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 18^th 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

Our outdoor living space is just as important as our indoor one, and #Havenwood Model 1 has the goods. 😉

We’re picturing late nights with great wine and good friends in this airy backyard! Cue string lights. ✨

Get more info on all the homes in the Havenwood community on our website, and contact our leasing office with any questions!

Enjoy the ranch-style residence one. Although it is the smallest of the floor plans offered at Cresleigh Havenwood, at 2,293 square feet, there is plenty of space in this single story home. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-one/
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Ever since brokers began congregating at Jonathan’s Coffee House in the eighteenth century and gave birth to what became the London Stock Exchange, the money eyes in each country in the West has had within it a financial-services industry handling the needs of borrowers and investors. This industry has relied on the most advanced data stores and communications available in each period. However, as late as the 1950s, that still meant file cabinets, the post office, rotary telephones and ticker tapes to manage money-relevant knowledge. The rise since then of the knowledge-based economy has been attended not merely by the extremely paid expansion of constantly changing data, information and knowledge but by the brisk growth of the middle class, burgeoning pension funds and insurance coverage, a vast increase in customers for financial services—and the need for an entirely new financial infrastructure. By 2022, financial services employed fully 5 percent of the entire U.S.A workforce. Put differently, more than one out of every 20 American workers were engaged in banking, insurance, pension management, mortgage companies, real estate investment trust and the securities industry. The average age of these workers is 43, estimated job growth 1.03 percent, average salary $91,866, average male salary $124,644, and average female salary $121,498. These businesses manage the flow of money through the money system, providing liquidity, assembling and allocating investments, rating and furnishing credit, maintaining secondary markets for stocks and bonds and grading and managing risk. In the United Kingdom, where the City of London is home to some of the World’s largest traders in Eurobonds, derivatives and insurance, more than one million people are employed in finance. Concentrations in financial services are also found in Zurich, Frankfurt (sometimes labeled “Bankfurt”), Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. And new regional centers are springing up from Shanghai to Dubai. Linking all these and other nodes together are high-powered computers and high-speed networks that aggregate and disperse money for investment and credit, not to mention speculation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Worldwide IT spending in the banking and securities sector was $514 billion in 2020. And the demand for even more instantly available information, data, and knowledge is growing constantly. The effects of this shift from the industrial-age financial infrastructure to its near-instantaneous, almost global digital form are by no means understood as yet, either by its users or by its customers—and least of all by policymakers and the public. Only a small fraction of the sums exchanged each day on the World’s stock markets is actually channeled to companies on the basis of their needs and long-term prospects. Instead, pre-programmed computers simultaneously scan thousand of firms to identify the most minute variations in their stock prices and frequently “invest” funds not for months or years but for minutes or even seconds. The result in large part is no longer investment but mathematically based, hyperspeed electronic poker. And it is no secret that within these markets, one in particular has grown so fast and furiously that the Financial Times describes it as “virtually unrecognizable from ten years ago.” This is the global currency market—swollen to the point that the International currency market has an average daily trading volume (ADTV) of $5 trillion, more than 67 times the entire amount traded daily on the New York Stock Exchange. In it, the Financial Times adds, trades are often multibillion-dollar transactions that take less than a second. However, little if any attention has gone to an even more troubling issue. For here once more we see change at the level of the deep fundamental of time—and yet another case of de-synchronization. Theoretically, the value of a country’s currency reflects, in great measure, the strength of its underlying economy. The de-synchronization, however, between high-speed currency trading and the slower pace at which a country’s “real” economy operates has grown so pronounced that the polarities—at least in some countries—are reversed. That is why, it was not bad economics that destroyed Asian financial markets in 1997-98 but bad currency market that tore down one economy after another. Similarly, near-instantaneous currency markets that tore down one economy after another. Similarly, near-instantaneous currency markets have left not only real economies but financial regulators in the dust. The result of this lack of synchrony is a system regarded by many as a threat not merely to individual countries but to the World economy. Super-slow national authorities with different and conflicting rules cannot regulate superfast global networks. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Many economies and economists still have trouble coming to terms with immense sums of “money” that exist only as temporary ones and zeros continually zipping from one node to node in digital trading networks with minimal human interaction. The effects are abstract, seemingly impersonal. Yet once in a while a poignant image encapsulates the revolutionary shift from the old money infrastructure to the still-emergent new structure. World-renowned photographer Robert Weingarten recently decided to shoot a series of pictures of the World’s stock exchanges. Assuming that their trading floors would someday all be replaced by electronic markets, he wanted to record their twilight in a series called “The Closing Bell.” It would capture frantic traders shouting and rushing about to close sales while telephones rind endlessly and changing prices blink across overhead light boards. He would then shoot the rooms as they look after closing: empty and desolate. Because he is a Californian, his first stop was the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. However, when he arrived to scout the location, he found the former stock-trading floor under reconstruction. The exchange had already converted equity trading to an electronic auction system called Archipelago, increasing the volume of its business twentyfold. The specialists and traders were already gone. The floor was on its way to becoming a gymnasium. And Archipelago was on its way to merging with the New York Stock Exchange. On its surface, today’s revolution in money—much of it still to come—seems chaotic. Yet if we look a bit closer, we discover a hidden motif. It is the same pattern of de-massification and diversification that we have already seen in production, markets, media, family structure—indeed, throughout the emergent new civilization. So profound are these changes—and those to come—that they challenge the very definition of money. Central banks have their own answers to the question “What is money?” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

