, as d’Alembert said in the Preliminary Discourse of l’Encyclopedie, the premier document of the Enlightenment. It has to be, for, in order to have rulers who are reasonable, many of the old rulers had to be replaced, in particular all those whose authority rested upon revelation. The priests were the enemies, for they rejected the claim of reason and based politics and morals on sacred text and ecclesiastical authorities. The philosophers appeared to deny the very existence of God, or at least of the Christian God. The old order was founded on Christianity, and free use of reason simply could not be permitted within it, since reason accepts no authority above itself and is necessarily subversive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

There was a public struggle for the right to rule; for, in spite of the modest demeanor of the philosophers, they at the very least require rulers who are favorable to them, who have chosen reason. The right to freedom of thought is a political right, and for it to exist, there must be a political order that accepts that right. In other words, an argument had to be made that the free pursuit of science is good for society, in order to persuade the most powerful element of society and thus guarantee the protection of that pursuit. In a simple formula, it had to be shown that the progress of knowledge was parallel to political progress. This is by no means a self-evident proposition, as anyone who has read Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, a powerful attack on it, knows. However, it is the leading principle of Enlightenment and the ultimate ground of the prejudice that most people have in favor of freedom of thought and inquiry. I say prejudice because the reasons have almost been forgotten, and other kinds of thought hostile to freedom of thought are current. The old order offered roots and salvation, and the very latest thought is marked by nostalgia for that old order. The Enlightenment thinkers proposed a political science that could be used by founders, such as in America, in establishing principles and arrangements for a sounder and more efficient politics, and a natural science that could master nature in order to satisfy men’s needs. These promises are what make reason not only acceptable within civil society but even central to it. A society based on reason needs those who reason best. The scientists were to be the most respected of men, taking the place of kinds and prelates, because they are the evident sources of the good think for life, liberty and the pursuit of property. It was not precisely replacing one faith by another, because the new science, if it cannot be practiced by just anyone, can be understood by anyone, if one is trained in its method, and knowledge of the rights and duties of man requires the use of his reason. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

The Enlightenment was a daring enterprise. Its goal was to reconstitute political and intellectual life totally under the supervision of philosophy and science. No conqueror, prophet or founder ever had a broader vision, and none had more stunning success. There is practically no contemporary regime that is not somehow a result of Enlightenment, and the best of the modern regimes—liberal democracy—is entirely its product. And throughout the World all men and all regimes are dependent on and recognize the science popularized by the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment inexorably defeated all opponents it targeted at the outset, particularly the priests and all that depends on them, by a long process of education that taught men, as Machiavelli put it, about “the things of this World.” One need only read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Book V, on education, to see how the reform of universities, particularly the overcoming of the theological influence, was essential to the emergence of modern political economy and the regime founded on it. Thus the academics and universities are the core of liberal democracy, its foundation, the repository of its animating principles and the continuing source of the knowledge and education keeping the machinery of the regime in motion. The regime of equality and liberty, of the rights of man, is the regimes of reason. The free university exists only in liberal democracy, and liberal democracies exist only where there are free universities. Marxists are right to say that the “bourgeois university” is essentially related to “bourgeois society,” but not in the sense they intend. The university does not defend that society because the university merely reflects its interests, but because the balance of forces within this kind of society is such as most to need, respect and, hence, protect, freedom of thought. Earlier associations of thinkers were under theological-political supervision by unquestioned right. Fascism rejected reason and controlled the universities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

When Hitler came to power, Karl Schmitt said, “Today Hegel died in Germany.” Hegel was arguably the greatest university man there ever was. And communism asserts that the people, under the guise of the vanguard party, has become rational, so that the university no longer needs a special statue—id est, it can be controlled by the Party. Only in liberal democracy is the primacy of reason accepted, even though its citizenry is not understood to be simply and always reasonable. It assures a special status for the university, an exemption from the ordinary moral and political limitations on what can be thought and said in a civil society. The university is not the beneficiary of the freedom of thought accorded to all the members of society. All to the contrary, in the original project of modern society, the general freedom of thought was believed to be desirable in order to support the kind of thought was believed to be desirable in order to support the kind of thought proper to philosophers and scientists, which alone strictly deserves the name of “thought.” At the outset the primary freedom was freedom of thought, both because reason is the highest faculty and because it is most necessary to the god society. If there was to be a new kind of society, a new dispensation for mankind, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Bacon, Locke and Newton had to be free to think and propagate what they learned. They very special status of what came to be called academic freedom has gradually been eroded, and there hardly remains an awareness of what it means. There is barely a difference recognized in popular and even university consciousness between academic freedom and job security guaranteed by government, business or unions. It has become assimilated to the economic system and looks like self-interest of a kind that is sometimes approved of and sometimes disapproved of. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

The rights of science are now not distinguishable from the rights of thought in general, of any description whatsoever. Freedom of speech has given way to freedom of expression, in which the obscene gesture enjoys the same protected status as demonstrative discourse. It is all very wonderful; everything has become free, and no invidious distinctions need to be made. However, it is too good to be true. All that has really happened is that reason has been knocked off its perch, is less influential and more vulnerable as it joins the crowd of less worthy claims to the attention and support of civil society. The semitheoretical attacks of Right and Left on the university and its knowledge, the increased demands made on it by society, the enormous expansion of higher education, have combined to obscure what is most important about the university. In October 1983, just four years after Deng Xiaoping began to release China from the iron grip of anti-capitalism, a conference of policy leaders was held in Beijing under the wing of the reformist premier Zhao Ziyang, who called on China to study the concept of the Third Wave. Some, still fearful of stepping outside the perimeter of Marxist theory, reportedly went over Zhao’s head to the then general secretary of the Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, and asked what he thought of the conference proposal. Himself a liberal in the Chinses context at the time, Hu responded with words to the effect that “too many people in the party are afraid of new ideas.” Since then, top Chinese leaders—and tens of millions of their followers—have strongly supported the idea that China should not merely focus on industrialization. It should simultaneously, and as rapidly as possible, try to build a knowledge-intensive economy, skipping whenever possible the traditional stages of industrialization. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

This is why China shoots an astronaut into space, why it sets out to become a biotech superpower, and why in just a few years it has more than 1.66 billion mobile-phone subscribers and more than one billion internet users. It is why China is attempting to set its own technical standards for DVD players, chips and computers, not merely for protectionist reasons but to influence future technological advance around the globe, as the British did in the nineteenth century and the Americans did in the twentieth. It is why the Beijing Genomics Center impressed the World by breaking the genetic code for rice in record time. It is why—while the Obama White House slowed medical research by severely restricting government money for embryonic stem-cell research—China moved more aggressively forward in this field. This is why the Chinese city of Dalian has become a knowledge center rather than a manufacturing base. They are not just making clothes there. GE, Microsoft, Dell, SAP, HP, Sony and Accenture have set up backroom operations there for Asian companies and software R&D centers. It is why in 2020 China graduated 1.4 million students from science programs and 600,000 from engineering programs and these numbers tend to be a yearly average, which is only growing. China is also making a concerted effort to bring home tens of thousands of Chinese scientists working in the United States. It is why hundreds of multinationals have rushed to set up R&D labs in China—with an estimated two hundred labs arriving each year. Says Harry Shum, chief of Microsoft’s Beijing lab, “Nowhere in this universe has a higher concentration of I.Q. power.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

And it is why China is leading the World in exports of digital equipment. China’s twin-track strategy—selling affordable industrial labour while racing to build its knowledge sector—is set against a background of less central planning, a downshift of power to regions and local governments, expansion of market activities and, if anything, an overemphasis on exports. These changes are accompanied by widespread pain, social disruption and unrest, all of which may well get much worse. Chinese leaders are right to put stability at the top of their agenda. However, much like the rest of the World, China has to worry about the COVID-19 pandemic, future epidemics and pandemics, along with protests, not merely on a manageable local level but on a national level; financial panics; environmental crises; out-of-control fuel and energy costs and looming shortages; and generational cleavages—not to mention greater instability relations with America, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Even worse, two or more of these crises could converge. Only the naïve think revolutionary changes follow straight trend lines. However, they also know their historic mission—to end the mass poverty that has characterized China for the past five thousand years. China has raised more than one billion people out of extreme poverty since 1979. The glass may be half empty, but before this, for these people, there was no glass. And no future. Nor is the twin-trach strategy applied only in China. The other vast pools of countries rising out of poverty are Africa and India. With these other nations expanding and rising out of poverty, to stay number one is going to be a challenge for America. That is why it is so important to support American business, American cars, American made meat and produce and washing machines, dryers and other types of American made products. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Now, consider a pair of jeans. The denim in them may well have come from Burlington Industries. This giant American textile firm sends it customers free software that allows them to communicate directly with Burlington’s mainframe, to paw through its stock of denims electronically, to find the particular batch of fabric they want, and to order it—all at instantaneous speeds. Manufacturers like Burlington hope such services will distinguish them from their competitors, make life easier for customers—and simultaneously lack those customers into the new “electronic data interchange” (EDI) systems so tightly that it will become hard for them to escape. At their simplest, EDI systems simply permit the electronic exchange of documents between companies or business units—invoices, specification, inventory data, and the like. However, leaving it at that is rather like calling Mozart a tunesmith. For by wedding one another’s data bases and electronic systems, companies re able to form highly intimate partnerships. For example, while Burlington opens its inventory files to its customer, Digital Equipment, the computer maker, opens its design secrets to its suppliers. When DEC places another order for components, it may electronically transfer its entire Computer-Aided-Design file to the supplier firm, so that both buyer and seller can work more closely together, step by step. The object is intimacy. The big auto companies now virtually refuse to do business with suppliers who are not equipped for electronic interaction. At Ford, fifty-seven parts plants have been told they must electronically exchange shipping schedules, material requisitions, releases, and receipts with both customers and suppliers. The benefits of EDI are not only a reduction in paperwork and inventory, but quicker, more flexible responses to customer needs. Together these can amount to massive savings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

However, the Worldwide shift to electronic interchange also implies radical changes in the business system. Companies are forming into what might be called “information-sharing groups.” More communication is crossing—and sometimes blurring—organizational boundaries. Whether in a Japanese insurance company or an American automaker, EDI forces major changes in accounting and other control systems. When a company goes electronic, jobs change; people move around; some departments gain clout, others lose. The entire relationship of the firm to its suppliers and customers is shaken up. Such power shifts, however, are not merely limited to individual firms. Whole sectors of the economy are already feeling the impact of EDI. For EDI can be used as a weapon to wipe out go-betweens and intermediaries. Shiseido, Japan’s top cosmetic firm, for example, uses its networks to sidestep the traditional distribution chain. Shiseido’s powders, creams, eye shadows, lotions, and what-have-you are everywhere in Japan and beginning to make a splash in American and European markets as well. By connecting its computers directly to those of its customers, Shiseido end-runs wholesalers and warehousers, delivering from its own distribution centers directly to the stores. If Shiseido and other manufacturers can “talk” directly with their retailers, and retailers can electronically access information in the manufacturer’s own computers, who needs an intermediary? “The wholesaler?” Bingo! By passed,” say Monroe Greenstein, a retail industry analyst at the Bear, Stearns securities firm in New York. To avoid that fate, wholesalers, too are turning to electronic weaponry. The most publicized, by now classic case of a wholesaler taking the offensive—and capturing new power in the marketplace—involves American Hospital Supply, now a part of Baxter Health Care Corporation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Starting as early as 1978, AHS began placing terminals inside hopsitals and allowing them to dial directly, through a network, to its computers. It was much simpler for hospitals to order supplies from AHS by pushing a button than to deal with other, less sophisticated suppliers. It turns, AHS used the network to zap all sorts of useful information about products, usage, costs, inventory control, et cetera, to its customers. Because AHS’s system was so responsive and reliable, hospitals were able to cut back on their own inventories, saving them substantial money. And if a hospital placed all its business with AHS, the company provided an entire management information system for the hospital. AHS’s business skyrocketed. Consultant Peter Keen, from whose study, Competing in Time, some of these data are drawn, describes how Foremost McKesson, a pharmaceutical wholesaler, applied the AHS strategy to its own field. As customer orders flow into Foremost McKesson’s computers electronically from hand-held terminals placed in 15,000 stores, they are instantly sorted and consolidated. This generates Foremost McKesson’s own orders, fully half of which are then, in turn, instantly and automatically transmitted to its supplier firms. Such high-speed systems allow AHS, Foremost, and many other firms to wire themselves so snugly into their customers’ daily operations that it becomes costly and complex for them to shift their business elsewhere. In return, the systems save their customers significant sums and help them manage more smartly all around. All this pays off in negotiating power. However, AHS and McKesson are still exceptions. Most wholesalers could face an electronic squeeze play, caught between manufacturers and increasingly sophisticated retailers. Warehouse companies are next in line for trouble as extra-intelligence spreads through the economy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

The increasing customization and flexible manufacture made possible by computers, means, among other things, a shift from a few big orders for uniform products to many smaller orders for diversified products. Simultaneously, the speedup of business encouraged by electronic networking increases pressures for just-in-time delivery to factories and stores. All this implies fewer bulk shipments, shorter storage times, faster turnaround, and more insistence on precise information about the whereabouts of every stored item—less space, more information. This substitution reduces the clout of the space merchant and pushes smart warehousers into a search for alternative functions. Some are using networks and computers to sell customers data software services, transportation management, packing, sorting, inspecting, knockdown and assembly services, and the like. Still others—Sumitomo Warehouse in Japan, for instance—are moving into real estate development as the traditional functions of the warehouser dry up. The super-symbolic economy and the spread of extra-intelligence also shake up the transportation sector—railroads, shippers, and truckers. Like warehousers, many truckers are also turning to electronic networks to save themselves. In Japan the move toward short-run factory production and the push for just-in-time delivery means a big surge in short-haul work. And instead of delivering big loads on a once-a-week schedule, the pressure is toward smaller but far more frequent drop-offs. The most rapid growth is seen in door-to-door delivery. What we see, therefore, are all the traditional sectors of the production and distribution system wielding extra-intelligence to stay alive, or as an offensive weapon to extend their power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Technopoly (the surrender of culture to technology) strove furiously to control information because the culture seeks all authority in technology to the point that it is becoming more satisfying to some than God. So much so that people are increasingly allowing technology to control their lives and taking orders from it. As we have discussed, there is a surplus of information, and we just keep generating more tools to help us deal with it. That is how people are now getting their direction and purpose for life. There have, of course, always been experts, even in tool-using cultures. The pyramids, Roman roads, the Strasbourg Cathedral, could hardly have been built without experts. However, the expert in Technopoly has two characteristics that distinguish one from experts of the past. First Technopoly’s experts tend to be ignorant about any matter not directly related to their specialized area. The average psychotherapist, for example, barely has even superficial knowledge of literature, philosophy, social history, art, religion, and biology, and is not expected to have such knowledge. Second, like bureaucracy itself (with which an expert may or may not be connected), Technopoly’s experts claim dominion not only over technical matters but also over social, psychological, and more affairs. In the United States of America, we have experts in how to raise children, how to educate them, how to be lovable, how to responsibly enjoy pleasures of the flesh, how to influence people, how to make friends. There is no aspect of human relations that has not been technicalized and therefore relegated to the control of experts. These special characteristics of the experts arose as a result of three factors. First, the growth of bureaucracies, which, in effect, produced the World’s fist entirely mechanistic specialist and thereby gave credence and prestige to the specialist-as-ignoramus. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Second, the weakening of traditional social institutions, which led ordinary people to lose confidence in the value of tradition. Third, and underlying everything else, the torrent of information which made it impossible for anyone to possess more than a tiny fraction of the sum total of human knowledge. As a college undergraduate, I was told by an enthusiastic professor of German literature that Goethe was the last person who knew everything. I assume she meant, by this astounding remark, less to deify Goethe than to suggest that by the year of his death, 1832, it was no longer possible for even the most brilliant mind to comprehend, let alone integrate, what was known. The role of the expert is to concentrate on one field of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left to assist in solving a problem. This process works fairly well in situations where only a technical solution is required and there is no conflict with human purposes—for example, in space rocketry or the construction of a sewer system. It works less well in situations where technical requirements may conflict with human purposes, as in medicine or architecture. And it is disastrous when applied to situations that cannot be solved by technical means and where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in education, law, family life, and problems of personal maladjustment. I assumes I d not need to convince the reader that there are no experts—there can be no experts—in child-rearing and pleasures of the flesh and friend-making. All of this is a figment of the Technopolist’s imagination, made plausible by the use of technical machinery, without which the expert would be totally disarmed and exposed as an intruder and an ignoramus. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

In 1987, R.S. Becker, J.A. Golovchenko, and B.S. Swartzentruber at AT&T Bell Laboratories announced that they had used an scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to deposit small blobs on a germanium surface. Each blob was thought to consist of one or a few germanium atoms. Shortly thereafter, IBM Almaden researchers John Foster, Jane Frommer, and Patrick Arnett achieved a milestone in STM-based molecular manipulation. Of this team, Foster and Arnett attended the First Foresight Conference in Nanotechnology, where they told us the motivations behind their work. Foster came to IBM from Stanford University, where he had completed a doctorate in physics and taught at graduate school. The STM work was one of his first projects in the corporate World. He describes his colleagues Arnett as a former “semiconductor jock” involved in chip creation at IBM’s Burlington and Yorktown locations. Besides his doctorate in physics, Arnett brought mechanical-engineering training to the effort. Arnett explains what they were trying to do: “We wanted to see if you could do something on an atomic scale, to create a mechanism for storing information and getting it back reliably.” The answer was yes. In January 1988, the journal Nature carried their letter reporting success in pinning an organic molecule to a particular location on a surface, using an STM to form a chemical bond by applying an electrical pulse through the tip. They found that having created and sensed the feature, they could go back and use another voltage pulse from the tip to change the feature again: enlarging it, partly erasing it, or completely removing it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

IMB quickly saw a commercial use, as explained by Paul M. Horn, acting director of physical sciences at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center: “This means you can create a storage element the size of an atom. Ultimately, the ability to do that could lead to storage that is ten million times more dense than anything we have today. A broader vision was given by another researcher, J.B. Pethica, in the issue of Nature in which the work appeared: “The partial era ensure reported by Foster et. al. implied that molecules may have pieces deliberately removed, and in principle be automatically ‘edited,’ thereby demonstrating one of the ideals of nanotechnology.” Can proximal probes move atoms with complete precision? Foster’s group succeeded in pinning single molecules to a surface, but they could not control the results—the position and orientation—precisely. In April 1990, however, another group at the same laboratory carried the manipulation of atoms even further, brining a splash of publicity. Admittedly, the story must have been hard to resist: It was accompanied by an STM picture of the name “IBM,” spelled out with thirty-five precisely places atoms. The precision here is complete, like the precision of molecular assembly: each atom sits in a dimple on the surface of a nickel crystal; it can rest either in one dimple or in another, but never somewhere between. Donald Eigler, the lead author on the Nature paper describing this work, sees clearly where all this is leading: “For decades, the electronics industry has been facing the challenge of how to build smaller and smaller structures. For those of us who will not be using individual atoms as building blocks, the challenge will be how to build up structures atom by atom.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Technical machinery is essential to both the bureaucrat and the expert, and may be regarded as a third mechanism of information control. I do not have in mind such “hard” technologies as the computer—which must, in any case, be treated separately, since it embodies all that Technopoly stands for. I have in mind “softer” technologies such as IQ tests, SATs, standardized forms, taxonomies, and opinion polls. These play a role in reducing the types and quantity of information admitted to a system that often goes unnoticed, and therefore their role in redefining traditional concepts also goes unnoticed. There is, for example, no test that can measures a person’s intelligence. Intelligence is a general term used to denote one’s capacity to solve real-life problems in a variety of novel contexts. It is acknowledged by everyone except experts that each person varies greatly in such capacities, from consistently effective to consistently ineffective, depending on the kinds of problems requiring solution. If, however, we are made to believe that a test can reveal precisely the quantity of intelligence a person has, then, for all institutional purposes, a score on a test becomes one’s intelligence. The test transforms an abstract and multifaceted meaning into a technical and exact term that leaves out everything of importance. One might even say that an intelligence test is a tale told by an expert, signifying nothing. Nonetheless, the expert relies on our believing in the reality of technical machinery, which means we will reify the answers generated by the machinery. We come to believe that our score is our intelligence, or our capacity for creativity or love or pain. We come to believe that the results of opinion polls are what people believe, as if our beliefs can be encapsulated in such sentences as “I approve” and “I disapprove.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Political movements with single charismatic leaders are usually always more suitable and efficient for television. When a movement has no leader or focus, television needs to create one. Mao is simpler to transmit than Chinese communism. Chavez is better television than farm workers. Steinem is better than women. Graham is better than Christianity. Erhard is better than “human potential movement.” Hitler is easier to convey than fascism. Nader is easier than consumerism. Trump is better than corruption. The one is easier than the many. The personality of the symbol is easier than the philosophy. The philosophy requires depth, time, development, and in some cases, sensory information. This remains true unless the many are made into copies of each other. Then, the one is the same as the many. For the same reasons, hierarchy is easier to report upon than democracy or collectivity. The former is focused and has a specific form: leaders and followers. Only the leaders need to be interviewed. Democratic or collective forms need to be interviewed. Democratic or collective forms involve flow processes with power constantly shifting. Television reporters do not have time to interview everyone. And this is how technology is controlling our lives. Superficiality is easier than depth. Short subjects with beginnings and ends are simpler to transmit than extended and multifaceted information. The conclusion is simpler than the process. But getting what you prefer is not easy. There are two reasons. In the first place, you have to get another individual to help—even though the other individual is better off in the short run by not helping. In the second place, you are tempted to get whatever help you can without providing any costly help yourself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

