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

Cresleigh Homes

The design of #Havenwood Model 3 is ideal for anyone who loves to entertain – and we know you do! 🥂 The open floor plan allows for maximum seating and mingling space, and it’s just waiting for a brilliant host/hostess to set out the premimum cranberry juice 🍷 and charcuterie! 🧀

Lot 75 is up for sale and all ready for you! Contact us with questions and let’s get the ball rolling – don’t let summer 2022 🌞 pass you by without making moves to your brand new digs at #CresleighHomes!

Explore our exciting collection of ranch-style floor plans, ready to personalize with your choice of finishes, flooring, faucets and home technology. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/

 Provided in Cresleigh Homes are spacious great room sand an open dinings area that flow into a spacious kitchens with large center islands and walk-in pantries.

Residence Three is the largest of the single story homes offered in Cresleigh Havenwood. At 2,827 square feet you’ll be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space. There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-three/

#CresleighHomes

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

Cresleigh Homes

Move over, shiplap; there are new wood panel designs on the scene! 😉

Our home at #PlumasRanch uses some gorgeous vertical lines to enhance the design of this dining room; what do you think?

Ready to see the rest? Check out all the options for this community via the link in our bio. ☝️☝️☝️ https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-plumas-ranch/

#CresleighHomes

The weapon used by retailers to hurl the big manufacturers back on their heels is a small black-and-white symbol. Ever since the mid-sixties a little noticed committee of retailers, wholesalers, and grocery manufacturers had been meeting with companies like IMB, National Cash Register, and Sweda to discuss two common supermarket problems: long checkout lines and errors in accounting. Could not technology be used to overcomes these difficulties? It could—if product could somehow be coded, and if computers could automatically “read” the codes. Optical scanning technology was still in its infancy, but the computer companies, sensing a major new market, gladly worked with the retailers. On April 3, 1973, the “symbol selection committee” agreed on a single standard code for their industry. The result was the now familiar “Universal Product Code” or “bar code”—the shimmery black lines and numbers that appear on everything from detergent to cake mix—and the swift spread of optical scanning equipment to read them. Today, bar coding is becoming near universal in the United States of America, with fully 95 percent of all food items marked with the UPC. And the system is fast spreading abroad. By 1988 there were 3,470 supermarkets and specialty and department stores in France using it. In West Germany, at least 1,500 food stores and nearly 200 department stores employed scanners. All told, not counting the United States of America, there were 78,000 scanners at work from Brazil to Czechoslovakia and Papua New Guinea. In Japan, where the new retail technologies spread like fire in a high wind, 47 percent of all supermarkets and 72 percent of all convenience stores were already equipped by 1987. The bar code did more, however, than speed the checkout line for millions of customers or reduce errors in accounting. It transferred power. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The average U.S.A supermarket now stocks 22,000 different times, with thousands of new products continually replacing old one, power has shifted to the retailer who can keep track of all these items—along with their sales, their profitability, the timing of advertising, costs, prices, discounts, location, special promotions, traffic flow, and so on. “Now,” say the late Pat Collins, former president of the 127 Ralph’s stores in southern California, “we know as much, if not more than, the manufacturer about his product.” Ralph’s scanners scoop up vast volumes of data, which then helps its managers decide how much shelf space to devote to what products, when. This is a crucial decision for competing manufacturers who are hammering at the doors, pleading for every available inch of shelf on which to display their products. Instead of the manufacturer telling the store how much to take, the store now compels manufacturers to pay what is known as “push money” for space, and staggering sums for particularly desirable location. The result [of such changes] is a war over turf: product makers battling grocers—and fighting each other—to win and keep their spots in supermarkets. And it is clear who is winning—at the moment. Say Kevin Moody, formerly corporate director of Management Information Systems at Gillette: “We want to control our own destiny…but the trade is getting more powerful….They are looking for smarter deals and cooperative relationships. They are looking for better prices, which squeeze our margins…They buyer used to be the flunky. Now he’s backed up by all kinds of sophisticated tools.” Retail data become a more potent weapon when computer-analyzed and run through models that permit one to manipulate different variables. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Thus, buyers use “direct product profitability” models to determine just how much they actually make on each product. These models examine such factors as how much shelf space is occupied by a square package as against a round one, what colours in the packaging work best for which products. A version of this software is provided to retailers, in fact, by Procter & Gamble, one of the biggest manufacturers, in the hope of ingratiating itself with them. Armed with this software, P&G’s sales force offers to help the store analyze its profitability if it, in turn, will share consumer information with P&G. Retailers also use “shelf management” software and “space models” to help them decide which manufacturer’s lines or good to carry and which to reject, which to display in prime eye-catching space and which to put elsewhere. “Plan-a-Grams” printed out by computer give shelf-by-shelf guidance. Having seized control of the main flow of data coming from the customer, retailers are also beginning to influence, if not control, the influence going to the consumer. According to Moody, “The buyer can control the fate of a promotion….To a large extent, they dictate what the consumer is going to see.” At both ends, therefore, the big food and package-goods companies have lost control of the information that once gave them power. Beginning in the supermarket, the high-tech battle for control of information has caught fire elsewhere, too. Scanners, lasers, hand-held computers, and other new technologies are pouring into drugstores, department stores, discount stores, bookstores, electrical appliance stores, hardware stores, clothing stores, specialty shops, and boutiques of all kinds. In these markets, too, manufacturers suddenly face antagonists who are keener, more confident, sometimes just short of arrogant. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