The U.S. Federal Reserve definition essentially bundles together actual currency with money in our checking accounts and traveler’s checks and calls this “M1” money. Add to M1 the sums in our savings accounts and money-market mutual funds and it is called M2. Add a basket of other, mostly arcane, items and it becomes M3. For ordinary people going about their daily lives, these distinctions do not exist. The basic unit of money in America is the “almighty dollar.” Few of those who use it every day know that until the industrialization of the nation was ramping up, the government-backed dollar was only one among as many as eight thousand different wildcat currencies in the United States of America issued by states, banks, individual companies, merchants and miners. The standardization of money imposed by the United States of America government in 1863 paralleled the standardization of products, prices, and consumer tastes that came as part of the process of industrialization. And the same was true in other countries as well. The Japanese yen did not become the national currency until 1871, as the Meiji restoration was starting the country on the path to industrial modernity. Similarly, the deuschemark did not become Germany’s monetary unit until 1872, as Germany raced to overtake Britain as the leading industrial power. China long suffered from monetary chaos—with warlords, states, revolutionary bases, foreign enclaves and others each issuing their own currencies—right down to December 1948, as the Communists took over and introduced the renminbi yuan. And Europe, of course, has only recently standardized on the euro. Ironically, this belated standardization—like must else in the European Union—comes just as the knowledge-based wealth system beings to move advanced economies in the opposite direction. In fact, homogeneous currencies are about to be challenged by a dizzying diversity of alternatives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