The main results of Cooperation Theory are encouraging. They show that cooperation can get started by even a small cluster of individuals who are prepared to reciprocate cooperation, even in a World where no one else will cooperate. The analysis also shows that the two key requisites for cooperation to thrive are that the cooperation be based on reciprocity, and that the shadow of the future is important enough to make this reciprocity stable. However, once cooperation based on reciprocity is established in a population, it can protect itself from invasion by uncooperative strategies. We want the government of the United States of America to exempt our people from ALL taxation as long as we are deprived of equal justice under the law of the land. We want equal education—but separate schools up for 16 for boys and 18 for girls on the condition that the girls be sent to women’s colleges and universities. Under such a schooling system, we believe we will make a better nation of people. The United States of America’s government should provide, free, all necessary textbooks and equipment, schools and college buildings. It is encouraging to see that cooperation can get started, can thrive in a variegated environment, and can protect itself once established. However, what is most interesting is how little had to be assumed about the individuals or the social setting to establish these rules. The individuals do not have to be rational: the evolutionary process allows the successful strategies to thrive, even if the individuals do not know why or how. Nor do the individuals have to exchange messages or commitments: they do not need words, because their deeds speak for them. Likewise, there is no need to assume trust between individuals: the use of reciprocity can be enough to make defection unproductive. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Altruism is not needed: successful strategies can elicit cooperation even from an egoist. Finally, no central authority is needed: cooperation based on reciprocity can be self-policing. The emergence, growth, and maintenance of cooperation do require some assumptions about the individuals and the socials setting. They require an individual to be able to recognize another individual who has been dealt with before. They also require that one’s prior history of interactions with this person an be remembered, so that an individual can be responsive. Actually, these requirements for recognition and recall are not as stong as they might seem. Even bacteria can fulfill them by interacting with only one other organism and using a strategy (such as TIT FOR TAT) which responds only to the recent behaviour of the other individual. And if bacteria can play games, so can people and nations. For cooperation to prove stable, the future must have a sufficiently large shadow. This means that importance of the next encounter between the same two individuals must be great enough to make defection an unprofitable strategy when the other player is provocable. It requires that the players have a large enough chance of meeting again and that they do not discount the significance of their next meeting to greatly. For example, what made cooperation possible in the trench warfare of World War I was the fact that the same small units from opposite sides of noman’s land would be in contact for long periods of time, so that if one side broke the tacit understandings, then the other side could retaliate against the same unit. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Finally, the evolution of cooperation requires that successful strategies can thrive and that there be a source of variation in the strategies which are being used. These mechanisms can be classical Darwinian survival of the fittest and the mutation, but they can also involve more deliberate processes such as imitation of successful patterns of behavior and intelligence designed new strategic ideas. In the most ancient part of the Avesta, the hymnlike speeches and discourses of Zarathustra, we read of the two primal moving spirits: the good, good in disposition, in word and in work, and the evil, evil in disposition, in word and in work. “Twins through sleep” they were, “as was heard,” that is, erstwhile sleeping companions in the womb of their origin. However, when they were in opposition to one another, and the benignant spirit spoke to the wicked one: “Neither our sentiments nor our judgements, neither our inclinations nor our intentions, neither our words nor our works, neither ourselves nor our souls are in concord.” And they further established, confronting each other, life and death together, and that ultimately for the adherents of deception there exists the most evil, but for the adherents of truth the best disposition. So these two spirits then chose: the deceitful one chose to do that which is most evil, but the most benignant spirit, he who is clad in the hardest Heavens, chose being-true. “Therefore, hold up your light that it may shine unto the World. Behold I am the light which ye shall hold up—that which yet have seen me do. Behold ye see that I have prayed unto the Father, and ye have all witnessed. Ans ye see that I have commanded that none of you should go away, but rather have commanded that ye should come unto me, that ye might feel and see; even so shall ye do unto the World; and whosoever breaketh this commandment suffereth himself to be led into temptations,” reports 3 Nephi 18.25-26. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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They Will Cry Their Eyes Out if We Sink the Lighthouse

Many Americans attend college. The University provides a way our as well as a model of reform. If not easy to carry out or even keep in mind, its task is thus defined. It is, in the first place, always to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving—by keeping alive—the works of those who best addressed these questions. In the Middle Ages, Aristotle was very much present in the minds of the leading elements of society. He was used as an authority almost on a level with the Church Fathers and was assimilated to them. This was, of course, an abuse of Aristotle, who thought that authority is the contrary of philosophy. His own teachings ought always to be approached with questions and doubts, not faith. The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favour of individual human reason. Nevertheless, Aristotle was there, his moderate and sensible views had an effect on the World, and he could be a guide to those who came to have philosophic doubt. In our time, freedom from authority and the independence of reason are commonplaces. Aristotle, however, instead of being properly used—now that we have the proper disposition—has to all intents and purposes disappeared. We would hardly be able to use Aristotle, as did Hegel, to grasp the character of modernity. Instead we are more and more restricted to the narrow experience of the here and now, with a consequent loss of perspective. The disappearance of Aristotle has much less to do with his intrinsic qualities than with a political distaste for him, joined with the lack of intellectual discipline that results from a sense of self-sufficiency. Reason has become a prejudice for us. Rousseau noted that in his time many men were liberals who a century earlier would have been religious fanatics. He concluded that they were not really reasonable but, rather, conformists. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worse form of prejudice. The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself, by being the model of true openness. Hence, without having the answers, the university knows what openness is and knows the questions. It also knows the regime within which it lives, and the kinds of threats this regime poses to its activity. In a democracy it risks less by opposing the emergent, the changing and the ephemeral than by embracing them, because the society is already open to them, without monitoring what it accepts or sufficiently respecting the old. There the university risks less by having intransigently high standards than by trying to be too inclusive, because the society tends to blur standards in the name of equality. It also risks less by concentrating on the heroic than by looking to the commonplace, because the society levels. In an aristocracy the university would probably have to go in a direction opposite to the one taken in a democracy in order to liberate reason. However, in an aristocracy the university is a less important institution than in a democratic society, because there are other centers for the life of the mind, whereas in a democracy there is practically no other center, practically no way of life, calling or profession, that requires or encourages or even permits cultivation. This is increasingly the case in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The university as an institution must compensate for what individuals lack in a democracy and must encourage its members to participate in its spirit. As the repository of the regime’s own highest faculty and principle, it must have a strong sense of its importance outside the system of equal individuality. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The university must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy—the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature. It must concentrate on philosophy, theology, the literary classics, and on those scientists like Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz who have the most comprehensive scientific vision and a sense of the relation of what they do to the order of the whole of things. These must help preserve what is most likely to be neglected in a democracy. They are not dogmatisms but precisely the opposite: what is necessary to fight dogmatism. The University is only one interest among many and must always keep its eye on that interest for fear of compromising it in the desire to be more useful, more relevant, more popular. The university’s task is illustrated by two tendencies of the democratic mind. One is abstractness. Because there is no tradition and men need guidance, general theories that are produced in a day and not properly grounded in experience, but seem to explain things and are useful crutches for finding one’s way in a complicated World, have currency. Marxism, Freudianism, economism, behaviouralism, et cetera, are examples of this tendency, and there are great rewards for those who purvey them. The very university of democracy and the sameness of man presupposed by it encourage this tendency and make the mind’s eye less sensitive to differences. The terms we have discussed in the past are evidences of this abstractness, simulacra of thought and experience, hardly better than slogans, which take the place of reflection. In aristocracies men take the experiences of their nations as unique and superior and tend not to generalize, but rather to forget the natural community of men and the universality of thought. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

However, they do really pay attention to their experiences, to the diversity of phenomena that is homogenized by abstract “mind-sets.” This is another thing the democratic university must learn from aristocracies. Our temptation is to prefer the shiny new theory to the fully cognized experience. Even our famous empiricism is more of a theory than an openness to experience. Producing theories is not theorizing, or a sign of theoretical life. Concreteness, not abstractness, is the hallmark of philosophy. All interesting generalization must proceed from the richest awareness of what is to be explained, but the tendency to abstractness leads to simplifying the phenomena in order more easily to deal with them. If, for example, one sees only gain as a motive in men’s actions, then it is easy to explain them. One simply abstracts from what is really there. After a while one notices nothing other than the postulated motives. To the extent that men begin to believe in the theory, they no longer believe that there are other motives in themselves. And when social policy is based on such a theory, finally one succeeds in producing men who fit the theory. When this is occurring or has occurred, what is most needed is the capacity to recover the original nature of man and his motives, to see what does not fit the theory. Hobbes’s mercenary account of the virtues, which won out in psychology, needs to be contrasted with Aristotle’s account, which preserves the independent nobility of the virtues. Hobbes was thinking of Aristotle, which we never do, when he developed his teaching. In order to restore what was really a debate, and thereby restore the phenomenon man, one must read Aristotle and Hobbes together and look at what each saw in man. Then one has the material on which to reflect. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

For modern men who live in a World transformed by abstractions and who have themselves been transformed by abstractions, the only way to experience man again is by thinking these abstractions through with the help of thinkers who did not share them and who can lead us to experiences that are difficult or impossible to have without their help. A related problem is a tendency in the social sciences to prefer deterministic explanations of events to those that see them as results of human deliberation and choice. This tendency is a consequence of the impotence of the individual in egalitarian society. Curiously, in democracy, the freest of societies, men turn out to be more willing to accept doctrines that tell them that they are determined, that is, not free. No one by oneself seems to be able, or have the right, to control events, which appear to be moved by impersonal forces. In aristocracies, on the other hand, individuals born to high position have too great a sense of their control over what they appear to command, are sure of their freedom and despise everything that might seem to determine them. Neither the aristocratic nor democratic sentiment about the causes of events is simply adequate. In a democracy where men already think they are weak, they are too open to theories that teach them they are weak, which, by making individuals think that controlling action is impossible, have the effect of weakening them further. That is why we are encouraging you all to be proud Americans again. Have pride in your flag, the national anthem, America cars, food and produced and goods and services produced in America. Do not allow yourselves to be colonized by a spirit of doom and gloom. Do not allow the joker and the riddler to control your streets, airwaves, radio, and politics. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Remember, this is a country of agriculture, it is the land of the free and the home of the brave. Go back to being like the Americans of the 1950s, who loved their suburban communities, and their American cars and new they were great and kind people. “Winter comes calling. The temperature’s falling. A fear is crawling. Don’t quit, we’re all in. The ship’s a mile out. Don’t blow the lights out. They’ll cry their eyes out, if we sink the lighthouse. Since fear itself is cruel and selfish—a contradiction—you tried to shout out my words in your mouth. We’re hard on the angel’s heels, with fire and brimstone wheels. The meadow starts with bones, and flowers and tears. With darkness closing, we’re decomposing. We’re made of starlight. From cruel and dark night, the guilty crushed out. We’re left in no doubt. They’ll cry their eyes out if we sink the lighthouse,” by Above & Beyond, “Sink the Lighthouse,” featured artist: Alex Vargas, Album: We are All We Need, 2015. The lighthouse represents American. The antidote is again the classic, the heroic—Homer, Plutarch. At the outset they appear hopelessly naïve to us. However, it is our sophisticated naivete that makes us think that. Churchill was inspired b his ancestor Marlborough, and his confidence in his own action is inconceivable without the encouragement to his education. And Shakespeare learned a large part of what he knew about statesmanship from Plutarch. This is intellectual genealogy of modern heroes. The democratic revolution of the mind extinguishes such old family lines and replaces them with decision-making theory, in which there is no category for statesmanship, let alone heroes. To sum up, there is one simple rule for the university’s activity: it need not concern itself with providing its students with experiences that are available in democratic society. They will have them in any event. It must provide them with experiences they cannot have there. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Old writers may not have been perfect, but they could best make us aware of our imperfections, which is what counts for us. The universities never performed this function very well. Now they have practically ceased trying. There is an Armageddon cult whose cosmology is trying to depress America. It is a bloodthirsty, orgiastic, mind-bending cult under the direction of a special interest group. Much more frightening than Manson could ever be in that it is able to successfully maintain a façade of eccentric legitimacy while secretly conducting vicious human sacrifices to its gods. The cult has been conducting cannibalistic rites on American citizens in the shadows and in secret so that Americans will give of their rights, give up capitalism, and become under control of communism. It is a lot like the Four Pi movement, which is 12.56 numerically. The rites are bloody and orgiastic. The goal is to transfix people, get them to become apathetic and make them feel a sense of entitlement so that they will release the fiend that lies dormant within one, for it is strong and ruthless and its power is far beyond the bounds of human frailty. The cult’s literature is repeated and the Process leaders reputedly envision the cult members coming together as groups of future shock troops in the coming Armageddon. The cult is into murder and mayhem. They teach their members that by spreading violence and chaos, they will help to fulfill the prophecies of Armageddon and speed up the Final Judgment. Also, many of these heinous criminals who are labeled as “lone wolves” are actually not. In many cases they are part of an organization that traffics in drugs and pornography with aims to spread panic and destruction, and are also connection to crimes before and after those who are labeled as lone wolves commit an act of violence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The high value of the evil urge finds its strongest expression in an interpretation of the scriptural verse (Genesis 1, 31) which assets that God, on the evening of the day on which He had created man, looked upon all He had made and found it “very good”: this “very good” applies to the evil urge, whereas the good one only earns the predicate “good”; of the two, it is the evil urge which is fundamental. However, that it is called the evil urge derives from man’s having made it so. Thus Kain (as is said in the Midrash) might indeed respond to the God who was calling him to account that it was He, God, Himself who had implanted in him the evil urge; but the rejoinder would be untrue, since only through him, man, did it become evil. It became so, and continually becomes so, because man separates it from its companion and in this condition of independence makes an idol of precisely that which was intended to serve him. Man’s task, therefore, is not to extirpate the evil urge, but to reunite it with the good. David, who did not dare to stand up to it and therefore “slew” it in himself—as it runs in one of his Psalms (109.22): “My heart is pierced through within me”—did not fulfill it, but Abraham, whose whole heart was found faithful before God, who now made a covenant with him (Nehemiah 9.8) did. Man is bidden (Deuteronomy 6.5): “Love the Lord with all thine heart,” and that means, with thy two united urges. The evil urge must also be included in the love of God thus and thus only does it become perfect, and thus and thus only does man become once more as he was created: “very good.” To achieve this, however, man must begin by harnessing both urges together in the service of God. As when a person who is less affluent possess two oxen, one that has already ploughed and one that has not yet ploughed, and now a new field is to be cultivated: he brings both of them together beneath the yoke. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

However, how is the evil urge to be prevailed upon to permit this to happen to it? Why, it is nothing but a crude ore, which must be placed in the fire in order to be moulded: so let it be totally immersed in the great fire of the Tora. And that also man cannot do of his own strength; we must pray to God to assist us to do His will with our hearts. Therefore the Psalmist beseeches (86.11): “Unite my heart to fear Thy name”; for fear is the gateway to love. This important doctrine cannot be understood as long as good and evil are conceived, as they usually are, as two diametrically opposite forces or directions. Its meaning is not revealed to us until we recognize them as similar in nature, the evil “urge” as passion, that is, the power peculiar to man, without which he can neither beget nor bring forth, but which, left to itself, remains without direction and leads astray, and the “good urge” as pure direction, in other words, as an unconditional direction, that towards God. To unite the two urges implies: to equip the absolute potency of passion with the one direction that renders it capable of great love and of great service. Thus and not otherwise can man become whole. Although there are wonderful surprises from the human organization, the latest and most potent creation and miracle-worker of the commercialized intellect will not be able to spread more love until we unite out urges. We have many wonderful transportation-systems, in manufactures, in systems of communication, in news-gathering, book-publishing, journalism; in protecting labour; in oppressing labour; in herding the national parities and keeping the sheep docile and usable; in closing the public service against brains and character; in electing purchasable legislatures, blatherskite Congresses, and city governments which rob the town and sell municipal protection to gamblers, thieves, men and women of the evening, and professional seducers for cash. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

It is a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life; replaces its contentment, its poetry, its soft romance-dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned them into necessities, it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies none of them; it has dethroned God and set up a shekel in His place. Religion has removed from the heart to the mouth. You have the word of Noah for it. Time was, when two sects, divided but by a single hair of doctrine, would fight for that hair, would kill, torture, persecute for it, suffer for it, starve for it, die for it. That religion was in the heart; it was vital, it was a living thing, it was the very man himself. Who fights for his religion now, but with the mouth? Your civilization has brought the flood. Noah has said it, and he is preparing. “And when the multitude had eaten and were filled, he said unto the disciples: Behold there shall one be ordained among you, and to him will I give power that he shall break bread and bless it and give it unto the people of my church, unto all those who shall believe and baptized in my name. And this ye shall always observe to do, even as I have done, even as I have broken bread and blessed it and given it unto you. And this shall ye do in remembrance of my body, which I have showed unto you. And it shall be a testimony unto the Father that ye do always remember me. And if ye do always remember me ye shall have my Spirit be with you,” reports # Nephi 18.5-7. Religion can be considered a bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is not in principle a social institution; nor are all institutions that reduce information by excluding some kinds or sources necessarily bureaucracies. Schools may exclude dianetics and astrology; courts exclude hearsay evidence. They do so for substantive reasons having to do with the theories on which these institutions are based. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

However, bureaucracy has no intellectual, political, or moral theory—except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goals are essentially less worthy, if not irrelevant. That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a “tyranny” and C.S. Lewis identified it with Hell. The transformation of bureaucracy from a set of techniques designed to serve social institutions to an autonomous metainstitution that largely serves itself came as a result of several developments in the mid- and late-nineteenth century: rapid industrial growth, improvements in transportation and communication, the extension of government into ever-larger realms of public and business affairs, the increasing centralization of governmental structures. To these were added, in the twentieth century, the information explosion and what we might call the “bureaucracy effect”: as techniques for managing information became more necessary, extensive, and complect, the number of people and structures required to manage those techniques grew, and so did the amount of information generated by bureaucratic techniques. This created the need for bureaucracies to manage and coordinate bureaucracies, then for additional structures and techniques to manage the bureaucracies that coordinated bureaucracies, and so on—until bureaucracy became, to borrow again from Karl Kraus’s comment on psychoanalysis, the disease for which it purported to cure. Along the way, it ceased to be merely a servant of social institutions and became their master. Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are—and they are always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of efficiency. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