“If you don’t have Universal Product Codes on your goods, don’t sit down, because we’re not going to write the order,” declares a peremptory sign in the buying office of Toys-R-Us, the 313-store chain. As power shifts, retailer demands grown aggressive. By-passing the country’s 100,000 independent manufacturers’ representatives, dealing direct with its suppliers. Wal-Mart, the United States’ fourth-biggest chain, insist that companies like Gillette change how they ship. Once more accommodating, Wal-Mart now demands that all its orders be filled 100 percent accurately—down to the numbers, sizes, and models of the products—and that deliveries be made to its schedule, not supplier’s. Failure to fill the order or deliver precisely on time could result in a supplier’s payments being held ransom or a “handling cost” being deducted. This puts manufacturers up against the wall: Either they increase inventories or they install new, more advanced technologies for de-massifying their factor output, moving to shorter rather than longer factory runs and faster turnaround times. Both are costly options. At the same time, retailers are imposing tighter quality standards—right down to the quality of the print on the packaging. This seemingly trivial matter is in fact critical, since much of the information on which retail power now increasingly depends is found on the bar code, and bad printing means that the scanners may not be able to read the code accurately. If the bar code on the package cannot be read properly by their scanning equipment, some retailers are threatening to hold the suppliers responsible. Millions of customers have waited at checkout lines while clerks have passed the same package over the electronic scanner again and again before the scanner picked up the print message properly. All too often the clerk is forces to ring the product price up manually on the cash register. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Some storekeepers, in effect, are now threatening, “If my scanner can’t read your code, it’s your problem. I’m not telling my clerk to try again and again, and keep the customer waiting. If it doesn’t scan, and we have to enter it manually, we’re going to toss the product into the customer’s bag and not charge for it. We’’ give the product away and stop payment to you!” Nobody ever talked back to the big companies that way. However, then nobody had the information that retailers now have. So vital is this information that some manufacturers are now paying the retailers for it—either directly, or in exchange for services, or through intermediary firms who buy the data from retailers and sell them to manufacturers. “The economies of the future are somewhat different. You see, money does not exit in the twenty-fourth century.” So said Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise in the science-fiction movie Star Trek: First Contact. Neither, perhaps, will capitalism exist by then—and its demise may arrive long before AD 2300. It is a strange new World we are entering as revolutionary wealth continues to unfold here on Earth, yet both enemies and defenders of capitalism still hurl centuries-old cliches at one another. If changes in the nature of property, capital and markets are not enough to shake their minds free of the past, perhaps a look at the future of money will. Like the other key elements of capitalism, money is undergoing the fastest, deepest revolution in centuries—one that will create radically new forms, new ways to pay and be paid, and more and more business opportunities that use no money at all. The invention of money clearly was one of the great World-changing events in human history, and all capitalist economies run on it. That indention, despite all its subsequent misuse, opened the path to tremendous advances in human well-being. However, running money, or more properly, the money system, imposes a heavy cost on society—and on each of our pocketbooks. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