In 1958—just two years after white-collar and service workers initially outnumbered blue-collar workers in the United States of America—a prototype for the first nationwide credit card was launched. This was the start of a Third Wave leap away from conventional money and into what today sometimes seems like a wilderness of “para-money”—a jungle of substitutes that have some or all of the characteristics of official currencies but are not. Money is fungible, meaning that it can be used in principle to buy just about anything. It can also be transferred to and from just about anyone. That near-universal applicability has made it very handy as a medium of exchange. However, a strange thing is happening. Today with more than one billion credit cards in use in the United States of America. American charge one trillion dollars a year on plastic—more than they spend in cash. And every day, it seems, we invent additional substitutes for money. Our airline tickets are often “free,” paid for with frequent-flier points. Originally, these points could be redeemed only for free seats on another flight. They were completely nonfungible—and not transferable to anyone else. They were unmoneylike. Before long, however, airlines permitted your points to be used by family members, friends—and anyone you choose. Beyond airline tickets, the points became redeemable for hotel rooms and rental cars, then an ever-widening range of merchandise—health-club memberships and hockey tickets, barbecues and wide-screen TVs, gardenias and garden hoses. What we say, therefore, was growing transferability and fungibility. Frequent-flier points were becoming more moneylike. They become actual money when they are sold to any of the various “milage brokers” who operate a gray market for points, over the objections of the airlines. True, given the financial shakiness of some of the issuing airlines, one might worry that the redeemability of all these points is in doubt. However, these intangible frequent-flier points may soon be worth more than the currency issues by some of the World’s dead-broke governments who still own airlines. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Of course, loyalty programs of various kinds, with greater or lesser degree of fungibility, are used not just by airlines. They are offered by everyone from InterContinental Hotels and Hilton to Neiman Marcus and Tesco Europe, from CVS drugstores and Chart House restaurants to BMW motorcycles. In the swirling, changing, milling marketplace they, too, perform some of the functions of plain old garden-variety money. However, this is only part of a larger change—the arrival of “flexible fungibility” in the form of programmable money. And your thirteen-year-old may not like it. The contest at the checkout counter has important implications for the consumer as well—and for the economy generally. Among other things it should help us rethink our obsolete assumptions about the respective roles of producers and consumers. For example, in a World in which money is “informationalized” and information “monetized,” the consumer pays for every purchase twice over: first with money and a second times by providing information that is worth money. The customer typically gibes this away for nothing. It is this valuable information that the retailers, manufacturers, banks, credit card issuers (and a lot of other people) are now fighting to control. In Florida and California, retail chains have fought blistering legal battles with banks over this issue. The central question their lawyers are asking one another is: “Who owns the customer data?” More consumers are becoming aware of just how much of their personal data has been collected. Consumer data ownership has reached a point that few people ever imagine it reaching. As a result, throughout the last decade, consumer data has become exponentially more valuable, and the tracking methods of social platforms have become exponentially more invasive. As a result consumers have a better understanding of their data’s value and the ways in which it is captured, there are two ways this may play out. First of all, no more tracking. With consumers and governments pushing for change in tech when it comes to data collection, we could see many brands change their business models to not relay on data as a revenue drive. For example, we could see social networks become pay-to-play. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Secondly, rewarding consumers for their data is an option. Some consumers—typically younger ones—are would accept their data being collected as long as there is a value exchange for it. However, at the end of the day, it comes down to ownership and control. If consumers own their data and are in control of how it is used, then everyone is happy. If a consumer prefers that their information be private and not make their data available to brands, that is their choice. However, if that consumer is not as concerned about their privacy, then they also have the ability to make their data available in exchange for some type of value—the level of which they are willing to accept in exchange for their data is up to each individual consumer. Yet, we still lack the vocabulary, let alone laws and economic concepts, with which to deal with these unfamiliar questions arising from the information wars. However, the issues involve the transfer of billions of dollars—and a subtle shift of economic and social bargaining power. What does a customer give away free to the store, the manufacturer, or his or her credit card company? Take the simplest of cases: A mother, home from work, in haste to make dinner, discovers she is out of margarine. Dashing into the nearest store, she snatches a pound of Fleischmann’s sweet unsalted margarine made by Nabisco off the shelf. Hurrying to the checkout counter, she waits her turn, grabbing a copy of TV Guide from the rack near the register, and hands her purchase to the clerk, who passes them over the scanner. In principle, she has communicated the following to the store computer: (1) a type of product she uses: (2) its brand; (3); its size or amount; (4) the fact that she preferred unsalted margarine to the regular; (5) the time of the purchase; (6) what other items, brands, sizes et cetera, she bought at the same time; (7) the size of her total bill; (8) the kind of magazine in which an advertiser might reach her; (9) information about where additional shelf space is now available; and much more besides. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