As Lewis suggests, this makes bureaucracies exceedingly dangerous, because, though they were originally designed to process only technical information, they now are commonly employed to address problems of a moral, social, and political nature. The bureaucracy of the nineteenth century was largely concerned with making transportation, industry, and the distribution of goods more efficient. Technopoly’s bureaucracy has broken loose from such restrictions and now claims sovereignty over all of society’s affairs. This may be because so many people find the most appropriate type of daily life for them is a day by day World of destruction. Peace has become the most difficult and abnormal state of many civilizations to live in. No moment is so dazzling to them as when everyday imaginings concerning death and danger and World destruction are transformed into duty. Magnanimity perishes during long periods of peace and, in its stead, there develop cynicism, apathy, weariness, and, at most, spiteful raillery…Honour, humaneness, self-sacrifices are still being respected, valued, and rated highly immediately after war, but the longer peace lasts—the dimmer, the more withered, the more torpid all these beautiful magnanimous things grow, while wealth and the spirit of acquisition take possession of everything. At length, there is nothing left but hypocrisy—hypocrisy of honour, of self-sacrifice, of duty, so that these will still be respected, despite all the cynicism, but merely in boastful phases and as a matter of form. There will be no more genuine honour, and nothing but formulas will be left. Formulas of honour mean the death of honour. The peril we face in trusting social, moral, and political affairs to bureaucracy may be highlighted by reminding ourselves what a bureaucrat does. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

As the World’s history suggests, a bureaucrat is little else than a glorified counter. The French word bureau first meant a cloth for covering a reckoning table, then the table itself, then the room in which the table was kept, and finally the office and staff that ran the entire counting room or house. The word “bureaucrat” has come to mean a person who by training, commitment, and even temperament is indifferent to both the content and the totality of a human problem. The bureaucrat considers the implications of a decision only to the extent that the decision will affect the efficient operations of the bureaucracy, and takes no responsibility for its human consequences. Thus, Adolf Eichmann becomes the basic model and metaphor for a bureaucrat in the age of Technopoly. When faced with dangerous crimes against humanity, he argued that he had no part in the formulation of Nazi political or sociological theory; he dealt only with the technical problems of moving vast numbers of people from one place to another. Why they were being moved and, especially, what would happen to them when they arrived at their destination were not relevant to his job. Although the jobs of bureaucrats in today’s Technopoly given five thousand times a day in America alone: I have no responsibility for the human consequences of my decisions. I am only responsible for the efficiency of my part of the bureaucracy, which must be maintained at all costs. Eichmann, it must also be noted, was an expert. And expertise is a second important technical means by which Technopoly strives furiously to control information. Japan worries. To the outside World it often seems economically invincible. However, things look different from inside. It has no energy supplies of its own, grows little food, and is highly sensitive to trade restrictions. If the yen goes down, it worked. If the yen goes up, it worries. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

However, individual Japanese do not just worry about the economy in general. They also worry about their own future. So they are among the World’s biggest savers. And they buy massive amounts of insurance. For a long time the chief beneficiaries of all this anxiety were the giant insurance companies. Today, however, it is the insurers who are doing the worrying. The government is opening the door that once kept out competition from Japan’s aggressive securities brokers. Tough, World-class companies like Nomura and Daiwa, the Merrill Lynches or Shearsons of Japan, are preparing to move in on the insurance industry’s turf. Topping that off, the entire insurance field is in an uproar of change. Customers are demanding all sorts of newfangled policies and financial services which these venerable giants—Nippon Life is over one hundred years old—find hard to create and manage. To deal with threats like these, the big insurance firms have begun laying down an electronic line of defense. Nippon Life is betting nearly half a billion dollars on a new information system that adds 5,000 PCs, 1,500 larger computers for its satellite offices, mega-machines for branches and headquarters, plus optical scanners and other equipment, all plugged together in a single network that will allow agents in the field to dial up central data banks, respond to synthesized voice commands on the phone, and get facsimile printouts of the data they need about customer or policies. Meanwhile, Meiji Mutual, with its 38,000 agents, mainly women, is also racing to arm itself with the weaponry of communications. Nor are the insurance companies alone. All of Japan, it would seem, is going electronic. Writes Datamation: “Major service companies are installing networks with 5,000 or more PCs and workstations in every corner of Japan.” Say Meiji’s Toshiyuki Nakamura: “If we don’t…we might lose everything.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Nakamura is right. For as electronic networks spread, power is beginning to shift. And not just in Japan. The United States of America and Europe, too, are wiring up as never before. It is the electronic race of the century. Japan’s high-tech manufacturing miracle brought in such immense amounts of money and sent the yen spiraling so high that Japanese companies began investing heavily in factories in Taiwan, South Korea and, in time, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines—helping to kick-start the development process in what soon were called Newly Industrialized Countries, or NICs. In effect, Japan had begun off-loading its low-tech, low-value production to neighbouring countries with more affordable labour, while it upshifted more and more to knowledge-based operations. Japan was not the only spigot from which direct investment flowed into Asia. Nonetheless, by the 1980s, according to the Library of Congress Country Studies, Japan had, in fact, “displaced the United States as the largest provider of investment and economic aid” in the Asia-Pacific region. In all, Japan poured more than $123 billion into Asian neighbours between 1980 and 2000. It is difficult to determine precisely how many new manufacturing and related service jobs in these Asian countries are specifically attributable to the influx of investment from Japan, America and Europe. Or to the next step, when South Korea and Taiwan themselves began investing in their less affluent neighbours—setting in motion a developmental chain reaction spilling over from the United States of America to Japan to these other countries. The result was the flow of billions of dollars into agrarian economies in the region where some of the World’s worst poverty existed. In each of these recipient countries, we saw the same classic process at work—the shift of the workforce from agriculture to industry. In South Korea as late as 1970, 51 percent of the labour force was still in agriculture. By 2000, the number was down to 9 percent, while manufacturing employment had risen to 22 percent. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In Taiwan during the same period, the shift went down from 37 percent to rural to 7 percent, as the industrial workforce swelled to 35 percent. Malaysia went from more than 50 percent in agriculture to 16 percent, with manufacturing jumping to 27 percent. Similar, though less dramatic, shifts occurred in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In each case, too, it was not just money that was transferred. With it came what economist William Easterly, formerly of the World Bank, has called “leakage”—a diffusion of knowledge, not just about technologies, but about finance, about markets and marketing, about import-export rules and business in general. The net effect of this massive transfer of industrial-age activities and know-how has been to raise multitudes of the World’s least affluent people out of the most extreme poverty. Ending up struggling in urban slums may hardly seem like progress to people with full bellies. However, for most of the Asian millions driven off the land by drought, hunger and disease, going back would be worse. And they know it. This process, during which countries transitioning toward knowledge economies transferred some of their manufacturing to less affluent, mainly agrarian countries from Asia to Latin America, had important corollaries. The recipient countries saw lengthened life expectancy, a general decline in infant mortality and reduced rates of population growth, the latter a key factor in the poverty equation. Between 1960 and 1999, per capita food production in the World grew by nearly 25 percent, and the number of those surviving on less than 2,100 calories a day—the threshold used to define malnutrition—plunged by 75 percent. Not incidentally, during roughly the same period, East Asians, starting from an admittedly low case, saw a 400 percent increase in average real incomes. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

The gains made by these and other poor countries, and not merely in Asia but in Latin America and elsewhere, are not the result of the softhearted benevolence of the rich World. These external inputs of capital—accompanied by hand-me-down relevant knowledge—would have had little impact without the brains, energy, hard work, ideas, entrepreneurialism and struggle of leaders and ordinary people in the least affluent countries themselves. Overall, however, what we find is a remarkable case of trickle-down economics—which for reasons that were unanticipated and unintentional actually worked, and not just in Asia. Yet an important question remains: How much of this anti-poverty progress in recent decades would have happened had the computer never been invented and the latest revolutionary wealth system never arrived? The story, moreover, does not end with this question hanging in the air. For none of what we have seen here so far fully explains the turbo-powered rise of Asia—or tells us what happens next as Africa, China, and Indian burst onto the World scene. To those thinking in terms of nanotechnology, STMs immediately looked promising not only for seeing atoms and molecules but for manipulating them. This idea soon became widespread among physicists. As Calvin Quate stated in Physics Today in 1986, “Some of us believe that the scanning tunneling microscope will evolve. That one day [it] will be used to write and read patterns of molecular size.” This approach was suggested as a path to molecular nanotechnology in Engines of Creation, again in 1986. By now, whole stacks of scientific papers document the use of STM and AFM tips to scratch, melt, erode, indent, and otherwise modify surfaces on a nanometer scale. These operations move atoms around, but with little control. They amount to bulk operations on a tiny scale—one fine scratch a few dozen atoms wide, instead of the billions that result from conventional polishing operations. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

As way of drawing together the technical limits and tendencies of television technology so that a pattern emerges, we need to consider some miscellaneous inherent biases. War is better television than peace. It is filled with highlighted moments, contains action and resolution, and delivers a powerful emotion: fear. Peace is amorphous and broad. The emotions connected with it are subtle, personal and internal. These are far more difficult to televise. Violence is better TV than nonviolence. When there is a choice between objective events (incidents, data) and subjective information (perspectives, thoughts, feelings), the objective event will be chosen. It is more likely to take visual form. Cars (and most commodities) are more visible on television, and come across with less information loss, than any living thing, aside from human faces. The smaller a plant or creature, or the more complex an image it presents, the harder it is to convey and the less likely it is to be chosen. Cars, like most urban forms, offer a clean, straight, uncomplicated message. They communicate their essence more efficiently than plants do. We are bound to have more images of cars and urban forms on television than natural environments and creates. Religions with charismatic leaders such as Billy Graham, Jesus Christ, Reverend Moon, Maharishi or L. Ron Hubbard, Joel Ostin, are far simpler to handle on television than leaderless or nature-based religions like Zen Buddhism, Christian Science, Native Americans (however, European Americans now considered themselves Native Americans and the Native Americans are referred to as Indigenous people), or druidism, or, for that matter, atheism. Single, all-powerful gods, or individual godlike figures are simpler to describe because they have highly defined characteristics. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Nature-based religions are dependent upon a gestalt of human feeling and perceptual exchanges with the planet. To be presented on television, they would need to be too simplified to retain meaning. To study different aspects of the evolutionary process, different methodological tools have been used. One set of questions asked about the destination of the evolutionary process. To study this, the concept of collective (or evolutionary) stability was used to study where the evolutionary process would stop. The idea was to determine which strategies could not be invaded if they were used by everyone. The virtue of this approach is that it allowed a good specification of which types of strategies can protect themselves, and under what conditions this protection can work. For example, it was shown that TIT FOR TAT would be collectively stable if the shadow of the future were large enough, and that the strategy of always defecting would be collectively stable under all possible conditions. The power of the collective stability approach is that it allows a consideration of all possible new strategies, whether minor variants of the common strategy or completely new ideas. The limitation of the stability approach is that it only tells what will last once established, but it does not tell what will get established in the first place. Since many different strategies can be collectively stable once established in a population, it is important to know which strategies are likely to get established in the first place. For this a different methodology was need. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

To see what is likely to get established in the first place, the emphasis must be placed upon the variety of things that can happen at once in a population. Since the process of getting fully established is likely to take a considerable amount of time, another kind of technique was used to study the changing prospects of strategies as their social environments of changes. This technique was an ecological analysis, which calculated what would happen if each generation had strategies growing in frequency in proportion to their success in the previous generation. This was an ecological approach because it introduced no new strategies, but instead determined the consequences over hundreds of generations of the variety of strategies already represented in society. It allowed for an analysis of whether the strategies that were successful in the beginning would remain successful after the poor performers had dropped out. The growth of the successful strategies in each generation could be thought of as due to either better survival and reproduction of the users of that strategy, or due to a greater chance of being imitated by others. In the territorial system, determination of what is successful is local. Each location which has a more successful neighbour adopts the strategy of the most successful of its neighbours. As in the ecological simulation, this growth of the more successful can be attributed to either better survival and reproduction, or to greater chance of being imitated by others. The Process incorporated the ideas of a number of its ancestors and current occupants of the occult landscape. Accordingly, there was an intermingling of philosophy, membership, and networking among the groups. The Solar Lodge, a secret magical society. The Brayton cult operated a boardinghouse near the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles and recruited members from the student body there. The cult was broken up when a Riverside Country sheriffs raided the Blythe commune and found a six-year-old boy chained in a packing crate. Getting what you want is not easy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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It Was What We Are Really Paid for

Anyone can see and touch the telephone or computer on the nearest desk. This is not true of the networks that connect them to the World. Thus we remain, for the most part, ignorant about the high-speed advances that are fashioning them into something resembling the nervous system of our society. If not downright balderdash, the networks that Morse, Western Union, Bell, and others set up when they first began stringing wires were unsophisticated. Common sense taught that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. So engineers sought this straight line, and messages sent from one city to another were always sent over this pathway. As these first-stage networks expanded, however, it was discovered that in the World of the network, a straight line is not necessarily the best way to get a message from one place to another. In fact, more messages could flow faster if, instead of always sending a call, say, from Tallahassee to Atlanta via the same route, the network could count the calls in each leg of the system and then shunt the Atlanta-bound call onto available lines, sending it as far away as New Orleans or even St. Louis, rather than delaying it because the shortest straight-line route happened to be busy. Primitive though it was, this was an early injection of “intelligence” or “smarts” into the system, and it meant, in effect, that the entire system leaped to a second stage of development. This breakthrough led to many additional innovations, often of marvelous ingenuity, that eventually allowed the telephone network to monitor many more things about itself, to check its components and anticipate and even diagnose breakdowns. It was as though a once-dead or inert organism suddenly began checking its own blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rate. The network became self-aware. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Crisscrossing the entire planet, with wires running into hundreds of millions of homes, with whole copper mines of cable snaking under the streets of cities, with complex switching systems and transmission technologies in them, these second-stage networks, constantly refined, improved, extended, and given more and more intelligence, were among the true marvels of the industrial age. Because they are largely invisible to the ordinary user, our civilization has radically underestimated the congealed brilliance and conceptual beauty of these hidden networks as well as their evolutionary significance. For while some human populations still lack even the most rudimentary telephone service, researchers are already hard at work on another revolutionary leap in telecommunications—the creation of even more sophisticated third-stage networks. Nowadays, as millions of computers are plugged into them, from giant Crays to tiny laptops, as new networks continually spring up, as they are linked to form a denser and denser interconnected mesh, a still higher level of intelligence or “self-awareness” is needed to handle the incredibly vast volumes of information pulsing through them. As a result, researchers are racing to make networks even more self-aware. Their goal is so-called neural networks. These will not only route and reroute messages, but actually learn from their own past experience, forecast where and when heavy loads will be, and then automatically expand or contract sections of the network to match the requirements. This is as though the San Diego Freeway or German Autobahn were clever enough to widen and narrow itself according to how many cars it expected at any moment. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Yet even before this major effect is complete, another even more gigantic leap is being taken. We are moving not into a fourth-stage system, but to another kind of intelligence altogether. Until now, even the smartest networks, including the new neural networks, had only what might be called “intra-intelligence.” All their “smarts” were aimed inward. Intra-intelligence is like the intelligence embedded in our own autonomic nervous system, which regulates the involuntary operations of the body, such as heartbeat and hormonal secretions—the functions we seldom think about, but which are necessary to sustain life. Intra-intelligent networks deliver the message precisely as sent. Scientists and engineers struggle to maintain the purity of the message, fighting to eliminate any “noise” that might garble or alter the message. They may scramble it or digitize it or packetize it (id est, break it into short spurts) to get it from here to there. However, they reconstitute it again at the receiving end. And the message content remains the same. Today we are reaching beyond intra-intelligence toward networks that might be called “extra-intelligent.” They do not just transfer data. They analyze, combine, repackage, or otherwise alter messages, sometimes creating new information along the way. Thus massaged or enhanced, what comes out the other end is different from what is fed in—changed by software embedded in the networks. These are the so-called “Value Added Networks,” or VANs. They are extra-intelligent. At present most VANs merely scramble and rescramble messages to adapt them to different media. For example, in France the Atlas 400 service of France Telecom accepts data from a mainframe computer, say, then repackages it in a form that can be received by a PC, a fax machine, or a videotex terminal. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Not very exciting, it would appear. However, the concept of adding value to a message does not stop with altering its technical characteristics. The French Minitel network, which links 5 million homes and businesses, offers Gatrad, Mitrad, Dilo, and other services that can accept a message in French and automatically deliver it in English, Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, or Dutch—and vice versa. While the translations are still rough, they are workable, and some services also have the specialized vocabularies needed for subjects involving, say, aerospace, nuclear, or political topics. Other networks receive data from a sender, run them through a computerized model, and deliver an “enhance” message to the end-user. A simple hypothetical example illustrated the point. Imagine that a trucking firm based in the outskirts of Paris must regularly dispatch its trucks to forty different European distributors, restocking their shelves with a product. Road conditions and weather differ in various parts of Europe, as do currency exchange rates, gasoline prices, and other factors. In the past each driver calculated the best route, or else phoned the transport company each day for instructions. However, imagine instead that an independent VAN operator—a common carrier—not only can send signals to truck drivers all over Europe, but also collects current information on road conditions, traffic, weather, currencies, and gas prices. The Paris trucker can now load its daily messages and routing instructions onto the VAN for distribution to its drivers. However, the messages, before reaching the drivers, are run through the network’s software program, which automatically adjusts routes to minimize driving time, milage, gas costs, and currency expenses in light of the latest data. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

In this case, the instructions sent by the transport firm to its drivers are altered enroute and “enhanced” before reaching them. The telecommunications carrier firm—the operator of the Value Added Network—has added value by integrating the customer’s message with fresh information, transforming it, and then distributing it. This, however, suggests only the simplest use of an extra-intelligent net. As the networks come to offer more complex services—collecting, integrating, and evaluating data, drawing automatic inferences, and running input through sophisticated models—their potential value soars. In short, we are now looking toward networks whose “smarts” are no longer aimed at changing or improving the network itself but which, in effect, act on the outside World, adding “extra-intelligence” to the messages flowing through them. Still largely a gleam in their architects’ eyes, extra-intelligent nets represent an evolutionary leap to a new level of communication. They also raise to a higher level the sophistication required of their users. For a company to load its messages on a VAN and permit them to be altered without a deep understanding of the assumptions buried in the VAN’s software is to operate on blind faith, rather than rational decision. For hidden biases built into the software can cost a user dearly. Foreign airlines, for example, have complained to the U.S. Department of Transportation that they are discriminated against in the electronic network that thousands of U.S. travel agents use in choosing flights for their clients. Called Sabre, the computerized reservation system is run by AMR Corp., which also owns American Airlines. The system, which monitors reservations on many airlines, has extra-intelligence embedded in it in the form of a software model that tells the travel agent the best available flights. At issue in the complaint were the assumptions built right into this software. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Thus, when a travel agent searches, say, for a flight from Frankfurt, to San Jose, California, her computer screen displays the flights in order depending upon the length of time they take. The shorter the flight the better. However, the Sabre software automatically assumed that changing the planes and transferring from one airline to another takes ninety minutes, irrespective of the actual time required. Since many of their flights to the United States of America required a change of plane and transfer to a domestic American airline, the foreign carriers charged that the hidden premises of the software unfairly penalized those whose interline transfers require less than ninety minutes. For this reason, they argued, their flights were less likely to be chosen by travel agents. In short, the extra-intelligence was biased. Imagine, soon, not a handful of such disputes and networks, but thousands of VANs with tens of thousands of built-in programs and models, continually altering and manipulating millions of messages as they whiz through the economy along these self-aware electronic highways. Britain alone already boasts eight hundred Vans, West Germany seven hundred, and more than five hundred companies in Japan have registered with the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications to operate VANs. The existence of VANs promises to squeeze untold billions of dollars out of today’s costs of production and distribution by slashing red tape, cutting inventory, speeding up response time. However, the injection of extra-intelligence into these fast-proliferating and interlinked nets has a larger significance. It is like the sudden, blinding addition of a cerebral cortex to an organism that never had ones. Combined with the automatic nervous system, it begins to give the organism not merely self-awareness and the ability to change itself, but the ability to intervene directly in our lives, beginning first with our business. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Because of this, networks will take on revolutionary new roles in business and society. And even though, so far as we know, no one has yet used extra-intelligence for pernicious or even criminal purposes, the spread of extra-intelligent networks is still in its infancy, with rules and safeguards yet to be defined. Who knows what will follow? By creating a self-aware electronic neural system that is extra-intelligent, we change the rules of culture as well as business. E-I, as we may call it, will raise perplexing questions about the relationships of data to information and knowledge, about language, about ethics and the abstruse models concealed in software. Rights or redress, responsibility for error or bias, issues of privacy and fairness will all cascade into executive suits and the courts in the years to come as society tries to adapt to the existence of extra-intelligence. As the implications of E-I will someday reach far beyond mere business matters, they should cause deep social, political, and even philosophical reflection. For prodigies of labour, intellect, and scientific imagination that dwarf anything involved in constructing Egyptian pyramids, medieval cathedrals, or Stonehenge are now being poured into the construction of the electronic infrastructure of tomorrow’s super-symbolic society. E-I, as we shall see in the following reports, is already upsetting power relationships in whole sectors of the emerging economy. In the past, economic development and poverty reduction depended mainly on a country’s domestic factors—the availability of capital, local resources and environment, along with the propensity of the population to save, the drive, energy and work habits of the labour force, and so forth. Since the mid-1950s, this has been less and less the case. As the World economy has become more integrated, with trade, people, capital and especially knowledge moving across boundaries, external factors have risen in importance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