We hardly notice this cost because it is usually embedded or bundled into the price we pay for goods, services, and other marketed items. Go to movie theater or a spots stadium. Part of the price you pay covers the cost of the person who takes your money and hands you the ticket. The same is true for the 3.5 million cashiers behind U.S. checkout counters at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, 7-Eleven, Office Depot and Office Max outlets; at supermarkets, department stores, and railroad stations. And this does not include the total number outside America. Then, too, at McDonald’s, Burger King, and other fast-food emporia, the person at the counter takes both your order and your money. It is true that taking your order and passing it to the kitchen is technically distinct from cashiering. That means that only part, rather than all, of his or her wages is attributable to time spent collecting money. However, collecting money is similarly part of the job for many other occupations—millions upon millions of waiters, barbers and salesclerks. All these costs, too, are passed along to the customer. And this is only the most visible expense of operating the World’s money system. Someone has to keep track of all the transactions. And that, too, costs money. So add at least part of these fees paid to bookkeepers and the World’s 2.5 million accountants. And someone has to actually print, store and transport the cash we use; protect it from theft and counterfeiting; authenticate documentation and so forth. These functions, too, cost money. Ultimately transferred to the customer, these costs are, in effect, part of the hidden “tax” we pay for the convenience of employing money. And they are only a small part. Which raises some important, mind-sparking questions. What if we could reduce or even eliminate this hidden “tax”? Is that possible? In fact, do we need money at all to run a knowledge-based wealth system? #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Now, when it comes to doing business, many companies, even if they are not owned by the person who does the hiring, use a form of nepotism. Nepotism is a form of favoritism shown to acquaintances and family members. It allows one to use one’s power or influence to get good jobs or unfair advantages for members of one’s own family. As favoritism is the broadest of the related terms, we will focus on this definition. Basically favoritism is just what it sounds like; it is favoring a person not because he or she is doing the best job but rather because of some extraneous feature-membership in a favored group, personal likes and dislikes, et cetera. Favoritism can be demonstrated in hiring, honoring, or awarding contracts. A related idea is patronage, giving public service jobs to those who may have helped elect the person who has the power of appointment. Favoritism has always been a complaint in government service. It was discovered that the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management believed that only 36.1 percent of federal workers promotions in their units were based on merit. They believed that connections, partisanship, and other factors played a role. Probably the biggest dilemma presented by favoritism is that, under various other names, few people see it as a problem. Connections, networking, family-almost everyone had drawn on these sources of support in job hunting in the private sphere. And everyone can point to instances where nepotism is an accepted fact of life in political sphere, as well. John F. Kenney, for example, appointed his brother Robert as attorney general. Every president and governor names close associates to key cabinet positions. Mayors put those they know and trust on citizens committees and commissions. Friends and family can usually be counted on for loyalty, and officeholders are in a good position to know their strengths. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The first issue is competence. For cabinet level positions, an executive will probably be drawn to experienced, qualified candidates, but historically, the lower down the ladder, the more likely for someone’s brother-in-law to be slipped into a job for which he is not qualified. The American Civil Service Act was passed in 1883 in large part because so many patronage jobs, down to dogcatcher, were being filled by people whose only qualification for employment was their support for a particular party or candidate. Also, the appearance of favoritism weakens morale in government service, not to mention public faith in the integrity of government. Reasonable people will differ appointment of friends and family in high-level positions, but public officials should be aware that such choices can give the appearance of unfairness. According to the National Conference of State Legislature, 19 state legislatures have found the practice of nepotism troubling enough to enact laws against it. Others may restrict the hiring or relatives or friends in more general conflict-of-interest rules. Penalties for violating nepotism rules may be different depending on the state. A public official or employee violating a nepotism law may be required to reimburse the state for any payments made to relative by reason of the violation. Some states do not specify a penalty while others consider the act a misdemeanor punishable with fines, imprisonment, removal from office, or any combination thereof. In California, no explicit prohibition against nepotism in the legislative branch was located in the state’s statutes, although other rules or conflict of interest provisions may apply. An individual’s reputation is embodied in the beliefs of others about the strategy another person will use. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