By combining all this, it will soon become possible to construct a surprisingly detailed picture of the individual’s life style, including driving habits, travel, entertainment and reading preferences, the frequency of meals outside the home, purchases of adult beverages, prophylactics or other contraceptives, and a list of favorite charities. Marui, a leading Japanese general-goods retailer which issues its own credit card, uses a system called M-TOPS. This permits Marui to zero in on families who have just changed residence. It does this by identifying purchases that usually go with furnishing a new home. On the assumption that a family buying air conditioners or kitchen cabinetry might be in the market for new beds as well, Marui has been able to achieve astonishingly high direct-mail responses. Leaving aside for a time the unsettling issues this raises about privacy in a super-symbolic economy, much of this information once in the hands of any commercial enterprise—supermarket chain, bank, manufacturer—can also be sold for a price of bartered for a discount on services. The market for such information is huge. “Data protection” laws in many countries now seek to regulate the uses of computerized information, but the data banks are filling up, the possibilities of integration are increasing, and the economic value of the information is soaring. All this, however, is only a primitive first approximation of the future. Consumers may soon find themselves in supermarkets lined with so-called “electronic shelves.” Instead of paper tags indicating the prices of canned goods or paper towels, the edge of the self itself will be a blinking liquid crystal display with digital readouts of the prices. The magic of this new technology is that it permits the store to change the price of thousands of products automatically and instantaneously as data streak in from the scanners at the front of the store. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Prices might plummet for slow-selling goods, climb for the hot items, rising and falling continuously in real-time response to supply and demand. Telepanel, Inc., a Toronto firm, estimates that such a system, capable of pricing 8,000 to 12,000 items, would cost the store in the range of $150,000 to $200,000 and pay for itself within two years. Carried only a short step further, the electronic shelf might also provide shoppers with nutritional and prince information at the touch of a button. Now are such systems contemplated only for supermarkets. Says Business Week: “Drug chains, convenience stores, and even department stores already are planning their own version of the system.” Down the line are even “smarter” shelves that would not merely send information to the customer, but elicit information from him or her. Hidden sensors, for example, make it possible to know when a customer passes a hand over a particular shelf or item, or when traffic exceeds or falls below expectation at a particular display. Soon the customer will hardly be able to blink in the store, or move his or her arms, without providing the storekeeper with more and yet more usable or salable data. The moral and economic implications of all this have hardly been explored by business or by consumer advocates. (Those interested in organizing consumer power had better start thinking about all this quickly, before the systems have been laid in place.) For now, it is only necessary to understand that profit margins today increasingly depend on information judo. Now, a college catalogue lists courses, subjects, and field of study that, taken together, amount to a certified statement of what a serious student ought to think about. More to the point, in what is omitted from a catalogue, we may learn what a serious student ought not to think about. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

A college catalogue, in other words, is a formal description of an information management program; it defines and categorizes knowledge, and in so doing systematically excludes, demeans, labels as trivial—in a word, disregards certain kinds of information. That is why “it makes sense” (or, more accurately, used to make sense). By what it includes/excludes it reflects a theory of the purpose and meaning of education. In the university where I teach, you will not find courses in astrology or dianetics or creationism. There is, of course, much available information about these subjects, but the theory of education that sustains the university does not allow such information entry into the formal structure of its courses. Professors and students are denied the opportunity to focus their attention on it, and are encouraged to proceed as if it did not exist. In this way, the university gives expression to its idea of what constitutes legitimate knowledge. At the present time, some accept this idea and some do not, and the resulting controversy weakens the university’s function as an information control center. The clearest symptom of the breakdown of the curriculum is found in the concept of “cultural literacy,” which has been put forward as an organizing principle and has attracted the serious attention of many educators. If one is culturally literate, the idea goes, one should mater a certain list of thousands of names, places, dates, and aphorisms; these are supposed to make up the content of the literate American’s mind. However, cultural literacy is not an organizing principle at all; it represents, in fact, a case of calling the disease the cure.  If it is to function well in the management of information, the point to be stressed here is that any educational institution, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning, mist have the means to give clear expression to its theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