And that includes indirect, second-order effects all too often unnoticed or ignored. The future of poverty cannot be understood until these spillover implications are taken into account. A good example can be seen in the amazing chain reaction that helpful fuel Asia’s economic rise—a rise that has seen more than a billion Asians climb above the two-dollar-a-day poverty line in just forty years. The story actually began in the mid-1950s as the United States of America started its development of a knowledge-based wealth system. Across the Pacific, Japan’s industrial economy, having been ground into dust during World War II, was still pathetic. Its defeated military was nonexistent and its politics were shaky at best. At this pivotal moment, the United States of America, facing an ascendant, nuclear-armed Soviet Union, reached a three-part deal with Japan. Militarily, Japan would ally with the United States of America against the threat posed by the communist U.S.S.R. In return, politically, the United States of America would tacitly support the conservative Liberal Democratic Party; economically, it would fling its doors wide open to Japanese exports. The problem with this last point was that Japan had little to sell that Americans might want. Around the World, some Japanese products were not the most desirable at the time. In a British play as late as the 1970s, actor Robert Morley still got a laugh by referring to “typical Japanese muck.” However, by then Japanese exports were no longer “muck.” Japan solved its muck problem by drawing on two largely American innovations. The first involved statistical quality-control methods spread throughout Japan by Joseph M. Juran and W. Edwards Deming during the 1950s and ‘60s. Assembly-line perfection became a national passion. (For their contributions, the emperor awarded both men the Order of the Sacred Treasure.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Quality did not always become a catchword in U.S.A. manufacturing for decade or two, even though Americans were making some of the most durable products known to man. And while Toyotas, Honda, and Nissans used to routinely outrank the cars of Detroit and Europe in J.D. Power quality surveys, Cadillac, Chevy, Ford, Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz are becoming more desirable to the America consumer. The other American contribution was the industrial robot, about which a similar story can be told. In 1956, engineer Joseph F. Engelberger and entrepreneur George C. Devol met one evening over cocktails and discussed I, Robot, Isaac Asimov’s classic science-fiction novel. Together they set up a company, named it Unimation (for “universal automation”), and, five years later, delivered the World’s first working industrial robot. General Motors installed it in its plant outside Trenton, New Jersey, but other American companies showed little enthusiasm for the new computer-driven technology. “I had a hard time with American industrialist[s],” Engelberger later said. By contrast, he continued, “the Japanese caught on right away. That’s why robotics is a $7 billion industry and it’s dominated by Japan.” In 1965, according to the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, “new technologies…became a top priority.” More specifically, by 1970, digital technology, much of it imported from the United States of America, led “in short while to a computerization of the entire manufacturing process,” while robots “gradually eliminated the need for humans to perform dangerous work.” By the late 1970s, according to John A. Kukowski and William R. Bolton in a Japanese Evaluation Center report, “Japan was the World leader in industrial assembly robots, and in 1992 it operated 69 percent of all installed industrial robots in the World, compared with 15 percent operated by Europe and 12 percent by the United States.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

The combination of U.S. technological knowledge and an American hunger for Japanese products, plus Japan’s own technological savvy and underestimated innovativeness, shot adrenaline into its economy. While its factories poured out such consumer products as VCRs, TVs, cameras and stereos, Japan also moved aggressively into semiconductor chips and computer components for the American market, brining itself father toward knowledge-based production. By 1979, Japan was IMB’s chief rival in the manufacture of computers, and a book entitled Japan as No. 1 attracted attention on both sides of the Pacific. The author attributed much of the Japanese corporation’s success to its ravenous hunger for knowledge and its emphasis on training—brining in foreign consultants and sending countless teams out to visit World centers where the most advanced knowledge was being pursued. The first secret of Japanese success was “learning, learning, learning.” The second was creative commercial application of new knowledge. The third was speed. Thus, by the 1980s, Japanese chip technology was advancing so rapidly that Washington slapped trade limits on the importation of Japanese semi-conductors. Cars, consumer electronics, computers, chips, copiers—none of these, on the surface, seemed relevant to the lives of some less affluent people in Asia. Or to the attack of poverty. However, they were. Now, many people are left wondering if microtechnology will lead to nanotechnology? Can bulldozers be used to make wristwatches? At most, they can help to build factories in which watches are made. Though there could be surprises, the relevance of microtechnology to molecular nanotechnology seems similar. Instead, a bottom-up approach is needed to accomplish engineering goals on the molecular scale. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

What are the main tools used for molecular engineering? Almost by definition, the path to molecular nanotechnology must lead through molecular engineering. Working in different disciplines, driven by different goals, researchers are making progress in this field. Chemists are developing techniques able to build precise molecular structures of sorts never before seen. Biochemists are learning to build structures of familiar kinds, such as proteins, to make new molecular objects. In a visible sense, most of the tools used by chemists and biochemists are rather unimpressive. They work on countertops cluttered with dishes, bottles, tubes, and the like, mixing, stirring, heating, and pouring liquids—in biochemistry, the liquid is usually water with a trace of material dissolved in it. Periodically, a bit of liquid is put into a larger machine and s trip of paper comes out with a graph printed on it. As one might guess from this description, research in the molecular sciences is usually much less expensive than research in high-energy physics (with its multibillion-dollar particle accelerators) or research in space (with its multibillion-dollar spacecraft). Chemistry has been called “small science,” and not because of the size of the molecules. Chemists and biochemists advance their field chiefly by developing new molecules that can serve as tools, helping to build or study other molecules. Further advances come from new instrumentation, new ways to examine molecules and determine their structures and behaviours. Yet more advances come from new software tools, new computer-based techniques for predicting how a molecule with a particular structure will behave. Many of these software tools let researchers peer through a screen into simulated molecular Worlds much like those toured in past reports. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Of these fields, it is biomolecular science that is most obviously developing tools that can build nanotechnology, because biomolecules already form molecular machines, including devices resembling crude assemblers. This path is easiest to picture, and can surely work, yet there is no guarantee that it will be fastest: research groups following another path may well win. Each of these paths is being pursued Worldwide, and on each, progress is accelerating. Physicists have recently contributed new tools of great promise for molecular engineering. These are the proximal probes, including the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and the atomic force microscope (AFM). A proximal-probe (and sometimes modify) the surface and any molecules that may be stuck to it. An STM brings a sharp, electrically conducting needle up to an electrically conducting surface, almost touching it. The needle and surface are electrically connected so that a current will flow if they touch, like closing a switch. However, at just what point do soft, fuzzy atoms “touch”? It turns out that a detectable current flows when just two atoms are in tenuous contact—fuzzy fringes barely overlapping—one on the surface and one on the tip of the needle. By delicately maneuvering the needle around over the surface, keeping the current flowing at a tiny, constant rate, the STM can map shape of the surface with great precision. Indeed, to keep the current constant, the needle has to go up and down as it passes over individual atoms. The STM was invented by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, research physicists studying surface phenomena at IMB’s research labs in Zurich, Switzerland. After working through the 1970s, Rohrer and Binnig submitted their first patent disclosure on an STM in mid-1979. In 1982, they produced images of a silicone surface, showing individual atoms. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Ironically, the importance of their work was not immediately recognized: Rohrer and Binnig’s first scientific paper on the new tool was rejected for publication on the grounds that it was “not interesting enough.” Today, STM conferences draw interested researchers by the hundreds from around the World. In 1986—quite promptly as these things go—Binnig and Rohrer were awarded a Noble Prize. The Swedish Academy explained its reasoning: “The scanning tunneling microscope is completely new and we have so far seen only the beginning of its development. It is, however, clear that entirely new fields are opening up for the study of matter. STMs are no longer exotic: Digital Instruments of Santa Barbara, California, sells its system (The Nanoscope@) by mail with an atomic-resolution-or-your-money-back guarantee. Within three years of their commercial introduction, hundreds of STMs had been purchased. How does an AFM work? The related atomic force microscope is even simpler in concept: A sharp probe is dragged over the surface, pressed down gently by a straight spring. The instrument senses motions in the spring (usually optically), and the spring moves up and down whenever the tip is dragged over an atom on the surface. The tip “feels” the surface just like a fingertip in the simulated molecular World. The AFM was invented by Binnig, Quate, and Gerber at Stanford University and IBM in San Jose in 1985. After the success of the STM, the importance of the AFM was immediately recognized. Among other advantages, it works with nonconducting materials. AFM-based devices might be used as molecular manipulators in developing molecular nanotechnology. (Note that AFMs and STMs are not quite as easy to use as these descriptions might suggest. For example, a bad tip or a bad surface can prevent atomic resolution, and pounding on the table is not recommended when such sensitive instruments are in operation. Further, scientists often have trouble deciding just what they are seeing, even when they get a good image.) #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Speaking of images, the bias toward the peaks of television content is possibly most tragic when it comes to news. Since much of life is now removed from our direct experience, the news that we get from afar becomes our total information on the forces that shape and move our lives. That makes the distortions in it a very serious matter. When Walter Cronkite says, “And that’s the way it is,” he is surely aware that that’s the way it is only within those events, only in those aspects that fit the standards of “good television.” Presenting events exactly as they occur does not fit with the requisites of television news….Given the requirement that a network news story have definite order, time and logic, it would be insufficient in most cases to record from beginning to end the natural sequence of events, with all the digression, confusions and inconsistencies that more often than not constitute reality. Cameramen and women seek out the most action-packed moments; and editors then further concentrate the action. Even when an event is characterized by an unexpected low degree of activity, television can create the illusion of great activity. The relatively unenthusiastic reception General MacArthur received in Chicago during his homecoming welcome in 1951 thus appeared to be a massive and frenetic reception on television because all the moments of action were concentrated together. In collapsing the time frame of events and concentrating the action into a continuous flow, television news tends to heighten the excitement of any group or other phenomena it pictures, to the neglect of the more vapid and humdrum elements. Their jobs are to cut out all the dead wood and full moments. The procedure involves routinely eliminating the intervals in which little of visual interest occurs, and compressing the remaining fragments into one continuous montage of unceasing visual action. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

For instance, an attempt by the SDS faction at Columbia University to block the registration of students in September of 1968, involved, according to my observations, a few speeches by SDS leaders, hours of milling about, in which the protest more or less dissipated for lack of interest, and about one minute of violence when five SDS leaders attempted to push their way past two campus patrolmen. The hours of film taken that day by an NBC camera crew recorded various views of the crowd from 9.00 am until the violence at about 2.00 pm, and the minute or so of violent confrontation. However, when the happening was reduced to a two-minute news story for the NBC Evening News, the editors routinely retained the violent scenes, building up to them with quick cuts of speeches and crowd scenes. The process of distilling action from preponderantly inactive scenes was not perceived as any sort of distortion by any of the editors interviewed. On the contrary, most of them considered it to be the accepted function of editing; as one chief editor observed, it was “what we are really paid for.” The results of the bias toward highlighted news content were put even more succinctly by John Birt in TV Guide (August 9, 1975). He points out that some of the elements of news fit the needs of the medium more directly than others, and the result is a serious “bias in understanding…trying to come to grips with the often-bewildering complexity of modern problems…is a formidable task, even without trying to put the result on television; and the failure rate is high. The realities one is seeking are abstract—macroeconomic mechanisms, political philosophies, international strategies—and cannot be directly televised like a battle sone or a demonstration.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Even when an effort is made to cover subtle or complex material, the decision is made to choose only the most televisable elements. So a specific case of, say, a starving family will be chosen, rather than an overall look at its cause, which is more complicated and less televisable. The latter, runs the risk of being boring. A well-made report on a famine, or even on one starving family in Appalachia, will be more watchable than a report on the World food problem. A program on living conditions in Watts, Harlem, or Midtown Sacramento will be more diverting than a report on housing policy. I believe that the various forms and techniques of TV journalism can all too easily conspire together to create a bias against the audience’s understanding of the society in which it lives. The problem could be solved by lengthening the time devoted to the main stories of the day, so that a more comprehensive understanding of them might develop. Of course this would result in giving less time to the stores that are not the “main” ones, and so the recommendation seems to contradict earlier remarks. In effect, it would leave some news highlighted to an even greater extent in the World? Obviously not. It would leave people even more transfixed by the out-of-context information which is chosen. The reason for the contradiction is that we cannot bear to face the implications of what is happening. To face the inevitable drift of this reasoning leads straight to the observation that news, like all other information on television, is inevitably and irrevocably biased away from some forms of content and toward others. If this is true, then we really do not know which end is up and which is down. We take things as they come. The evolutionary approach is based on a simple principle; whatever is successful is likely to appear more often in the future. The mechanism can vary. In classical Darwinian evolution, the mechanism is natural selection based upon differential survival and reproduction. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

In Congress, the mechanism can be an increased chance of reelection for those members who are effective in delivering legislation and services for their constituency. In the business World, the mechanism can be the avoidance of bankruptcy by a profitable company. However, the evolutionary mechanism need not be a question of life and death. With intelligent individuals, a successful strategy can appear more often in the future because other players convert to it. The conversation can be used based on more or less blind imitation of the successful players, or it can be based on a more or less informed process of learning. The evolutionary process needs more than differential growth of the successful. In order to go very far it also needs a source of variety—of new things being tried. In the genetics of biology, this variety is provided by mutation and by a reshuffling of genes with each generation. In social processes, the variety can be introduced by the “trial” in “trial and error” learning. This kind of learning might not reflect a high degree of intelligence. A new pattern of behaviour might be undertaken simply as a random variant of an old pattern of behaviour, or the new strategy could be deliberately constructed on the basis of prior experience and a theory about what is likely to work best in the future. The ability to detect radiation has been bestowed on a group of experimental cats, each of which is wired into a portable, miniature Geiger counter that telemeters electrical impulses directly to the feline brain via implanted electrodes. The square-wave electrical impulses are similar to normal nervous impulses. They are transmitted to a portion of the brain that is associated with fear reactions, causing cats to shy away from radioactive sources. It is reasonable to speculate that in near future the stimoreciever [instruments for radio transmission and reception of electrical messages to and from the brain] may provide the essential link from man to computer to man, with a reciprocal feedback between neurons and instruments which represents a new orientation for the medical control of neurophysiological functions. For example, it is conceivable that the localized abnormal activity which announces the imminence of an epileptic attack could be picked up by implanted electrodes, telemetered to a distant instrument room, tape-recorded, and analyzed by a computer capable of recognizing abnormal electrical patters. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Identification of the specific electrical disturbance could trigger the emission of radio signals to activate the patient’s stimoreceviver and apply an electrical stimulation to a determined inhibitory area of the brain, thus blocking the onset of the convulsive episode. By the turn of the century, it is likely that every major organ except the brain and the central nervous system will have artificial replacements. Scientists are working on replacement parts for organs such as the pancreas, heart, ear, eyes and more. The concept of total prothesis seems plausible. Creating an artificial human brain, however, is a little more difficult. Some say it will never happen. Since the first Artificial Intelligence experiments, attempts to mimic complex human neural activity with the crudities of current electronic hardware have been plagued with challenging problems. Breakthroughs in this line of research might take place through electro-biological engineering or hybridization of computer architecture with molecular engineering. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on what is known as the Molecular Electronic Device (MED) or “biochip.” There are several designs for these organic microprocessors, but the essential idea is to use protein molecules or synthetic organic molecules as computing elements to store information or act as switches with the application of voltage. Signal flow in this case would be by sodium or calcium ions. Others feel that artificial proteins can be constructed to carry signals by electron flow. Still another idea is to “metalize” dead neuronal tissues to produce processing devices. The ultimate scenario is to develop a complete genetic code for the computer that would function as a virus does, but instead of producing more virus, it would assemble a fully operational computer inside a call. That is nanotechnology at work. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

The very notion that computer chips could be “grown” or that living and inert matter could be fused together on a molecular level promises surprises ahead for those with orthodox nations of mind and body. As machines become more and more responsive to human internal experiences (from the desire to move a limb or even rage or pleasures of the flesh), we will probably reach a stage at which every subtle nuance of imagination and consciousness can be realized, stored and displayed through machinery. And at some point in the future it will be possible to “will” events to occur. New twists in the evolution of the brain might be brought about through our own manipulation of the elements of biological science. If we seriously consider that hand tools must have come into existence together, then it follows that the tool’s transformation into an “organism” capable of monitoring and responding to our biological functions transforms us as well. The human body can be seen as a complex machine, but it is so much more. Bureaucracy is an attempt to rationalize the flow of information, to make its use efficient to the highest degree by eliminating information that diverts attention from the problem at hand. There is a prime example of such bureaucratic rationalization in the 1884 decision to organize time, on a Worldwide basis, into twenty-four time zones. Prior to this decision, towns only a mile or two apart could and did differ on what time of day it was, which made the operation of railroads and other businesses unnecessarily complex. By simply ignoring the fact that solar time differs at each node of a transportation system, bureaucracy eliminated a problem of information chaos, much to the satisfaction of most people. However, not everyone. It must be noted that the idea of “God’s own time” had to be considered irrelevant. This is important to say, because, in attempting to make the most rational use of information, bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency. The idea of God’s time made no such contribution. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

A university is a bureaucracy, and successful ones are the proof that society can be devoted to the well-being of all, without stunting human potential or imprisoning the mind to the goals of the regime. The deepest intellectual weakness of democracy is its lack of taste or gift for the theoretical life. However, the issue is not whether we possess intelligence but whether we are adept at reflection of the broadest and deepest kind. We need constant reminders of our deficiency, now more than in the past. The great European universities used to act as our intellectual conscience, but with their decline, we are on our own. Nothing prevents us from thinking too well of ourselves. It is necessary that there be an unpopular institution in our midst that sets clarity above well-being or compassion, that resists our powerful urges and temptations, that is free of all snobbism but has standards. Those standards are in the first place accessible to us from the best of the past, although they must be such as to admit of the new, if it actually meets those standards. If nothing new does meet them, it is not a disaster. The ages of great spiritual fertility are rare and provide nourishment for others less fertile ones. What would be a disaster would be to lose the inspiration of those ages and have nothing to replace it with. This would make it even more unlikely that the rarest talents could find expression among us. The Bible and Homer exercised their influence for thousands of years, preserved in the mainstream or in backwaters, hardly every being surpassed in power, without becoming irrelevant because they did not suit the temper of the times or the spirit of a regime. They provided the way out as well as the model for reform. In the creation of man, the two urges are set in opposition to each other. The Creator gives them to man as His two servants which, however, can only accomplish their service in genuine collaboration. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

The “evil urge” is no loess necessary than its companion, indeed even more necessary than it, for without it man would woo no woman and beget no children, build no house and engage in no economic activity, for it is true that all travail and all skill in work is the rivalry of a man with his neighbour. Hence this urge is called the yeast in the dough, the ferment placed in the soul by God, without which the human dough does not rise. Thus, a man’s status is necessarily bound up with the volume of “yeast” within him; whoever is greater than another, his urge is greater than the other’s. Wonderful civilization? I will not object to the adjective—it rightly describes it—but I do object to the large and complacent admiration which it implies. By all accounts—yours in chief, Excellency—the pure and sweet and unenlightened and unsordid civilization of Eden was worth a thousand millions of it. What is a civilization, rightly considered? Morally, it is the evil passions repressed, the level of conduct raised; spiritually, idols cast down, God enthroned; materially, bread and fair treatment for the greatest number. That is the common formula, the common definition; everybody accepts it and is satisfied with it. Our civilization is wonderful, in certain spectacular and meretricious ways; wonderful in scientific marvels and inventive miracles; wonderful in material inflation, which it calls advancement, progress, and other pet names; wonderful in its spying-out of the deep secrets of Nature—and its vanquishment of her stubborn laws; wonderful in its extraordinary financial and commercial achievements; wonderful in its hunger for money, and in its indifference as to how it is acquired; wonderful in the hitherto undreamed of magnitude of its private fortunes and the prodigal fashion in which they are given away to institutions devoted to the public culture. “And it came to pass that there were sorceries, and witchcrafts, and magics; and the power of the evil one was wrought upon all the face of the land, even unto the fulfilling of all words of Abinadi, and also Samuel and Lamanite,” reports Mormon 1.19. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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Sudden Shocks and Surprises, Explosive Passions, and Frequent Catharsis