A reputation is typically established through observing the actions of that individual when interacting with other individuals. For example, Britain’s reputation for being provocable was certainly enhanced by its decision to take back the Falkland Islands in response to the Argentine invasion. Other nations could observe Britain’s decisions and make inference about how it might react to their own actions in the future. Especially relevant would be Spanish inferences about the British commitment to Gibraltar, and Chinese inferences about the British commitment to Hong Kong. Whether these inferences would be correct is another matter. The point is than when third parties are watching, the stakes of the current situation expand from those immediately at hand to encompass the influence of the current choice on the reputation of the individuals. Knowing people’s reputations allows you to know something about what strategy they use even before you have to make your first choice. This possibility suggests that question of how valuable it would be to know for certain what strategy the other individual is about to use with you. A way to measure the value of any piece of information is to calculate how much better you could do with the information than without it. Thus, the better you can do without the information, the less you need the information, and the less it is worth. In instances of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example, TIT FOR TAT did well without know the strategy to be employed by the other individual. Knowing the other individual’s strategy were known to be TIT FOR TWO TATS (which defects only if the other defected on both of the previous moves), it would be possible to do better than TIT FOR TAT did by alternating defection with cooperation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

However, there are not many exploitable strategies in either round of the interaction, so knowing the other’s strategy in advance would not actually help you do much better than the all-purpose strategy of TIT FOR TAT. In fact, the smallness of the gain from knowing the other’s strategy is just another measure of the robustness of TIT FOR TAT. The question about the value of information can also be turned around: what is the value (or cost) of having other individuals know your strategy? The answer, of course, depends on exactly what strategy you are using. If you are using an exploitable strategy, such as TIT FOR TWO TATS, the cost can be substantial. On the other hand, if you are using a strategy that is best met with complete cooperation, then you might be glad to have your strategy known to the other. For example, if you were using TIT FOR TAT, you would be happy to have the other player appreciate this fact and adapt to it, provided, of course, that the shadow of the future is large enough so that the best response is a nice strategy. In fact, as has been said, one of the advantages of TIT FOR TAT is that it is easy for it to be recognized in the course of a game even if the individual using it has not yet established a reputation. Having a firm reputation for using TIT FOR TAT is advantageous to an individual, but it is not actually the best reputation to have. The best reputation to have is the reputation for being a bully. The best kind of bully to be is one who has a reputation for squeezing the most out of the other individual while not tolerating any defections at all from the other. They way to squeeze the most out of the other is to defect so often that the other player just barely prefers cooperating all the time to defecting all the time. And the best way to encourage cooperation from the other is to be know as someone who will never cooperate again if the other defects once. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Fortunately, it is not easy to establish a reputation as a bully. To become known as a bully one would have to defect a lot, which means that one is likely to provoke the other individual into retaliation. Until one’s reputation is well established, one is likely to have to get into a lot of very unrewarding contests of will. For example, if the other individual defects even once, you will be torn between acting as tough as the reputation you want to establish requires and attempting to restore amicable relations in the current interaction. What darkens the picture even more is that the other individual may also be truing to establish a reputation, and for this reason may be unforgiving of the defections you use to try to establish their reputation. When two parties are each trying to establish their reputations for use against other individuals in future deals, it is easy to see that their own interactions can spiral downward into a long series of mutual punishments. Each side has an incentive to pretend not to be noticing what the other is trying to do. Both sides want to appear to be untrainable so that the other will stop trying to bully them. The Prisoner’s Dilemma in business deals suggest that a good way for the individual to appear untrainable is for the individual to use the strategy of TIT FOR TAT. That utter simplicity of the strategy of TIT FOR TAT. The utter simplicity of the strategy makes it easy to asset as a fixed pattern of behavior. And the ease of recognition makes it hard for the other player to maintain an ignorance of it. Using TIT FOR TAT is an effective way of holding still and letting the other individual do the adaptation. It refuses to be bullied, but does not do any bullying of its own. If the other individual does adapt to it, the result is mutual cooperation. In fact, deterrence is achieved through the establishment of a reputation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