I suspect that if we were to make a law forbidding the use of any of the words on the imposing list in this section, a large part of the population would be silenced. Technical discourse would continue; but all that concerns right and wrong, happiness, the way we ought to live, would become quite difficult to express. These words are there where thoughts should be, and their disappearance would reveal the void. The exercise would be an excellent one, for it might start people thinking about what they really believe, about what lies behind the formulas. Would “living exactly as I please” be speakable as a substitute for “life-style”? Would “my opinion” do for “values”? “My prejudices” for my “ideology”? Could “rabble-rousing” or “simply divine” stand in for “charisma”? Each of the standard words seems substantial and respectable. They appear to justify one’s tastes and deeds, and human beings need to have such justification, no matter what they may say. We have to have reasons for what we do. It is the sign of our humanity and our possibility of community. I have never met a person who says, “I believe what I believe; these are just my values.” There are always arguments. Tyrant groups had them; Communists have them. Thieves and pimps have them. There may be some people who do not feel they have to make a case for themselves, but they must be either unethical or philosophers. However, these words are not reasons, nor were they intended to be reason. All to the contrary, they were meant to show that our deep human need to know what we are doing and to be good cannot be satisfied. By some miracle these very terms became our justification: nihilism as moralism. It is not the immorality of relativism that I find appalling. What is astounding and degrading is the dogmatism with which we accept such relativism, and our easygoing lack of concern about what that means for our lives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The one writer who does not appeal at all to Americas—who offers nothing for our Marxist, Freudian, feminist, deconstructionist, or structuralist critics to mangle, who provides no poses, sentimentalities or bromides that appeal to our young—is Louis Ferdinand Celine, who best expressed how life looks to a man facing to what we believe or do not believe. He is a far more talented artist and penetrating observer than the much more popular Mann or Camus. Robinson, the hero he admires in Journey to the End of the Night, is an utterly selfish liar, cheat, murderer for pay. Why does Ferdinand admire him? Partly for his honesty, but mostly because he allows himself to be shot and killed by his girlfriend rather than tell her he loves her. He believes in something, which Ferdinand is unable to do. American students are repelled, horrified by this novel, and turn away from it in disgust. If it could be force-fed to them, it might motivate them to reconsider, to regard it as urgent to think through their premises, to make their implicit nihilism explicit and examine it seriously. As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation. A government must deter its citizens from breaking the law. For example, to collect taxes effectively, a government must maintain a reputation for prosecuting tac evaders. The government often spends far more investigating and prosecuting evaders than it acquires from the penalties levied against them. The government’s goal, of course, is to maintain a reputation for catching and prosecuting evaders to deter anyone contemplating tax evasion in the future. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

And what is true for tax collection is also true for many forms of policing: the key to maintaining compliant behavior from the citizenry is that that government remains able and willing to devote resources far out of proportion to the stakes of the current issue in order to maintain its reputation for toughness. In the case of a government and its citizens, the social structure has a single central actor and many peripheral ones. A comparable social structure exists with a monopolist trying to deter entry into its markets. Still another example is an empire trying to deter revolt by its provinces. Boarder protection is a method for preventing an invasion and for determining other behaviors and actions that are not consider lawful. In each case, the problem is to present challenges by maintaining a reputation from firmness in dealing with people. To maintain this reputation might well require meeting a particular challenge with a toughness out of all proportion to the stakes involved in that particular issue. Even the most powerful government cannot enforce any rule it chooses. To be effective, a government must elicit compliance from the majority of the governed. To do this requires setting and enforcing the rules so that it pays for most of the governed to obey most of the time. An example of this fundamental problem occurs in the regulation of industrial pollution. As modeled by Scholz (1983), the government regulatory agency and a regulate company are in an iterated Prison’s Dilemma with each other. The company’s choices at any point are to comply voluntarily with the rules or to evade them. The agency’s choices are to adopt an enforcement mode in dealing with that particular company which is either flexible or coercive. If the agency enforces with flexibility and the firm complies with the rules, then both the agency and the firm benefit from mutual cooperation. The agency benefits from the company’s compliance, and the company benefits from the agency’s flexibility. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Both sides avoid expensive enforcement and litigation procedures. Society also gains the benefits of full compliance at low cost to the economy. However, if the firm evades and the agency uses coercive enforcement, both suffer the punishing costs of the resultant legalistic relationship. If the agency is using flexible enforcement policy which is unlikely to penalize evasion, the firm also faces temptation to evade. And the agency faces a temptation to use the strict enforcement mode with a complying company in order to get the benefits of encoring even unreasonably expensive rules. The agency can adopt a strategy such as TIT FOR TAT which would give the company an incentive to comply voluntarily and thereby avoid the retaliation represented by the coercive enforcement policy. Under suitable conditions of the payoff and discount parameters, the relationship between the regulated and the regulator could be the socially beneficial one of repeated voluntary compliance and flexible enforcement. The new feature introduced by Scholz’s model of the interaction between the government and the governed is the additional choice the government has concerning the toughness of the standards. To set a tough pollution standard, for example, would make the temptation to evade very great. On the other hand, to set a very lenient standard would men more allowable pollution, there by lessening the payoff from mutual cooperation which the agency would attain from voluntary compliance. The trick is to set the stringency of the standard high enough to get most of the social benefits of regulations, and not so high as to prevent the evolution of a stable pattern of voluntary compliance from almost all of the companies. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