Before the industrial revolution, horrific poverty was not just concentrated in Africa, Asia or Latin America. According to historian Fernand Braudel, in the Beauvaisis region of France in the seventeenth century, over one third of all children died every year. Only about 60 percent reached the age of fifteen. Braudel describes a Europe swept by plague and recurrent famine. The poor crowded into cities, begging and stealing to stay alive. Children and wives were routinely abandoned, many doomed to perish in poorhouses alongside the elderly and infirm. Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert Fogel points out that “the energy value of the typical diet in France at the start of the 18th Century was as low as that of Rwanda in 1965, the most malnourished nation for that year.” France was not alone. For ten thousand years, only the tiniest fraction of the World’s population ever lived above the barest subsistence level. And the World’s richest countries were only twice as rich as the poorest. If this was roughly true around the globe, with all the diversity of agrarian people, cultures, climates, religions and farming methods, it strongly suggests that peasant agriculture had at some point hit its upper limit of productivity. It was only after the industrial wealth system began to replace agriculture that the population soared and significant numbers of people crawled out of utter destitution. This history led economists and policy-makers to a common prescription for what is still called “development” or “modernization”—a strategy for moving a country’ workforce and economy from low-productivity, low-value-added farming to more productive, low-tech manufacturing and its support services. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

From the early 1950s on, this Second Wave strategy was propagated in endless variants by experts from the United States of America, Europe, Russia, the United Nations and NGO (Non-Government Organization) development agencies. Its message was, essentially, that each country had to replay the industrial revolution. And, indeed, there was no realistic alternative model. After the 1960s, some critics attacked this strategy and proposed focusing not on factories and the urbanization that came with them but on small-scale “appropriate” or “alternative” technologies that are sustainable and use local resources. Since them, this movement has broadened, encouraging microfinance and the creation of small business in poor-World countries, reaching out to science, and becoming more sophisticated. Many imaginative innovations have flowed from this movement. However, it is essentially designed to stop or slow further industrialization and to keep peasant populations on the land. Moreover, in their assumption that “small is beautiful,” many of the movement’s militant adherents still romanticize machines and make little distinctions between industrial and knowledge-intensive technologies. Claiming that both these technologies serve only the rich, critics ignore the benefits they have, in fact, brought to millions of the World’s destitute. More important, they do not understand that Third Wave technologies have already indirectly raised huge members out of misery and offer for the first time in more than three centuries fresh, powerful ways to attack the poverty of the poorest. Worldwide, as more and more of the economy came to depend on phones, the companies or government agencies that provided or regulated them became enormously powerful too. In the United States of America, AT&T, otherwise known as the Bell System or Ma Bell, became the dominant supplier of telecommunications services. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

It is hard for those accustomed to decent telephone service to imagine operating an economy or a business without it, or to function in a country where the telephone company (usually the government) can deny even basic phone service or delay its installation for years. This bureaucratic power gives rise to political favoritism, payoffs, and corruption, slows down national economic development, and frequently determines which enterprises have a chance to grow and which must fail. Yet such is the situation still prevailing in many of the formerly socialist and nonindustrial nations. Even in the technologically advances nations, phone service suppliers and regulators can control the fate of entire industrial sectors, by providing or refusing specialized services, setting differential prices, and through other means. Sometimes angry or frustrated user strike back. In fact, the biggest corporate restructuring in history, the court-ordered breakup of AT&T in 1984, can illustrate the point. The U.S. government had been trying without success to dismantle AT&T since the 1940s on grounds that it was charging customers too much. Government attorneys hauled the company into court, cases dragged on interminably, but nothing fundamental changed. Warning shots were fired across the corporation’s bow, but even during Democratic administrations pledged to strong antitrust action, nothing cracked the AT&T grip on the U.S. communications system. What ultimately shifted the power balance was a combination of new technology and the irrepressible demand of business phone users for more and better service. Starting in the 1960s, a large number of American businesses had begun installing computers. Simultaneously, satellites and many other new technologies erupted from the laboratories—some of them out of AT&T’s own Bell Labs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Soon corporate computer users began demanding a great variety of new data network services. They wanted computers to be able to talk to one another. They knew the necessary technology was feasible. However, the diverse data services they desperately needed represented, at the time, to small a market to whet Ma Bell’s appetite. As a protected monopoly the phone company had no competition, and was therefore slow to respond to these new needs. As computers and satellites spread, however, and more companies needed to link them up, business disgruntlement with AT&T intensified. IMB, the prime supplier of mainframes, presumably lost business because AT&T was dragging its feet, and had other reasons for wishing to see AT&T’s monopoly cracked. All these unhappy corporations were politically savvy. Gradually anti-AT&T sentiment in Washington mounted. Ultimately, it was the combination of new technologies and rising hostility to Ma Bell that provided the political climate for the climactic bust-up that occurred. Breaking AT&T into pieces, the court, for the first time since the early decades of the century, opened telecommunications in the United States of America to competition. There were, in other words, structural forces, not merely legal reasons, behind the massive breakup. Just as an overwhelming business demand for better communications had defeated Western Union a century earlier, so again, new technologies and an overwhelming unmet demand for new services ultimately defeated AT&T. By now the rate of technological change has become white-hot and companies are far more dependent on telecommunications than ever in history. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The result is that airlines, car makers, and oil companies are all engaged in a many-sided war for control of the emerging communications system. Indeed, as we will shortly see, truckers, warehousers, stores, factories—the entire chain of production and distribution—are being shaken. Moreover, as money becomes more like information, and information more like money, both are increasingly reduced to (and moved around by) electronic impulses. As this historic fusion of telecommunications and finance deepens, the power inherent in the control of networks increases exponentially. All this explains the fierce urgency with which companies and governments alike are hurling themselves into the war to control the electronic highways of tomorrow. Amazingly, however, few top business leaders actually understand the stakes, let alone the fantastic changes restructuring the very nature of communications in our time. In the territorial system, people tend to not want to apologize and wins a great many converts from its neighbours. When one of these apologizers is next to someone who does not like to admit fault, and the other three neighbours are nice, the one who does not like to apologize is likely to do better than any of its four neighbours as well. Thus, in a social system based on diffusion by imitation, there is a great advantage to being able to attain outstanding success, even if it means that the average rate of success is not outstanding. This is because the occasions of outstanding success win many converts. The fact the stubborn neighbour starts off being nice means that it avoids unnecessary conflict, and continues to hold its own when the rules which are not nice are eliminated. The advantage of being stubborn is based on the fact that while five rules are abjectly apologetic to it, no other nice rule elicits such apologies from more than two other rules. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

The territorial system demonstrates quite vividly that the way the players interact with each other can affect the course of the evolutionary process. A variety of structures have now been analyzed in evolutionary terms, although many other interesting possibilities await analysis. Each of the five structures reveal different facets of the evolution of cooperation: Random mixing was used as the fundamental type of structure. Cooperation based upon reciprocity can thrive even in a setting with such a minimal social structure. Clusters of individuals were examined to see how the evolution of cooperation could have gotten started in the first place. Clusters allow a newcomer to have at least a small chance of meeting another newcomer, even though the newcomers themselves are a negligible part of the whole environment of the natives. Even if most of a newcomer’s interactions are with uncooperative natives, a small cluster of newcomers who use reciprocity can invade a population of meanies. Differentiation of the population was shown to occur when the individuals have more information about each other than is contained in the history of their own interaction. If the people have labels indicating their group membership or personal attributes, stereotyping and status hierarchies can develop. If the individuals can observe each other interacting with others, they can develop reputations; and the existence of reputations can lead to a World characterized by efforts to deter bullies. Governments were found to have their own strategic problems in terms of achieving compliance from most of their citizens. Not only is this a problem of choosing an effective strategy to use in a particular case, but it is also a question of how to set the standards so that compliance will be both attractive to the citizen and beneficial to the society. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Territorial systems were examined to see what would happen if the individuals interacted only with their neighbours and imitated a neighbour who was more successful than they were. Interactions with neighbours were found to give rise to intricate patterns in the spread of particular strategies, and to promote the growth of these strategies that scored unusually well in some setting even though they did poorly in others. Compared to football, baseball is an almost an Eastern game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones. Baseball is virtually a process game. Not that baseball is a process the way oceans and coffeehouses and conversations and love are, but in the context of sports it is more process oriented than many. Soccer has even fewer peaks than baseball. The action flows over an immense field. Moments of focused concentration are rare. There is very little resolution from minute to minute. Boxing, on the other hand, is very focused, involving constant action, frequent resolution and peaks of personal catharsis. Basketball, although it is a flow sport like soccer, is played on a small field and involves highlighted events—baskets—every few seconds. Naturally football has totally overpowered baseball on television and so have boxing and basketball. Meanwhile, soccer is rarely presented, and when it is, it communicates almost nothing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Television, which is better suited to football and boxing than to soccer, is also better suited to any sporting event than to probing of alternative consciousness or natural environments, or any delving into relationships, all of which require emphasis on process: the in-between spaces. Within the range of all human experience, and all possible programming, any sport contains more clearly highlighted action than, say, 99 percent of human relationships, except for those with a component of pleasures of the flesh or violent orientation. The dramatic programs, featuring jealousy, hatred, desire, fear, humiliation, ebullience, are not only the most visible on television, they are also the most emotionally loaded, with the larger cathartic payoffs, like home runs or touchdowns or wars. They pass the test of highlighted content, providing visibility in a dimmed-out medium. Television presents relationships in crisis; those that stand out from the usual fare of everyday life, which is not so explosive and dramatic most of the time. In the television World, relationships involve the same huge cycles of feeling as sports shows: big joys, great losses, ups and downs, sudden shocks, and surprises, explosive passions, frequent catharsis. We get soap operas, Elizabeth Gillies, Roots. Without crises, television drama would not be able to deliver any feeling. Conversation or smaller feelings—love, friendship, camaraderie—do not deliver on television. Violence does. It delivers fear. Producers and sponsors are well advised to make choices in favor of such programs. Fear qualifies as a bona fide pseudoexperience. It can fool viewers into believing that when they are watching television, some actual living is going on, when it is not. In the long run, experiencing artificial fear over and over again when nothing dangerous is actually going on eventually dulls one’s responses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

As a result, one becomes less subject to television fear while at the same time more paranoid about the real World one actually experiences less and less. It is a psychological fact that frustration can lead to aggression and that the more a person is frustrated from achieving a goal, typically the more aggressive one will become. If not able t vent that aggression against the cause of one’s frustration, one will readily deflect it to a less deserving object. Cult leaders and political demagogues have traditionally channeled and used those aggressive feelings by teaching their followers that they are the elect, and the rest of the World is inferior. Charles Mansion, who called himself Christ and Satan, taught his Family that the apocalypse, in the form of a race war in America (which many people suspect some local and state leaders are trying to egg on), was at hand, and that he, “the Beast of the bottomless pit,” would lead them to salvation. The Family would trigger these cosmic events by endling the lives of the rich, and blaming in on the less affluent, a reign of terror he called Helter Skelter, after a song from the Beatles’ White album. According to Manson, after a backlash against the rich, the less affluent would rise up and defeat the affluent, but being inferior and not capable of intelligent rule, they would be forced to ask Charlie, who would be waiting things out with his Family in the desert, to take over as World leader. As bizarre as these ideas may sound, the Haight for a few brief years in the sixties was a place out of time and space, and Manson had little trouble finding minds receptive to his acid-activated rap. He found Susan Atkins, an adult dance who had briefly been a member of the Church of Satan and had prophetically, played a blood-sucking vampire in LaVey’s “Witches’ Sabbath” stage show at Gigi’s nightclub in North Beach. He also found Beausoleil, guitar player for a Digger band called the Orkustra and former protégé of underground filmmaker and later author of Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger, a Crowley disciple and one of the original members of Levey’s Magic Circle, out of which the Church of Satan evolved. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

God—after the work of destruction—explains His forgiveness, His resolution never again to strike the living thing He had made, precisely on the grounds that “the imagery of man’s heart is evil from His youth.” No longer “all the imagery,” no longer “only evil,” and curiously added afresh “from his youth.” It is not to be understood in any other manner than that God deliberates: imagination is not entirely evil, it is evil and good, for in the midst of it and from out of it decision can arouse the heart’s wiling direction toward Him, master the vortex of possibility and realize the human figure purposed in the creation, as it could not yet do prior to the knowledge of good and evil. For straying and caprice are not innate in man, they are not of the nature of original sin; in spite of all the burdens of past generations, he always begins anew as a person, and the storm of adolescence first deluges him with the infinitude of the possible—greatest danger and greatest opportunity at once. This was the point at which, several hundred years, the Talmudic doctrine of the two urges started. It found the word yester, which I have rendered by “imagery,” already transformed in meaning; as early as Jesus Sirach it signifies the own impulse, into whose hand created man is given by God, but with liberty to keep commandment and faith in order to do the will of God. In the Talmud, the concept, under the influence of increasing reflection, is partly used, without any attribute, to designate the second of these as the elemental one. Why cannot people learn to wait for developments before they commit themselves? Surely experience has given them warnings enough. Almost as a rule the apparently insane invention turns out well by and by, through the discovery and applications to it of improvements of one kind and another. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

To make that range of possibilities accessible, to overcome the regime’s tendency to discourage appreciation of important alternatives, the university must come to the assistance of unprotected and timid reason. The university is the place where inquiry and philosophic openness come into their own. It is intended to encourage the noninstrumental use of reason for its own sake, to provide the atmosphere where the moral and physical superiority of the dominant will not intimidate philosophic doubt. And it preserves the treasury of great deeds, great men and great thoughts required to nourish that doubt. Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense a man free, but thoughts, reasoned thoughts. Feelings are largely formed and informed by convention. Real differences come from difference in thought and fundamental principle. Much in democracy conduces to the assault on awareness of difference. In the first place, as with all regimes, there is what might be called an official interpretation of the past that makes it appear defective or just a step on the way to present regime. An example of this is the interpretation of Rome and the Roman empire in Augustine’s City of God. Rome is not forgotten, but it is remembered only through the lens of victorious Christianity and therefore poses no challenge to it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Second, sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist, and where, as I have said, there is no legitimate power other than the people to which a man can turn. Repugnance at the power of the people, at the fact that the popular taste should rule in all arenas of life, is very rare in a modern democracy. One of the intellectual charms of Marxism is that it explains the injustice or philistinism of the people in such way as to exculpate the people, who are said to be manipulated by corrupt elites. Thus a Marxist is able to criticize the present without isolating oneself from present and future. Almost no one wants to face the possibility that “bourgeois vulgarity” might really be the nature of the people, always and everywhere. Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particular among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience. Hostility and excessive contempt for the people is the vice of aristocracies, and is hardly our problem. Aristocracies hate and fear demagogues most of all, while democracies in their pure form hate and fear “elitists” most of all, because they are unjust, id est, they do not accept the leading principle of justice in those regimes. Hence each regime discounts those who are most likely to recognize and compensate for its political and intellectual propensities, while it admires those who encourage them. However, to repeat this tendency is more acute in democracy because of the absence of a nondemocratic class. In every regime there is a people; there is not necessarily any other class. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Third, the democratic concentration on the useful, on the solution of what are believed by the populace at large to be the most pressing problems, makes theoretical distance seem not only useless but immoral. When there is poverty, disease and war, who can claim the right to idle in Epicurean gardens, asking questions that have already been answered and keeping a distance where commitment is demanded? The for-its-own-sake is alien to the modern democratic spirit, particularly in matters intellectual. Whenever there is a crunch, democratic men devoted to thought have a crisis of conscience, have to find a way to interpret their endeavors by the standard of utility, or otherwise tend to abandon or deform them. This tendency is enhanced by the fact that in egalitarian society practically nobody has really grand opinion of himself, or has been nurtured in a sense of special right and a proud contempt for the merely necessary. Aristotle’s great-souled man, who loves beautiful and useless things, is not a democratic type. Such a man loves honor but despises it because he knows he deserves better, whereas democratic vanity defines itself by the honor it seeks and can get. The lover of beautiful and useless things is far from being a philosopher—at least as far as is the lover of the useful, who is likely to be more reasonable—but he has the advantage of despising many of the same things the philosopher does and is likely to admire the philosopher for his very uselessness, as an adornment. Great and unusual undertakings are more natural to him than to the lover of the useful, and he believes in and revers motives that are denied existence by utilitarian psychology. He can take for granted the things that are the ends of most men’s strivings—money and status. He is free, and must look for other fulfillments, unless he spends, as in the democratic view he should do, his life helping others to get what he already has. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Knowing as fulfillment in itself rather than as task required for other fulfillments is immediately intelligible to him. Finality as opposed to instrumentality, and happiness as opposed to the pursuit of happiness, appeal to the aristocratic temperament. All of this is salutary for the intellectual life, and none of it is endemic to democracy. Thus the mere announcement of the rile of reason does not create the conditions for the full exercise of rationality, and in removing the impediments to it some of its supports are also dismantled. Reason is only part of the soul’s economy and requires a balance of the other parts in order to function properly. The issue is whether the passions are its servitor, or whether it is the handmaiden of the passions. The latter interpretation, which is Hobbes’s play an important role in the development of modern democracy and is a depreciation as well as an appreciation of reason. Older, more traditional orders that do not encourage the free play of reason contain elements reminiscent of the nobler, philosophic interpretation of reason and help to prevent its degradation. Those elements are connected with the piety that prevails in such orders. They convey a certain reverence for the higher, a respect for the contemplative life, understood as contemplation of God and the peak of devotion, and a cleaving to eternal beings that mitigates absorption in the merely pressing or current. These are images of philosophic magnificence—which, it must be stressed, are distortions of the original, and can be its bitterest enemies, but which preserve the order of the cosmos and of the soul from which philosophy begins. If humanity is not to be grievously impoverished, the marvelously well, most perfect of men, a human type, the theoretical type is most threatened and it must be vigorously defended. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Much of the theoretical reflection that flourishes in modern democracy could be interpreted as egalitarian resentment against the higher type of man, denigrating it, deforming it and interpreting it out of existence. Marxism and Freudianism reduce his motives to those all men have. Historicism denies him access to eternity. Value theory makes his reasoning irrelevant. If he were to appear, our eyes would be blind to his superiority, and we would be spared the discomfort it would cause us. It is to prevent or cure this peculiar democratic blindness that the university may be said to exist in a democracy, not for the sake of establishing an aristocracy but for the sake of democracy and for the sake of preserving the freedom of the mind—certainly one of the most important freedoms—for some individuals within it. Do not let the TV, the Master of this World lead you into the dark paths of lust and licentiousness, and all the intricate pleasures of the flesh. Also, do not take the road to nowhere, half-in, half-out, half-up, half-down, your instincts and ideals buried in a deep morass of hypocritical compromise and respectable mediocrity. Time is running out. “But behold this my joy was vain, for their sorrowing was not unto repentance, because of the goodness of God; but it was rather the sorrowing of the damned, because the Lord would not always suffer them to take happiness in sin,” Mormon 2.13. It is an open question whether or not “liberal democracy” in its present form can provide a thought-World of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. It is not enough for one’s nation to liberate itself from one flawed theory; it is necessary to find another, and Technopoly provides no answer. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

There is another ideological conflict to be fought—between “liberal democracy” as conceived in the eighteenth century, with all its transcendent moral underpinnings, and Technopoly, a twenty-first-century thought-World that functions not only without a transcendent narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology. Because that flood has laid waste the theories on which schools, families, political parties, religion, nationhood itself are based, American Technopoly must reply, to an obsessive extent, on technical methods to control the flow of information. Bureaucracy is foremost among all technological solutions to the crisis of control. Bureaucracy is not, of course, a creation of Technopoly. Its history goes back five thousand years, although the word itself did not appear in English until the nineteenth century, as bureaucracies became more important, the complaints against them become more insistent. John Stuart Mill referred to them as “administrative tyranny.” Carlyle called them “the Continental nuisance.” There are two distinctions between two types of centralization, calling one governmental and the other administrative. Only the first exists in America, the second being almost unknown. If the directing power in American society had both these means of government at its disposal and combined the right t command with faculty and habit to perform everything itself, if having established the general principles of the government, it entered into the details of their application, and having regulated the great interests of the country, it came down to consider even individual interest, then freedom would soon be banished from the New World. I live in the Managerial Age, in a World of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see final result. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state of the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern. Putting these attacks aside for the moment, we may say that in principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing. It is the invention of the standardized form—a stable of bureaucracy—allow for the “destruction” of every nuance and detail of a situation. By requiring us to check boxes and fill in blanks, the standardized form admits only a limited range of formal, objective, and impersonal information, which in some cases is precisely what is needed to solve a particular problem. For an amputee to obtain motions when they are desired, one must give the microcomputer needed for information. This information can come in the form of myoelectric signals picked up on the surface of the amputee’s skin. These signals occur when the brain sends a signal to the muscle and the muscle tissues expand or contract to produce the requested motion. When a part of the body is amputated, many times the amputees continues to have a mental image of the missing part, a phenomenon known as the phantom limb syndrome. Mentally, the amputee can continue to move this phantom limb. Therefore, the brain continues to send signals to the remaining muscles and these muscles continue to try to produce desired motion. Grey Walter experimented with the E-wave, or expectancy wave, which is a voltage that “arises in the brain about one second before a voluntary action, which can be either a motor act (such as pushing a button) or simply an action with respect to making a firm decision about something. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The E-wave, like any electric signal from any source, can also be used to operate electrically controlled devices. Slow progress has finally resulted in a recent announcement that a researcher at Johns Hopkins University has learned to predict the arm movements of a monkey by analysis of its brain waves. These techniques, developed twenty years ago, are rather basic, but they are a first step in allowing machinery to be mentally or neurally controlled like alternate body parts. The opposite of thought-activated machinery is electrical brain stimulation which sinks electrodes into the brain and applies minor voltages. Just as thoughts and mental impulses produce electrical activity, most motor functions and emotions can be triggered or influenced by electrically stimulating the brain. When a patient is conscious during a brain operation, the surgeon can give electrical stimulation in the motor strip and produce definite movements; here a twisting of the foot, there an arm movement, at a third point a clamping of the jaw. Electrical brain stimulation provides researchers with a means of mapping and controlling brain functions, including stimulating formant sections (as in stroke victims) to produce useful body operation. Sequential computer control of serial stimulus has apparently been successful in producing “lifelike” movement in laboratory animals suffering paralysis. Stimulating the cortex directly to replace missing sensory input is another application. There was a case of a fifty-two-year-old woman, totally blind after suffering bilateral glaucoma, in whom an array of eighty small receiving coils were implanted subcutaneously above the skull, terminating in eighty platinum electrodes enchased in a sheet or silicone rubber placed in direct contact with the visual cortex of the right occipital lobe. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

With this type of transdermal stimulation, a visual sensation was perceived by the patient in the left half of her visual field…and simultaneous excitation of several electrodes evoked the perception of predictable simple visual patterns. Electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve has produced auditory sensations. Appropriately placed electrodes can alter blood pressure, sleep, motor functions, the sensation of pain and even hostile behaviour. These procedures and functions are also part of what bureaucracies do. For many years, it was conventional to assume that the road to very small devices led through smaller and smaller devices: a top-down path. On this path, progress is measured by miniaturization: How small a transistor can we build? How small a motor? How thin a line can we draw on the surface of a crystal? Miniaturization focuses on scale and has paid off well, spawning industries ranging from watchmaking to microelectronics. Researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, the University of California at Berkely, and other laboratories in the United States of America have used micromachining (based on microelectronic technologies) to make tiny gears and even electric motors. Micromachining is also being pursued successfully in Japan and Germany. These microgears and micromotors are, however, enormous by nanotechnological standards: a typical device is measure in tens of micrometers, billions of times the volume of comparable nanogrears and nanomotors. (In our simulated molecular World, ten microns is the size of a small town.) In size, confusing microtechnology with molecular nanotechnology is like confusing an elephant with a ladybug. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The differences run deeper, though. Microtehcnology dumps atoms on surfaces and digs them away again in bulk, with no regard for which atoms goes where. Its methods are inherently crude. Molecular nanotechnology, in contrast, positions each atom with care. The essence of nanotechnology is that people have worked for years making things smaller and smaller until we are approaching molecular dimensions. At that point, one cannot make smaller things except by staring with molecules and building them up into assemblies. The difference is basic: In microtechnology, the challenge is to build smaller; in nanotechnology, the challenge is to build bigger—we can already make small molecules. (A language warning: In recent years, nanotechnology has indeed been used to mean “very small microtechnology”; for this usage, the answers to the above question is yes, by definition. This use of a new word for a mere extension of an old technology will produce considerable confusion, particularly in light of the widespread use of nanotechnology in the sense found here. Nanolithography, nanoelectronics, nanocomposities, nanofabrication: not all that is nano– is molecular, or very relevant to the concerns raised in these reports. The terms molecular nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing are more awkward but avoid this confusion.) BMW has an iX SUV that used nanotechnology to change colour at the push of a button, and the grill can also repair itself from minor damages. Nanotechnology will be used to preform things like car maintenance in the future, making it easier for an auto science engineer to access things in the internal system of the car without removing anything. They may even be used to restores hoses and pumps. So, the future is very bright with all of this developing technology. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

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Tis the Season to be Jolly

Young adults are on the true threshold of life. They have outgrown their childhood, survived the rigors of adolescence, and now catch a glimpse of their great potential as they move into early maturity. For them to see even a short way into the future (and everyone can) is almost breathtaking. Young adults are assuming increased reasonability and now influence the shape of things to come to a remarkable degree. What kind of World will they build? Just as children or primitives believe they can change the Universe at large by performing magical rituals, they seek to transform society by transforming themselves. Being human, they will make mistakes like the generations before them, for who can be perfect in this life? It is true that we today enjoy a technology never before known, and that many of us may seem better educated than forefathers. However, are we any wiser? It not wisdom the basis of real progress. Whence comes wisdom? The youth today flaunt their separateness from the mainstream society by styling their hair like the beetles, letting it grow long like a mermaid, or shaving it all off and donning buckskin and diamonds, pearls, gold, platinum, and silver. They exorcised the Christian demon—pleasures of the flesh—by advocating and practicing “free love” and communal living, which is almost necessary in this economy. They shoor off the fetters of Western religion by dabbling in arcane schools of thought and Eastern religions. They revolted against the Western emphasis on rationality by rejecting objective consciousness as the only method of gaining access to reality. In one fell swoop, three hundred and fifty years of science were thrown out the door to nowhere, and magic, paganism, and witchcraft were revived as viable Worldly outlooks. However, has today’s brilliance produced a greater talent than Shakespeare? Can we find a modern man with greater wisdom than Solomon? Whose writings today can compare with those of Martin Buber? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Technology cannot produce a Merchant of Venice nor can any modern school of thought write a book like the Bible. So the past had its greatness too, and we still feed upon it. Western society, has over the past three centuries, incorporated a number of marginalized groups whose antagonism toward the scientific World view has been irreconcilable, and who have held out against the easy assimilation to which the major religious congregations have yielded in their growing desire to seem progressive. Theosophists and fundamentalists, spiritualists and flatearthers, occultists and satanists…it is nothing new that there should exist anti-rationalist elements in our midst. What is new is that a radical rejection of science and technological values should appear so close to the center of society, rather than on the negligible margins. Greatness of some kind ha characterized every age. It has always sprung from a common source, and that source is God. Sockrates acknowledged Him. Shakespeare’s most sublime expression reflect the teachings of scripture. Columbus prayed. Washington, Lincoln, Trump, and Churchill sought guidance in the Bible. Darwin was devout, and Von Braun, today’s space genius, worships the diving. Then can young adults do less? If their World is to be secure, it must rest upon they only sure foundation men have ever known—reliance upon Almighty. Throughout the ages efforts have been made to live without God. Both nations and individuals have tried it and with similar results. “And I did endeavor to preach unto this people, but my mouth was shut, and I was forbidden that I should preach unto them; for behold they had willfully rebelled against their God; and the beloved disciples were taken away out of the land, because of their iniquity,” reports Mormon 1.16. Inevitably, rejection of God means rejection of his way of life. His rules always lead upward with one objective: to help us become like Him. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Six times, in the story of creation, God sees “that it is good,” but the seventh time, after the creation of man, He looks at everything He has made and sees “that it is very good.” How did the first humans’ very good become the only-evil of the human race? However, it is not man who is seen as evil. Adam was a good man, and his intellect was better than its reputation. He built prognostications, not prophecies. He pretended to nothing more. Built them out of history and statistics, using facts of the past to forecast the probabilities of the future. It was merely applied science. An astronomer foretells an eclipse, yet is not obnoxious to the charge of pretending to be a prophet. Noah was a prophet; and certainly no one has more reverence for him and for his sacred office than many of us today. The “wickedness” does not imply a corruption of the soul, the living soul which was breathed into man, but of the “way,” which fills the Earth with “violence”—and this results from the intervention, not of the evil soul, but of the evil “imagery.” The wickedness of the actions is derived from its, the imagery’s, wickedness. Imagery or “imaging” corresponds, in a conceptual World which is simpler but more powerful than ours, to our “imagination”—not the power of imagination, but its products. Man’s heart emanates designs in images of the possible, which would be made into the real. Imagery, the depictions of the heart, is play with possibility, play as self-temptation, from which ever and again violence springs. It too, like the deed of the first humans, does not proceed from a decision; but the place of the real, perceived fruit has been taken by a possible, devised, fabricated one which, however, can be made, could be made—is made into a real one. This imagery of the possible, and in this its nature, is called evil. Good is not devised; the former is evil because it distracts from divine reality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Turning from God, we find ourselves drifting in a new direction, leading away from the up and, inevitably, toward the down? Can anyone afford it? Hosts have tried it and all have paid its price. It is costly—the painful—way to live, even though it may seem glamorous and attractive at first. Sin has a price for what sin gives us, and it is greater than any of us can afford. In the wake of sin comes every form of heartbreak, and its victims have suffered. So have others. For instance, Starbucks is closing six of its locations due to safety concerns. The change against the situation of the first humans stems from the knowledge of good and evil, not from disobedience as such, but from its immediate consequences. Man has therein become like a God, in that now, like God, man “knows” oppositeness; be he cannot, like God, rise superior to it. Thus, from divine reality, which was allotted to him, for the “good” actuality of creation, he is driven out into the boundless possible, which he fills with his imaging, that is evil because it is fictitious: even in exile, man’s expulsion from divine reality is continually repeated by his own agency. In the swirling space of images, through which he strays, each and every thing entices him to be made incarnate by him; he grasps at them like a wanton burglar, not with decision, but only in order to overcome the tension of omnipossibility; it all becomes reality, though no longer divine but his, his capriciously constructed, indestinate reality, his violence, which overcomes him, his handiwork and fate. That man, at the mercy of the knowledge of good and evil, without being able to transcend its opposites—there is no other transcendence than that of the Creator—brings the compelled chaotic of the possible, which is continuously, capriciously incarnating itself, over the created World, that is what causes God to repent of having made man; He wants to wipe him out from the face of the Earth and with him every living thing drawn by the author of violence into his corruption—it repents Him that He made them all. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Each territory that has a more successful neighbour simply converts to the rule of the most successful of its neighbours. After twenty-four generations, the process of badness can stop evolving, only when all of the rules that are not nice have been eliminated. With only nice rules left, everyone is always cooperating with everyone else and no further conversation can take place. There are a number of striking features in this stable pattern of strategies. In the first place, the surviving strategies are generally clumped together into regions of varying size. The random scattering that began the population has largely given way to regions of identical rules which sometimes spread over a substantial distance. Yet there are also a few very small regions and even single territories surrounded by two or three different regions. The rules which survived tend to be rules which do well. Never defect first. However, what is unique about it is that when the other party defects first, the party who did not defect can get the other individual(s) to “apologize” so profusely that the party that honored the contract or agreement ends up doing better than if there had been mutual cooperation. The great democratic danger is enslavement to public opinion. The claim of democracy is that every man decides for himself. The use of one’s natural faculties to determine for oneself what is true and false and good and bad is the American philosophic method. Democracy liberates from tradition, which in other kinds of regimes determine the judgment. Prejudices of religion, class and family are leveled, not only in principle but also in fact, because none of their representatives had an intellectual authority. Equal political right makes it impossible for church or aristocracy to establish the bastions from which they can affect men’s opinions. Churchmen, for whom divine revelation is the standard, aristocrats in whom the reverences for antiquity are powerful, fathers who always tend to prefer the rights of the ancestral to those of reason, are all displaced in favor of the equal individual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Even if men seek authority, they cannot find it where they used to find it in other regimes. Thus the external impediments to the free exercise of reason have been removed in democracy. Men are actually on their own in comparison to what they were in other regimes and with respect to the usual sources of opinion. This promotes a measure of reason. However, since very few people school themselves in the use of reason beyond the calculation of self-interest encouraged by the regime, they need help on a vast number of issues—in fact, all issues, inasmuch as everything is opened to fresh and independent judgment—for the consideration of which they have neither time nor capacity. Even the self-interest about which they calculated—the ends—may become doubtful. Some kind of authority is often necessary for most men and is necessary, at least sometimes, for all men. In the absence of anything else to which to turn, the common beliefs of most men are almost always what will determine judgement. This is just where tradition used to be most valuable. Without being seduced by its undemocratic and antirational mystique, tradition does provide a counterpoise to and a repair from the merely current, and contains the petrified remains of old wisdom (along with much that is not wisdom). The active presence of a tradition in a man’s soul gives him a resource against the ephemeral, the kind of resource that only the wise can find simply within themselves. The paradoxical result of the liberation of reason is greater reliance on public opinion for guidance, a weakening of independence. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Although, reason is exposed at the center of the stage. Although every man in democracy thinks himself individually the equal of every other man, this makes it difficult to resist the collectivity of equal men. If all opinions are equal, then the majority of opinions, on the psychological analogy of politics, should hold sway. It is very well to say that each should follow his own opinion, but since consensus is required for social and political life, accommodation is necessary. So, unless there is some strong ground for opposition to majority opinion, it inevitably prevails. This is the really dangerous form of the tyranny of the majority, not the kind that actively persecutes marginalized groups, but the kind that breaks the inner will to resist because there is no qualified source of nonconforming principles and no sense of superior right. The majority is all there is. What the majority decides is the only tribunal. It is not so much its power that intimidates but its semblance of justice. Americans talk very much about individual right but there is a real monotony of thought and vigorous independence of mind is rare. Even those who appear to be free-thinkers really loo to a constituency and expect one day to be part of a majority. They are creatures of public opinion as much as are conformists—actors of nonconformism in the theater of the conformists who admire and applaud nonconformity of certain kinds, the kinds that radicalize the already dominant opinions. Revolutionary wealth brings a new future for impoverishment. While no future arrives with a guarantee, the arrival of the Third Wave knowledge-based economy brings with it the best chance yet of—once and for all—breaking the back of global poverty. It would be utopian to suggest that we could totally eliminate material want everywhere on the planet. Poverty has too many sources—from stupid economic policies and bad political institutions climate shifts, epidemics and war. However, it is not utopian to recognize that we now have—or are on the edge of developing—extremely powerful new anti-poverty tools. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Poverty is supposedly everyone’s enemy. Virtually every government in the World claims to be trying to eliminate it. Thousands of NGOs collect money to feed hungry children, purify village water supplies and bring medical care to the countryside. Pious resolutions issue forth from the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund the Food and Agriculture Organization and other international agencies charged, at least in part, with fighting poverty. And the adjectives applied to global penury run from merely “heartbreaking” to “disgraceful,” “tragic,” “shameful,” “scandalous,” “appalling,” “shocking,” “unspeakable” and “inexcusable.” Thousands of meetings and conferences have been devoted to the problem. Hordes of well-intentioned experts have flown into remote regions to provide technical assistance, and an enormous multibillion-dollar “aid industry” has grown up around global poverty reduction. Between 1950 and 2000, more than $1 trillion flowed from the rich World to the poor in the form of “aid” or “development assistance.” Some of these dollars saved lives and did improve conditions: The smallpox eradication program in the 1960s, child immunization in the 1980s and campaigns against river blindness, trachoma, leprosy and polio. Yet, globally, 10 percent of the World is living on less than $2 a day. That is just over 700 million people living on less than $1.90 a day. For every 1,000 children born, 39 will die before they turn five. Globally, there are over 65 million children not attending school. And 1.1 billion survive in extreme or absolute poverty on less than one dollar. What is truly amazing about this, however—apart from the failure to wipe out global poverty after half a century of concerted international effort—is the incredible success these numbers reveal—once we look at them in reverse. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Noe of this is intended to minimize the tragedy of twenty-first century poverty. However, a time traveler from the seventeenth century who turned up in the World today would be stunned not by how poor the human race is but by how big and unbelievably rich it has become. Having left behind a World that barely supported a population of 500 million people ridden by successive famines and plagues, he or she would surely marvel that more than 7.25 billion humans survive on the planet today, including more than 6.67 billion people live above the two-dollar poverty lines. The benefits of communication—whether Morse’s telegraph, Bell’s telephone, or today’s high-speed data networks—are relative. If no one has them, all competing firms operate, as it were, at the same neural transmission rate. However, when some do and other do not, the competitive arena is sharply tilted. So companies rushed to adopt Bell’s new invention. Telephones changed almost everything about business. They permitted operations over a greater geographical area. Top executives could now speak directly with branch managers or salesmen in distant regional offices to find out, in detail, what is going on. Voice communication conveyed far more information, through intonation, inflection, and accent, than the emotionless dah-dits of Morse code ever could. The phones made big companies bigger. They made centralized bureaucracies more efficient. Switchboards and operators proliferated. Secretaries overheard calls and learned when to keep mum. They learned to screen calls, thereby partially controlling access to power. At first the phone also abetted secrecy. A lot of business could now be transacted without the incriminating evidence of a piece of paper. (Later came technologies for wiretapping and bugging, tipping the scales in the never-ending battle between those who have business secret and those who want to penetrate them.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