In addition to making and enforcing standards, governments often settle disputes between private parties. A good example is the case of a divorce in which the court awards child custody to one parent, and imposes a requirement of child support payments upon the other parent. Such settlements are notorious for the unreliability of the consequent support payments. For this reason, If the other patent falls behind in the supper payments, it has been proposed reciprocal nature by allowing the custodial parent be given a reciprocal nature by allowing the custodial parent to withdraw visitation privileges. This proposal could amount to placing the parents in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, and leaving them to work out strategies based upon reciprocity. Hopefully, the result would benefit the child by promoting a stable pattern of cooperation between the parents based upon reciprocity that traded reliable support payments for regular visitation privileges. Governments relate not only to their own citizens, but to other governments as well. In some contexts, each government can interact bilaterally with any other government. An example is the control of international trade in which a country can impose trade restrictions upon imports from another country, for instance as a retaliation against unfair trade practices. However, an interesting characteristic of governments that had not yet been taken into account is that they are based upon specific territories. In a pure territorial system, each individual has only a few neighbors, and interacts only with these neighbors. “Having all manner of fruit, and of grain, and of silks, and of fine linen, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious things; and also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and sheep, and of swine, and of goats, and also man other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man. And they also hand horses, and mules, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumons. And the Lord did pour out His blessing upon this land, which was choice above all other lands,” reports Ether 9.17-20. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Surrealism is the last school to assert the political mission of art. Before trailing off into Tortskyism and/or art-World fame, the surrealists upheld chance and the primitive as ways to unlock “the Marvelous” which society imprisons in the unconscious. The false judgment that would have re-introduced art into everyday life and thereby transfigured it certainly misunderstood the relationship of art to repressive society. The real barrier is not between art and social reality, which are one, but between desire and the existing World. The Surrealists’ aim of inventing a new symbolism and mythology upheld those categories and mistrusted unmediated sensuality. Concerning the latter, Breton held that “enjoyment is a science; the exercise of the senses demands a personal initiation and therefore you need art.” Modernist abstraction resumed the trend begun by Aestheticism, in that it expressed the conviction that only by a drastic restriction of its field of vision could art survive. With the least stain of embellishment possible in formal language, art became increasingly self-referential, in its search for a “purity” that was hostile to narrative. Guaranteed not to represent anything, modern painting is consciously nothing more than a flat surface with paint on it. However, the strategy of trying to empty art of symbolic value, the insistence on the work of art as an object in its own right in a World of objects, proved a virtually self-annihilating method. This “radical physicality,” based on aversion to authority though it was, never amounted to more, in its objectness, than simple commodity status. The sterile grids of Mondrian and the repeated all-black squares of Reinhardt echo this acquiescence no less than hideous twentieth-century architecture in general. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Modernist self-liquidation was parodied by Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased Drawing, exhibited after his month-long erasure of a de Kooning drawing. The very concept of art, Duchamp’s showing of a urinal in a 1917 exhibition notwithstanding, became an open question in the 50s and has grown steadily undefinable since. Television is also considered a form of art. Popular wisdom hold that noncommerical public television competes so ineffectively, in terms of audience ratings, because of the “low tastes” of the viewing public. I have heard many a liberal put it that “we need to educate people to appreciate better sorts of programing.” I can barely restrain my anger at the arrogance, cynicism, and ignorance of this position. If you will go back to your television set and apply the Technical Events Test to your noncommerical channel, you will find that except for documentary footage there are usually only two or three technical events in every minute of programming and that these are more likely to be of the simpler sort: camera switching, panning and zooms. Because they are not as well funded as their commercial competitors, noncommerical television producers can afford only about 25 percent as much technical gimmickry as commercial stations. In the end, the ratio works out about this way: Advertising: 20-30 technical events per minute. Commercial program: 8-10 technical events per minute. Public television: 2-3 technical events per minute. The technical events are surely not the sole determinants of viewer interest and appeal, but they are far more logical an explanation for the popularity of certain programming than the assertion that people demand violent programs. What people desire is involvement and interest. In a World where real involvement and unique events are more and more remote from direct personal experience, and in a medium that is inherently dulling, it is a wonder that any people at all are able to make their way through any noncommerical programs with their small degree of technical effects. In fact, I find it a rather moving testimony to the vitality of people that they continue to seek content that has not been jazzed up and packaged. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