The indirect benefits of this advanced communications system were even greater. Phones helped integrate the industrializing economy. Capital markets became more fluid; commerce, easier. Deals could be made swiftly, with a confirming letter as follow-up. Phones accelerated the pace of business activity—which, in turn, stepped up the rate of economic development in the more technically advanced nations. In this way, one might argue that telephones, over the long term, even affected the international balance of power. (This claim is less outrageous than it might seem at first glance. National power flows from multiple sources, but one can crudely track the rise of America to a position of global dominance by looking at its communications system relative to other nations. As late as 1956, half of all the telephones in the World were in the United States of America. Today, as America’s relative dominance declines, that percentage has slipped to about one third.) Occupying the gray area between biology and technology is cybernetic theory. The word’s root is Greek for “steersman” and Andre Ampere used the word in 1834 to mean “science of control” or “the branch of politics which is concerned with the means of government.” Norbert Wiener used the term to refer to “the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine” concerned especially with mathematical analysis of information flow between biological, electronic and mechanical systems, and maintenance of order in those systems. The complexity of predicting trajectories of quickly moving targets during World War II sparked Wiener and Julian Bigelow’s development of cybernetics. Constantly changing information about the target’s direction and speed necessitated feedback devices which would allow a gun to regulate its own movements. Interestingly enough, human operators in Wiener’s automatic gun (which was never built) were given equal status with electro-mechanical components in the feedback loop. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Information gleaned from the project concerning feedback and servo-mechanisms led Wiener and associates to devise a model of the central nervous system that “explained some of its most characteristic activities as circular processes, emerging from the nervous system into the muscles, and re-entering the nervous system through the organs. The connecting link was electronics, and the almost mystical fit between mathematic logic and the behaviour of electronic circuits. The thrust of the new information sciences was to precisely define and measure information in mathematic terms; to add information to the list of fundamental definitions basic to science—matter, energy, electric charge and the like. “It has long been clear to me,” says Wiener in Cybernetics, “that the modern ultra-rapid computing machine was in principle an ideal central nervous system t an apparatus for automatic control; and that its input and output need not be in the form of numbers or diagrams but might very well be, respectively, the readings of artificial sense organs, such as photoelectric cells or thermometers, and the performances of motors or solenoids.” Information transfer is fundamental to discussing the current state of technology. Automata need only instructions to accomplish given tasks. The link with the machine is mental. Machine language carries out work. Language, according to Wiener, “is not exclusively an attribute of living beings but one which they may share to a certain degree with the machines man has constructed.” Cybernetics recorded the switch from one dominant model, or set of explanations for phenomena, to another. Energy—the notion central to Newtonian mechanics—was now replaced by information. The ideas of information theory, such as coding, storage, noise, and so on, provided a better explanation for a whole host of events, from the behaviour of electronic circuits to the behaviour of a replicating cell. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Electrical powering of machinery allowed a dialogue between organic and mechanized systems. Galvani’s discovery of electrical nervous stimulation in animal muscles around 1790 was the starting point of electrophysiology (apparently an inspiration to Mary Shelley). In 1875, electronic brain currents were discovered and in 1924, Hans Berger devised a method of recording electrical activity from the surface of the scalp, later to become known as electro-encephalography, central to biofeedback. All living tissues is sensitive to electric current and generates small voltages. Our nervous system’s activity is accompanied by electrical potentials and can be controlled externally by electricity, providing a means of direct communication between human and machine systems, the common thread of biofeedback. Technical history, then, involves extension and replacement of human functions in more than just a metaphorical sense. Wiener, again, was the first to suggest using myoelectric currents (produced by contracting muscle fiber) to control the motions of prosthetic limbs. He believed that signals from the brain to the muscle fiber in the stump of the limp could be tapped by electrodes. Small motors in the prosthesis could amplify the current to control the limb’s movements. The “Boston Elbow” and “Utah Arm” are motor-driven prostheses that follow this procedure almost exactly, using electrodes that attach to the shoulder muscle or lay implanted in the arm socket. Through biofeedback the amputee learns to control the device somewhat like a normal limb. Nobel Prizes are more often awarded for discoveries than for the tools (including instruments and techniques) that made them possible. If the goal is to spur scientific progress, this is a shame. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

This pattern of reward extends throughout science, leading to a chronic underinvestment in developing new tools. Philip Abelson, an editor of the journal Science, points out that the United States of America suffers from “a lack of support for development of new instrumentation. At one time, we had a virtual monopoly in pioneering advances in instrumentation. Now practically no federal funds are available to universities for the purpose.” It is easier and less risky to squeeze one more piece of data out of an existing tool than to pioneer the development of a new one, and it takes less imagination. However, new tools emerge anyway, often from sources in other fields. The study of protein crystals, for example, can benefit from new X-ray sources developed by physicists, and techniques from chemistry can help make new proteins. Because they cannot anticipate tools resulting from innovations in other fields, scientists and engineers are often too pessimistic about what can be achieved in their own fields. Nanotechnology will join several fields, and yield tools useful in many others. We should expect surprising results. Today’s tools for making small-scale structure are of two kinds: molecular-processing tools and bulk-processing tools. For decades, chemists and molecular biologists have been using better and better molecular-processing tools to make and manipulate precise, molecular structures. These tools are of obvious use. Physicists, as we will see, have recently developed tools that can also manipulate molecules. Combined with techniques from chemistry and molecular biology, these physicist’s tools promise great advances. Microtechnologists have applied chip-making techniques to the manufacture of microscopic machines. These technologies—the main approach to miniaturization in recent decades—can play at most a supporting role in the development of nanotechnology. Despite appearance, it seems that microtechnology cannot be refined into nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

In 1973, a wealthy young man leased a small suburban television station near San Francisco and tried the most curious experiment. He presented only two programs every day. One occupied most of the day with images of ocean waves rolling to shote. One camera, no editing, no zooms. It just sat there and transmitted whatever the ocean did. Then he switched to another single camera in an empty studio facing a blank wall. He invited everyone to do whatever he or she wished in front of the camera. Some people spoke into it; others tried more sensational behaviour. The first thing that was revealed by this experiment, which was practically an inversion of the usual television fare, was the extent to which the medium depends upon its technical events. A single stationary camera, picking up whatever passes through the frame, in real time, without alteration, will only bore people. If a professional producer-editor had gotten hold of that ocean footage, she or he could have created more interest in it. She or he could have zeroed in on details, shot from a helicopter following the waves forward, switched to a camera on the beach looking outward, and so on. With a little music, a nice little piece might have been made out of it. However, it would be engaging only for a short while. No matter what technical tricks are used, ocean footage will not work very long on television. It does not fit the test of highlighted moments. The experience of looking at oceans is beyond television’s ability to deliver. To enjoy an ocean, one must be in a timeless condition, contemplative yet alert to the small changes in the sea and the life it supports. If you are looking for action and catharsis watching an ocean will only bore you. Watching it on TV is worse. You lose that salt smell, the wind, the lazy detail of the foam and light on wet sand and the sense of vast time and space. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Television would also lose the nuances of a commonplace visit to a coffeehouse. The mundane conversation and people moving around or reading the paper would be profoundly boring to viewers sitting at home in their living rooms, unless, of course, some clown appeared and started tripping over everyone’s feet while dropping trays, and then someone began to throw pastries around or spilled cappuccino on people’s heads, or a bakery truck loaded with lemon meringue pies came crashing through the glass window. Now we are getting somewhere. Action. In practice, no TV producer would ever seriously consider either oceans or coffeehouses as subject matter. They are intrinsically and obviously wrong subjects for the medium, “bad” television. On the other hand, there are a lot of talking shows on television. Some people think this is odd since television is supposed to be a visual medium. Well, since television is so indistinct a medium, and since so little visual information can get through it, most of what we receive from television really comes in the words. This is especially true of news shows. We see some action—fires, wars, picketing—but we cannot really make much of it until a reporter tells us what is happening and orients our minds to perceive what we are actually not seeing at all. In many ways television is really radio. The only real effect of the imagery is to fixate us. Another reason why there is so much talking on television is that you can see faces. Faces talk. So naturally there is a bias toward talking. Within the talking there is a bias toward a kind of highlighted conversation. Television talking is very pointed. Subject oriented, rather than a generalized. Focused, rather than free-ranging. This is particularly the result of time limitations and the need to be sure that something happens beyond the kind of talk that takes place in grocery stores. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

On television people tend to skim along the highlights of the conversational material. Blank spaces, pauses, personal comments, asides, changes of mood, changes of attitude, changes of subject—all of the rhythms or ordinary conversation—are rarely allowed into television talk. To do otherwise would defy the medium’s demand for frequent catharsis, repeated high-light and achieved goals. Therefore talk show dialogues take on the same rhythms and follow the same values as dramatic programs or situations comedies or quiz shows of news. The dialogue moves from loaded line to loaded line, headline to headline, important pronouncement to important pronouncement, punch line to punch line, like Bob Hope’s humor. Verbal troughs are often written into dialogue shows. Many acting schools teach these. Talk shows hosts and guests indulge briefly in “patter” which is pseudoaimless. However, the process never advances very far. The goal remains a laugh or a point or a contention or an outrage or a shock. The conversation is never allowed to settle down to the rhythms of real life, because if it did, there would be no point in having the television on at all. One could have aimless conversation with someone at the bus stop. And so, as with the technically created artificial unusualness, content itself is usually chosen for its hyperactive effect. The survival of this dull, indistinct, inherently boring technological failure called television depend on this effect. Those who reject the Bible’s theory and who believe, let us say, in theory of Science are also protected from unwanted information. Their theory, for example, instructs them to disregard information about astrology, dianetics, and creationism, which they usually label as medieval superstition or subjective opinion. Their theory fails to give any guidance about moral information and, by definition, gives little weight to information that falls outside the constraints of science. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Undeniably, fewer and fewer people are bound in any serious way to Biblical or other religious traditions as a source of compelling attention, and authority, the result of which is that they make no moral decisions, only practical ones. This is still another way of defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a culture whose available theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable information in the moral domain. I trust the reader does not conclude that I am making an argument for fundamentalism of any kind. One can hardly approve, for example, of a Muslim fundamentalism that decrees a death sentence to someone who writes what are construed as blasphemous words, or a Christian fundamentalism that one did the same or could lead to the same. I must hasten to acknowledge, in this context, that it is entirely possible to live as a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jewish people with a modified and temperate view of religious theory. Here, I am merely making the point that religious tradition serves as a mechanism for the regulation and valuation of information. When religion loses much or all of its binding power—if it is reduced to mere rhetorical ash—then confusion inevitably flows about what to attend to and how to assign it. Indeed, another great World narrative, Marxism, is in the process of decomposing. No doubt there are fundamentalist Marxists who will not let go of Marx’s theory, and will continue to be guided by its prescription and constraints. The theory, after all, is sufficiently powerful to have engaged the imagination and devotion of more than a billion people. Like the Bible, the theory includes a transcendent idea, as do all great World narratives. With apologies to a century and a half of philosophical and sociological disputation, the idea is as follows: All forms of institutional misery and oppression are a result of class conflict, since the consciousness of all people is formed by their material situation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

God has no interest in this, because there is no God. However, there is a plane, which is both knowable and beneficent. The plan unfolds in the movement of history itself, which shows unmistakably that the working class, in the end, must triumph. When it does, with or without the help of revolutionary movements, class itself will have disappeared. All will share equally in the bounties of nature and creative production, and no one will exploit the labours of another. It is generally believed that this theory has fallen into disrepute among believers because information made available by television, films, telephone, fax machines, and other technologies has revealed that the working classes of capitalist nations are sharing quite nicely in the bounties of nature while at the same time enjoying a considerable measure of personal freedom. Their situation is so vastly superior to those of nations enacting Marxists theory that millions of people have concluded, seemingly all at once, that history may have no opinion whatever toward the fate of the working class or, if it has, that it is moving toward a final chapter quite different in its point from what Marx prophesied. All of this is said provisionally. History takes a long time, and there may yet be developments that will provide Marx’s vision with fresh sources of verisimilitude. Meanwhile, the following points need to be made: Believers in the Marxist story were given quite clear guidelines on how they were to weight information and therefore to understand events. To the extent that they now reject theory, they are threatened with conceptual confusions, which means they no longer know who to believe or what to believe. In the West, and especially in the United States of America, there is much rejoicing over this situation, and assurances are given that Marxism can be replaced by what is called “liberal democracy.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

However, this must be stated more as a question than an answer, for it is no longer entirely clear what sort of story liberal democracy tells. A clear and scholarly celebration of liberal democracy’s triumph rests on the fact that there will be no more ideological conflicts, all the competitors to modern liberalism having been defeated. However, many would like to challenge this idea. Several people believe that liberalism has become communism and will lead us back into slavery. However, in the early nineteenth century, when the principles of liberty and equality, as expressed in the American and French revolutions, emerged triumphant, with the contemporary decline of fascism and communism, some believe this is the reason that no threat exists. As one can see, these individuals paid insufficient attention to the changes in the meaning of liberal democracy over two and a half centuries. Its meaning in a technocracy is quite different from its meaning in Technopoly; indeed, in Technopoly it comes much closer to what Walter Benjamin called “commodity capitalism.” In the cause of the United States of America, the great eighteenth-century revolution was not indifferent to commodity capitalism but was nonetheless infused with the profound moral content. The United States of America was not merely an experiment in a new form of governance; it was the fulfillment of God’s plan. True, Adams, Jefferson, and Paine rejected the supernatural elements in the Bible, but they never doubted that their experiment had the imprimatur of Providence. People were to be free but for a purpose. Their God-given rights implied obligations and responsibilities, not only to God but to other nations, to which the new republic would be a guide and a showcase of what is possible when reason and spirituality commingle. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Reason’s exposedness in the rational regime is exacerbated by the absence of class in the old sense, based on principles or convictions of right. There is a general agreement about the most fundamental political principles, and therefore doubts about them have no status. In aristocracies there was also the part of the people, but in democracy there is no aristocratic party. This means that there is no protection for the opponents of the governing principles as well as no respectability for them. There were in the past also parties representing ecclesiastical interests against those of monarchs or aristocrats. These too provided a place for dissenting opinions to flourish. In the heat of our political squabbles we tend to lose sight of the fact that our differences of principle are very small, compared to those over which men used to fight. The only quarrel in our history that really involved fundamental differences about fundamental principles was over slavery. However, even the proponents of slavery hardly dared asset that some human beings are made by nature to serve other humans beings, as did Aristotle; they had to deny the humanity of the Africans. Besides, that question was really already settled with the Declaration of Independence. Black slavery was an aberration that had to be extinguished, not a permanent feature of our national life. Not only slavery, but aristocracy, monarch, and theocracy were laid to rest by the Declaration and the Constitution. This was very good for our domestic tranquility, but not very encouraging for theoretical doubts about triumphant equality. Not only were the old questions of political theorizing held to have been definitively answered, but the resources that couriered diversity concerning them were removed. Democratic conscience and the simple need to survive combine to suppress doubt. The kinds of questions put to the United States of America—the answers allow one to affirm the justice of equality more reasonably and more positively than many can do. This allows one to come out of an experience that we cannot have: a direct experience of an alternative regime and temper of soul—aristocracy. If we cannot in any way have access to something like that experience, our understanding of the range of human possibilities is impoverished, and our capacity to assess our strengths and weaknesses is diminished. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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It Would Save My Life—That’s All!

In 1839 down-at-heels artist who gave lessons in drawing was asked by a pupil whether payment of a ten-dollar fee would be helpful. The art teacher—a something dabbler in the mysteries of the electromagnetism—replied. “It would save my life, that’s all.” Samuel F.B. Morse had already proved that he could send coded messages along an electric wire. However, it was not until four years later, by dint of strenuous lobbying, that Mores managed to persuade the United States of America’s Congress to appropriate $30,000 to build a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. It was on the opening of that earliest line that Morse sent his historic telegram—“What hath God wrought!” With that Morse opened the age of telecommunications and triggered one of the most dramatic commercial confrontations of the 19th century. He started a powerful process that is still unfolding in our time. Today, even as the battle of the supermarket checkout counters intensifies, a larger conflict is shaping up, centered on control of what might be called the electronic highways of tomorrow. Because so much of business now depends on getting and sending information, companies around the World have been rushing to link their employees through electronic networks. These networks form the key infrastructure of the 21st century, as critical to business success and national economic development as the railroads were in Morse’s era. Some of these are “local area networks,” or LANs, which merely hook up computers in a single building or complex. Others are globe-girdling nets that connect CitiBank people the World over, or help Hilton reserve its hotel rooms and Hertz its cars. Every time McDonald’s sells a Big Mac or a McMuffin, electronic data are generated. McDonald’s is the World’s leading global foodservice retailer with over 38,000 restaurants in over 100 countries, McDonald’s operates no fewer than 20 different networks to collect, assemble, and distribute information. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Du Pont’s medical sales force plugs laptops into its electronic mail network, and Sara Lee depends on its nets to put L’eggs hosiery onto the shelves. Volvo links 20,000 terminals around the World to swap market data. DEC’s engineers exchange design information electronically Worldwide. IBM alone connection over 355,000 terminals around the World through a system called VNET, which in 1987 handled an estimated 5 trillion characters of data. By itself, a single part of that system—called PROFS—saved IBM the purchase of 7.5 million envelopes, and IBM estimates that without PROFS it would need nearly 40,000 additional employees to perform the same work. Networking has spread down to the smallest businesses. With some 250 million PCs in use in the United States of America, Wang now advertises its networking equipment over the radio, sandwiching its commercials about “connectability” between Bach and suites and Beethoven symphonies. Companies daily grow more dependent on their electronic nets for billing, ordering, tracking, and trading; for the exchange of design specification, engineering drawings, and schedules; and for actually controlling production lines remotely. Once regarded as purely administrative tools, networked information systems are increasingly seen as strategic weapon, helping companies protect established markets and attack new ones. The race to build these networks has taken on some of the urgency that accompanied the great age of railroad construction in the 19th century, when nations became aware that their fate might be tied to the extensiveness of their rail systems. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Yet the power-shifting implications of this phenomenon are only dimly perceived by the public. To appreciate their significance, it helps to glance back to what happened after Samuel Morse strung the first telegraph network. By the mid-19th century Morse franchises had built thousands of miles of telegraph lines. Competing companies sprang up, networks grew, and an intense race began to connect major cities to one another across the continent. Stringing its wires along railroad rights of way, a company called Western Union began gobbling up smaller companies. Within eleven years its lines reached from one end of America to the other, and its capital had shot up from $500,000 to $41,000—a bank-boggling amount in those days. Soon its subsidiary, the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, was providing high-speed information for investors and gold speculators—paving the way for today’s Dow Jones or Nikkei. At a time when most messages were still carried across the continent in saddlebags or railway cars, Western Union had a stranglehold on the means of advanced communications. Success, as usual, bred corporate arrogance. Thus, in 1876, when a voice teacher named Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone, Western Union tried to laugh it off as a joke and a fad. However, as public demand for telephone service soared, Western Union made it clear it was not about to surrender its monopoly. A knockdown conflict ensured, and Western Union did everything possible to kill or capture the newer technology. It hired Thomas Edison to invent alternatives to the Bell technology. Its lawyers fought Bell in court. It hired Thomas Edison to invent alternatives to the Bell technology. Its lawyers fought Bell in court. “At another level,” writes Joseph C. Goulden, author of Monopoly, “Western Union barred Bell from the right-of-way monopolies it owned for its wires along highways and railroads. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

“Western Union had its instruments in every major hotel, railway station, and newspaper office in the nation, under terms which forbade installations of telephones. A Bell manager in Philadelphia was forbidden to erect lines anywhere in the city; his workers frequently were jailed on complaints sworn by Western Union. The telegraph company’s political influence in Washington kept Bell phones from federal offices.” Despite all this, Western Union failed, swept aside not so much by its smaller antagonist as by the business World’s desperate hunger for better communications. In turn, the winner of that corporate power struggle grew into the biggest privately owned business the World had ever seen—the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). During the Worldwide Great Depression in the 1930s, a satirical French movie called Le Million showed two farmers sitting at an outdoor bistro savouring glasses of Bordeaux. When the waiter gives them the check, l’addition, one farmer reaches into a sack and hands him a chicken. The waiter returns with change, putting two eggs on the table, at which point the farmer picks up the eggs and places one back as the trip, or pourboire. The absurdity perfectly captures the realities of life for millions in economies where money loses its value, as it did not so long ago in Southeast Asia, Russia, and Argentina. However, tomorrow we may not wait for crises to engage in moneyless transactions. Barter, long regarded as impractical in complex markets, is being given new life. For the average person, the word barter calls to mind images of a primitive society or of small-scale personal exchanges. A lawyer writes a will for a friend who gives him a tennis lesson in return. So many of these transactions occur daily and are so natural that they pass for favors. However, economically speaking, they are in fact minor forms of barter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

However, barter is also big business. While reliable global statistics are hard to come by because definitions vary, according to Forbes, “it is estimated that more than 60 percent of all Forbes 500 companies use barter. Even heavyweights, including General Electric, Marriott, and Carnival Cruise Lines have been known to barter goods or services.” Fortune reports that two thirds of all major global companies regularly engage in barter and have set up departments specifically to handle such deals. In Argentina in 2002, as the economy tanked and auto sales melted away, Toyota and Ford agreed to accept grain in payments for cars. When Ukraine racked up a massive debt for natural gas, Russia took eight Tu-160 Blackjack bombers as partial payment. Russia swapped three billion dollars worth of Stolicnaya vodka for Pepsi-Cola syrup. Other governments have put on the barter block everything from alpaca cloth to zinc. At the global level, according to Bernard Lietaer, formerly chief planner of Belgian central bank and one of the architects of the euro, international corporate barter, otherwise known as countertrade, is in “common use among no less than 200 countries around the World, with a volume that now ranges from $800 billion to $1.2 trillion a year.” And barter growth is accelerating. One reason is that we may be heading into decades of tempestuous economic conditions. Say Lietaer, major currencies today are “exhibiting a volatility that is presently four times higher than it 1971.” High volatility suggests that an increasing number of countries will find themselves facing periodic foreign-exchange shortages. Bater gives governments and business a way to trade when no one wants their own nation’s currency. When currencies oscillate wildly, it is also a way to reduce risk. When countries agree to exchange goods or services in lieu of money, currency risk is essentially eliminated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Until now, the main objection to barter has been the difficulty of matching what one person wishes to sell with what another has to offer in return—what economists have called a necessary “coincidence of needs.” However, the rise of the Internet radically reduces these impediments, making it almost instantly possible to locate potential trading partners around the World and expanding the variety of barterable items. Not only is it easier—given today’s remarkable financial networks—to find a partner for a two-sided trade, but the ready availability of data and global communications makes it possible to match the simultaneous offerings and needs of multiple participants. This points toward more complex but far bigger barter deals in days to come. How big? Big enough to replace money within this lifetime? “There is no reason products and services could not be swapped directly by consumers and producers through a direct exchange—essentially a massive barter economy.” That conclusion comes from Mervyn King, formerly deputy governor of the Bank of England. Combine (1) the rise of para-money; (2) the growth of barter; (3) the increase of intangibility; (4) the spread of ever-more-complex global financial networks; and (5) radical new technologies soon to be deployed. Set these against (6) a World economy that is highly leveraged, rocked by largely unregulated speculation; and (7) the coming decades f seismic changes in the World geopolitical framework, and conventional, industrial-age money may not disappear—but it may become a collector’s item. Today, as these forces converge, we also find scattered small-scale experiments with alternate currencies, mostly at a community level, often combined with elements of barter. However, crypto currency was hyped when it first came out, but its value has decrease nearly 60 percent since its peak and now most people are likely to lose money when investing in it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

A program pioneered in Ithaca, New York, and now copied in dozens of other communities allows consumers and merchants to use chits rather than real currency to exchange goods and services for everything ranging from rent and medical bills to theater tickets. Another system, created by Edgar Cahn and detailed in his book Time Dollars, lets people build up service credits for, say, taking an elderly neighbour shopping, which can then be used to obtain babysitting from another participant in the network. In their own ways, all of these ventures seek to recognize and give quasi-monetary value to the many economic contributions made by prosumers. Considering the vast new opportunities opened by electronic exchange, it may be possible to expand on such community-based experiments and develop large-scale alternative currencies for certain kinds of prosumer activity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Terra Project calls for a superanational currency based not on gold or wildly floating exchange rates but on a basket of internationally traded commodities and services. The larger questions facing us, however, involve not only the fate of money but, as we have seen, the future of property, capital and markets—and their interactions—as well. They involve the shift from wage labour toward “portfolio work” and self-employment; from handcraft prosuming to technology-based prosuming; from profit-based production toward open-source contributions to software, medicine to value based on ideas, images, symbols and models inside billions of brains. They involve completely altered uses of time, space and knowledge—among the deepest fundamental of wealth. How might the growing links between unpaid prosumer production in the non-money economy and the paid production in the money economy affect capitalism? #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

What happens to capitalism when its most important input is not scarce, but essentially limitless and non-rival? What happens to capitalism when a growing proportion of property becomes not only intangible, but doubly intangible? Faced with these changes, as the Third Wave of change supplants industrialism and spread far beyond its origins in the United States of America, capitalism faces a crisis of redefinition. When that revolutionary redefinition is completed, will what remains still be capitalism? I know that the millions of people who migrate to and the other country that try to copy America sure hope so. When I was fifteen years old, I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life. I had never before seen, or at least had not noticed, buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or trade, but to something that might be an end in itself. The Middle West was not known for the splendor of its houses of worship or its monument to political glory. There was little visible reminiscence of the spiritual heights with which to solicit the imagination or the admiration of young people. The longing for I knew not what suddenly found a response in the World outside. It was, surely, the World outside. Although the Gothic buildings were magnificent, they are not as grand as the ones in Europe. However, they pointed toward a road of learning that leads to the meeting place of the greats. There one finds examples of a sort not likely to be seen around one, without which one could neither recognize one’s own capacities nor know how wonderful it is to belong to the species. This imitation of styles of faraway lands and ages showed an awareness of lack of, and a respect for, the substance expressed by those styles. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

These buildings were a bow to the contemplative life by a nation addicted more than any other to the active life. The pseudo-Gothic was much ridiculed, and nobody build like that anymore. Even though it is not authentic, they should continue to build that way. To me it was and remains an expression of what we are, especially since some of these buildings were created with authentic elements from ancient Egypt, Athens, and Medieval Europe. However, one wonders whether the vulture critics had as good an instinct about out spiritual needs as the vulgar rich who paid for the buildings. This nation’s impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration. Reminiscences and warnings from the past are our only monitor as we careen along our path. Those despised millionaires who set up a university in the midst of a city that seems devoted only to the American goals paid tribute to what they had neglected, whether it was out of a sense of what they themselves had missed, or out of bad conscience about what their lives were exclusively devoted to, or to satisfy the vanity of having their names attached to the enterprise. (What feeds a man’s vanity teaches as much about him as anything.) Education was an American thing, and not only technical education. For me the promise of these buildings was fully kept. From the moment I became a student there, it seemed plausible to spend all m time thinking about what I am, a theme that was interesting to be but had never appeared a proper or possible subject of study. In high school I had seen many of the older boys and girls go off to the state university to become doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, the whole variety of professions respectable in the little World in which I lived. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

The university was part of growing up, but it was not looked forward to as a transforming experience—nor was it so in fact. No one believed that there were serious ends of which we had not heard, or that there was a way of studying our ends and determining their rank order. In short, philosophy was only a word, and literature a form of entertainment. Our high schools and the atmosphere around them puts us in this frame of mind. However, a great university presented another kind of atmosphere, announcing that there are questions that ought to be addressed by everyone but are not asked in ordinary life or expected to be answered there. It provided an atmosphere of free inquiry, and therefore excluded what is not conducive to or is inimical to such inquiry. It made a distinction between what is important and unimportant. It protected the tradition, not because tradition is tradition but because tradition provides models of discussion on a uniquely high level. It contained marvels and made possible friendships consisting in shared experiences of those marvels. Most of all there was the presence of some authentically great thinkers who gave living proof of the existence of theoretical life and whose motives could not easily be reduced to any of the baser ones people delight in thinking universal. They had authority, not based on power, money or family, but on natural gifts that properly compel respect. The relations among them and between them and students were the revelation of a community in which there is a true common good. In a nation founded on reason, the university was the temple of the regime, dedicated to the purest use of reason and evoking the kind of reverence appropriate to an association of free and equal human beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The years have taught me that much of this existed only in my youthful and enthusiastic imagination, but not so much as one might suppose. The institutions were much more ambiguous than I could have suspected, and they have proved much frailer when caught in contrary winds than it seemed they would be. However, I did see real thinkers who opened up new Worlds for me. The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for. If fortune had not put me into a great university at one of its greatest moments, they accompany me every minute of every day of my life, making me see much more and be much more than I could have seen or been. I have had teachers and students such as dreams are made on. And most of all I have friends with whom I can share thinking about what friendship is, with whom there is a touching of souls and in whom works that common good of which I have just spoken. All of this is, of course, mixed with the weaknesses and uglinessess that life necessarily contains. None of it cancels the low in man. However, it informs even that low. None of my disappointments with the university—which is after all only a vehicle for contents in principle separable from it—has ever made me doubt that the life it gave me was anything other than the best one available to me. Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society. Falling in love with the idea of the university is not a folly, for only by means of it is one able to see what can be. Without it, all these wonderful results of the theoretical life collapse back into the primal slime from which they cannot re-emerge. The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties. However, such debunking can obscure them, and has. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

When driving a car, one’s nervous system becomes linked with the vehicle in a very basic way. If the driver decides to brake, the body performs a complex sequence of maneuvers with the brake, accelerator and steering wheel, all acting as sense-extension. The vehicle becomes body-like and responds in body-like fashion to the driver’s thoughts. If the driver decides to accelerate, the brain signals the foot which responds by signaling the accelerator, which responds by increasing fuel flow, which enacts a series of events that causes the vehicle to increase speed. In a sense, the car is the driver’s body and is directly controlled by the driver’s brain and central nervous system. The driver “feels” other objects external to the vehicle and judges distances from the car in a manner crudely analogous to the operations involved in judging one’s environment from the physical body. The difference is that the signal flow from the brain to the auto is indirect and is impeded by the physical separation of the operator’s appendages from the appropriate control mechanisms. A little over a decade ago, there was talk of an experimental automobile braking system which was to be engaged by simply lifting an eyebrow, cutting in half the reaction time of a conventional brake system and reducing physical effort and mechanical work. As we designed increasingly subtle mechanisms responsive to heat, pressure, and biological signals, we appear to be approaching a time when “willing” a machine into action will be relatively common. The separate steps between thought and realization of a desire goal begin to blur and finally disappear. Signal flow between organic and mechanical units linked in a system gradually becomes continuous and unbroken. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

This trend toward continuous communications has resulted in the transfer of the machine operator’s work from “…the level of muscular activity to the level of perception, memory and thought—to internal mental processes.” MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) noted that the Industrial Revolution concerned the machine primarily as an alternative to human muscle. According to Lewis Mumford in The Pentagon of Power, “Man’s biological emergence during the last two million years has, indeed, accelerated; and it has done so mainly in one direction, in the enlargement of the nervous system, under an increasingly unified cerebral direction.” Machines make the body expendable. If machines have accomplished nothing else, they have reduced the human self to the brain and central nervous system. The history of simple tools is a chronology of extension and articulation of human functions. Tools, originally conceived about two million years ago as crude adjuncts of the body to increase its power and efficacy, are passive participants in accomplishing work. A machine is merely a supplemental limb; this is the be-all and end—all of machinery. Tools connected in series produce machines. Machinery has gone a step beyond the tool in that it is capable of varying degrees of automatism (self-regulated activity without human participation), contingent behavior (decision making) and reaction to sensory stimulus through artificial organs. Mechanical history involves not only extension but replacement of human acidity. Mumford has actually called that machine “…a sort of minor organism, designed to perform a single set of functions.” You might say that extension of the limb evolved into extensions of the brain. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Technology improves itself in a Darwinian way, as seen in the electronic marketplace, where unfit contraptions become extinct every year. As technology absorbs more and more human work, the line separating biology and mechanics gradually becomes less distinct. Though we are still toolmakers and our “logic engines” are still tools in the general sense of the word, the context has changed. No one living at the time of Hero of Alexandria had any idea that five machines he defined would have produced offspring capable of instantaneous logarithmic calculation or incorporated into the body as working parts. By World War II, machines were exhibiting behaviour originally thought to be characteristic of primitive life. Early guided missiles were designed with the idea of goal-seeking and scanning in mind, which “had combined as the essential mechanical conception of a working model that would behave very much like a simple animal. Throughout history, limited tools have limited achievement. Leonardo da Vinci’s sixteenth-century chain drives and ball bearings were theoretically workable, yet never worked in their inventor’s lifetime. Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century mechanical computer suffered the same fate. The problem? Both inventors needed precisely machined parts that (though readily available today) were beyond the manufacturing technology of their times. Physicist David Miller recounts how a sophisticated integrated circuit design project at TRW counts how a sophisticated integrated circuit design project at TRW hit similar limits in the early 1980s: “It all came down to whether a German company could col their glass lenses slowly enough to give us the accuracy we needed. They couldn’t.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

In the molecular World, tool development again paces progress, and new tools can bring breathtaking advances. Mark Pearson, director of molecular biology for Du Pont, has observed this in action: “When I was a graduate student back in the 1950s, it was a multiyear problem to determine the molecular structure of a single protein. We used to say, ‘One protein, one career.’ Yet now the time has shrunk from a career to a decade to a year—and in optimal cases to a few months.” Protein structures can be mapped atom by atom by studying X-ray reflections from layers in protein crystals. Pearson observes that “Characterizing a protein was a career-long endeavor in part because it was so difficult to get crystals, and just getting the material was a big constraint. With new technologies, we can get our hands on the material now—that may sound mundane, but it is a great advance. To the people in the field, it makes all the difference in the World.” Improved tools for making and studying proteins are of special importance because proteins are promising building blocks for first-generation molecular machines. At one end of what we might think of as the spectrum of personal experience, there is the occasional momentous event. Emotionally engulfing. Intellectually overpowering. These experiences happen to everyone, but they are relatively rare. Between these “highs,” life moves along from routine experience to routine experience, flowing one into the next, developing the overall pattern that is life’s true content. When you sit down at a café with a friend, you do not need to have a highly excitable and joyful emotional experience to be worthwhile. Perhaps nothing will happen in that hour or two. No exclamations of passion. No news of dire events. No shoot-outs at the next table or in the street. Perhaps you will explore some obscure detail in your friend’s feelings or personal history. Perhaps you will merely converse or watch the passing parade. Perhaps you will explore some obscure detail in your friend’s feelings or personal history. Perhaps you will muse about fashion. Most coffeehouse conversations, like the rest of life, will go more or less that way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Ordinary life contains speaks and valleys of experience, highs and lows, long periods of dormancy, many periods of quiet, indecision, ambiguity, resolution, failed resolution. All of these fit into a wide pattern that is the way of life is actually lived. Included within this pattern are occasional highlighted events: great shocks, unexpected eruptions, sudden achievements. Life would be frustrating without such catharsis and excitement, but life would be bizarre and maddening if it had too many of these peak events. Much of the nervousness in the World today in both individual and national life may be attributable to the destiny and power of the experiences that are prearranged for our consumption. Too much happens too fast to be absorbed and integrated into an overall pattern of experience. It is no accident that the World outside television has concentrated increasingly on large and cathartic events. All artificial environments and the consumer life encourage focus on peak events. When nature is absent, so is natural subtlety. Personal attunement to slower, nature-based rhythms is obscured. We focus on the “hits” that are provided, and these reduce more and more to commodities. Every commodity is advertised as offering a bigger and better and more powerful experience than the one that preceded it. Since life’s experiences have been reduced to packaged commodities, like the chimpanzee in the lab, that is what we seek. Television, in addition to being the prime exponent of the commodity life, makes a direct contribution to distorting life in the direction of highlighted experience by choosing its contents to fit this pattern. It is a technological necessity that it do so. Since television is such a vague and limited medium, so unlikely to produce much of any response in a viewer, producers must necessarily divide all the content into two distinct categories: peaks and troughs, the highlighted and the routine, always choosing the former and not the latter. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

In this way, the choices in content match the technical bias toward artificial unusualness and also the tendencies of the wider commodity-based, artificial environment. The programming bias is always toward the more vivid, more powerful, more cathartic, more definite, “clean” peaks of content. The result, not the process. The bizarre, rather than the unusual. When we think about territorial systems, suppose that a single individual using a new strategy is introduced into one of the neighbourhoods of a population where everyone else is using a native strategy. One can say that the new strategy territorially invades the native strategy if every location in the territory will eventually convert to the new strategy. Then one can say that native strategy is territorially stable if not strategy can territorially invade it. All this leads to a rather strong result: it is no harder for a strategy to be territorially stable than it is to be collectively stable. In other words, the conditions that are needed for a strategy to protect itself from takeover by an invader are no more stringent in a territorial social system than they are in a social system where anyone is equally likely to meet anyone else. If a rule is collectively stable, it is territorially stable. The proof of this proposition gives some insight into the dynamics of a territorial system. Suppose there is a territorial system in which everyone is using a native strategy that is collectively stable, except for one individual who is using a new strategy. Now consider whether a neighbour of the newcomer would ever have reason to convert to the newcomer’s strategy. Since the native strategy is collectively stable, the newcomer cannot be scoring as well when surrounded by natives as a native who is surrounded by natives is scoring. However, every neighbour of the newcomer actually does have a neighbour who is also a native and who is entirely surrounded by other natives. Therefore no neighbour of the newcomer will find the newcomer’s neighbours will retain their own native strategy, or, what amounts to the same thing, will convert to the strategy of their native neighbours. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Therefore, the new strategy cannot spread in a population of collectively stable strategies, and consequently a collectively stable strategy is also territorially stable. The proposition that a collectively stable rule is territorially stable demonstrates that protection from invasion is at least easy in a territorial system as in a freely mixing system. One implication is that mutual cooperation can be sustained in a territorial system by a nice rule with no greater requirement on the size by a nice rule with no grater requirement on the size of the discount parameter relative to the payoff parameters than it takes to make that nice rule collectively stable. Even with the help of a territorial social structure to maintain stability, a nice rule is not necessarily safe. If the shadow of the future is sufficiently weak, then no nice strategy can resist invasion even with the help of territoriality. In such a case, the dynamics of the invasion process can sometimes be extremely intricate and quite fascinating to look at. Meanies spreading in a population of TIT FOR TAT goes something like this: there is an initial situation of one mean person in the population, by generation 1, there are five meanies. By generation 7 most of the community is mean, while the nice people being a very small minority. In this case, the shadow of the future has been made quite weak. By generation 19, the meanies have practically taken over, and finding a pocket of nice people extremely rare. The meanies colonize the original TIT FOR TAT population, forming a fascinating patten of long borders and bypassed islands of cooperators. Another way of looking at the effects of territoriality is to investigate what happens when the players are using a wide variety of more or less sophisticated strategies. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

The Biblical tale of the flood is started when the wickedness of man is so great on Earth and all the imagery of the designs of his heart only evil the whole day, and He repents of having made man. God Himself speaks: He does not wish again to curse the Earth on account of man, “for the imagery of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Scripture has at its core such a powerful mythology that even the residue of that mythology is still sufficient to serve as an exacting control mechanism for some people. It provides, first of all, a theory about the mean of life and therefore rules on how one is to conduct oneself. With apologies to Rabbi Hillel, who expressed it more profoundly and in the time it takes to stand on one leg, the theory is as follows: There is one God, who created the Universe and all that is in it. Although humans can never fully understand God, He has revealed Himself and His will to us throughout history, particularly through His commandments and the testament of the prophets as recorded in the Bible. The greatest of these commandments tell us that humans are to love God and express their love for Him through love, mercy, and justice to our fellow humans. At the end of time, all nations and humans will appear before God to be judged, and those who have followed His commandments will find favour in His sight. Those who have denied God and the commandments will perish utterly in the darkness that lies outside the presence of God’s light. To borrow from Hillel: That is the theory. All the rest is commentary. Those who believe in this theory—particularly those who accept the Bible as the literal word of God—are free to dismiss other theories about the origin and meaning of life and to give minimal weight to the facts on which other theories are based. Moreover, in observing God’s laws, and the detailed requirements of their enactment, believers receive guidance about what books they should not read, about what plays and films they should not see, about what music they should not hear, about what subjects their children should not study, and so on. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

For strict fundamentalists of the Bible, the theory and what follows from it seal them off from unwanted information, and in that way their actions are invested with meaning, clarity, and they believe, more authority. “These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them…I am whoever you make me, but what you want is a fiend; you want a sadistic fiend, because that is what you are,” say Charles Manson. Many people try to persuade the youth to follow religion and come and meet Jesus Christ, but some to not accept the invitation and become Worldly. A lot of people are disenchanted and have dropped out from main stream society. As they do, the converge to partake in their own great social experiment. They were alienated by the sterility of a technological society that elevated scientific materialism and rational planning as its ultimate ideals, yet could not solve basic problems such as poverty and economic injustice. They were frustrated by the hypocrisy and failures of religious and political institutions that preached Christian tolerance, yet supported the ecology-shearing practices of big business, racial intolerance, and the horrors of the 2020 riots. They sought solace in an atavistic romanticism. En masse, they “turned in, turned on, and dropped out.” This counterculture was a full-fledged revolt against the American technocracy, social form in which an industrial society reaches the peak of its organizational integration. In an attempt to blot out the vision of a “brave new World,” in which corporate profits supersede all other goals, these youths came together in an attempt at a utopian tribal society, in which man was in harmony with the environment, and in which the needs of all members of the tribe would be taken care of willingly, without government coercion. “Therefore we did pour out our souls in prayer to God, that He would strengthen us and deliver us out of the hands of our enemies, yea, and also give us strength that we might retain our cities, and our lands, and our possession, for the support of our people,” reports Alma 58.10. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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