This is all aside from the question of whether public television programs are any better than commercial programs. In fact most public television producers have the same system of values as their commercial counterparts and for the same reasons. Recognizing that hype is needed for ratings in such an intrinsically turned-off medium, and that the ratings are just as much a determinant for funding in public television as commercial television, they put as much money as possible into technique. They operate out of the same standards of “good television.” They even gain support from the same corporations that dominate commercial television: oil companies and chemical companies. So the smokestack era power producers are also funding your educational TV and many of the programs you watch on cable and commercial TV. It is sometimes considered a mitigating factor that the commercial message in public television is limited to a low-key acknowledgement at the beginning and the end of the program. However, these companies are not attempting to achieve exactly the same effect on public television as they do on commercial TV. There is a different level of benefit to corporations who insinuate themselves into this so-called noncommerical environment. The benefit is company identification rather than product identification. This has long-run value in public relations terms rather than short-run gains in sales. In addition, having the name repeated in a noncommerical format can still set off the neuronal billboard that has been preciously implanted in the brain by commercial programs. Finally, the cost of these low-key acknowledgments is negligible. To have its name appear on the screen before and after a half-hour program may cost a corporation only a few thousand dollars. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Underwriting an entire half-hour program on public television usually costs less than one sixty-second spot in commercial television. Aside from these differences, public television is similar to the rest of television. Competing for many of the same dollars, the same ratings, the same markets, and operating in the same medium with the same technical limitations, the noncommerical producer must take very similar choices. The best proof can be found in the most successful public television shows. Sesame Street, for example, the most popular program in public television history, has a technical events ratio equal to and sometimes larger than its commercial competition. It is not well enough appreciated, I think, that Sesame Street was conceived, designed, and executed from its inception by ex-advertising people. Using every technique they learned in advertising—rapid cutting, interspersing of songs and cartoons, very short time spans—their show had been found more “interesting” than any public TV program that preceded it. This “interest” is based on technique and these are the same techniques used in advertising. A basic question about nanotechnology is, “When will it be achieved?” The answer is simple: No one knows. How molecular machines will behave is a matter for calculation, but how long it will take us to develop them is a separate issue. Technology timetables cannot be calculated from the laws of nature, they can only be guessed at. In coming reports, we will examine different paths to nanotechnology, hear what some of the pioneers have to say, and describe the progress already mad. This will not answer our basic question, but it will educate our guesses. Molecular nanotechnology could be developed in any of several basically different ways. Each of these basic alternatives itself includes further alternatives. Researchers will be asking, “How can we make the fastest progress?” To understand the answers they may come to, we need to ask the same question here, adopting (for the moment) a gung-ho, let’s go, how-do-we-get-the-job-done? attitude. We give some of the researchers’ answers in their own words. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

“It is true that the World was a solitude in the first days, but the solitude was soon modified. When we were 30 years old we have 30 children, our children had 300; in 20 years more the population was 6,000; by the end of the second century it was become millions. For we are a long-lived race, and not many died. More than half of my children are still alive. I did not cease to bear until I was approaching middle age. As a rule, such of my children as survived the perils of childhoods have continued to live, and this has been the case with other families. Our race now numbers billions,” reports Eve. We must speak in the forecourt of the soul. Here, with absolute clarity, there is, as it were, a static opposition, reminiscent of the Avestic opposition of “goodness of mind” and “badness of mind”: a distinction is made between a state of the soul in which it purposes good and one in which it does not, in fact therefore, not between good and an ungood “disposition,” but between a disposition to good and its absence. Not until we deal with this second state, with the lack of direction towards God, do we penetrate to the chamber of the soul at whose entrance we encounter the demon. Not till then are we dealing with the true edge of good and evil, and by man’s self-exposure to the opposites inherent in existence within the World, but now in its ethical mould. From quite general opposites, embracing good and evil as well as good and ill and good and bad, we have arrived at the circumscribed area peculiar to man, in which only good and evil still confront each other. It is peculiar to man—so may we late-comers formulate it—because it can only be perceived introspectively, can only be recognized in the conduct of the soul towards itself: a man only knows factually what “evil” is in so far as he knows about himself, everything else to which he gives this name is merely mirrored illusion. “Behold, there is a time appointed that all shall come forth from the dead. Now when this time cometh no one knows; but God knoweth the time which is appointed,” reports Alma 39.4. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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