One purpose of having a reputation is to enable you to achieve deterrence by means of a credible threat. You try to commit yourself to a response that you really would not want to make if the occasion actually arose. The United States of America deters the Russians from taking West Berlin by threatening to start a major war in response to such a grab. To make such a threat credible, the United States of America seeks to establish a reputation as a country that actually does carry out such guarantees, despite the short-run costs. Vietnam had just such a meaning to the American government when the decision to commit major combat forces was being made in 1965. The dominance of the desire to maintain a reputation was expressed in a secret memo to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara from his Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara from his Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, John McNaughton, defining U.S. aims in South Vietnam: U.S.A aims: 70 percent—To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor). 20 percent—To keep SVN (and adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. 10 percent—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better freer way of life. Maintaining deterrence through achieving a reputation for toughness is important not only in international politics, but also in many domestic functions of the government. The most effective governments cannot take the compliance of its citizens for granted. Instead, a government has strategic interactions with the governed, and these interactions often take the form of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Social institutions of all kinds function as control mechanisms. This is important to say, because most writers on the subject of social institutions (especially sociologists) do not grasp the idea that any decline in the force of institutions makes people vulnerable to information chaos. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confusion rather than coherence. Social institutions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore value one must give to information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission. Take as a simple example a court of law. Almost all rules for the presentation of evidence and for the conduct of those who participate in a trial are designed to limit the amount of information that is allowed entry into the system. In our system, a judge disallows “hearsay” or personal opinion as evidence except under strictly controlled circumstances, spectators are forbidden to express their feelings, a defendant’s previous convictions may not be mentioned, juries are not allowed to hear arguments over the admissibility of evidence—these are instances of information control. The rules on which such control is based derive from a theory of justice that defines what information may be considered relevant and, especially, what information must be considered irrelevant. The theory may be deemed flawed in some respects—lawyers, for example, may disagree over the rules governing the flow of information—but no one disputes that information must be regulated in some manner. In even the simplest law case, thousands of events may have had a bearing on the dispute, and it is well understood that, if they were all permitted entry, there could be no theory of due process, trials would have no end, law itself would be reduced to meaninglessness. In short, the rule of law is concerned with the “destruction” of information. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Although legal theory has been taxed to the limit by new information from diverse sources—biology, psychology, and sociology, among them—the rules governing relevance having remained fairly stable. This may account for Americans’ overuse of the courts as a means of finding coherence and stability. As other institutions become useable as mechanisms for the control of wanton information, the courts stand as a final arbiter of truth. For how long, no one knows. Many of us are still in the process of using the keys for unlocking the meanings of our dreams. Raw, physically unacceptable facts, inhabitants of the unconscious, express themselves in hidden ways, gaining covert satisfaction that way. They fasten themselves in hidden ways, gaining covert satisfaction that way. They fasten themselves on consciously acceptable material, which then no longer really means what it seems to mean. It now does and does not express the true meaning. Plato’s respectable dialogue is the intermediary between Aschenbach’s good conscience and his carnality. Plato found a way of expressing and beautifying, of sublimating, perverse pleasures of the flesh. So the story presents it. There is no indication that Mann thought that one could learn much directly from Plato about eros. One could learn something by applying Dr. Freud’s insights to Plato and seeing how desire finds rationalization for itself. Plato was vile body for scientific dissection. Mann was too caught up by the novelty of the Freudian teaching to doubt whether sublimation can really account for the psychic phenomena it claims to explain. He was doctrinaire, or he was sure we know better than did older thinkers. They are mythologists. Dr. Freud and Plato agree about the pervasiveness of eroticism in everything human. However, there the similarity ends. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Anyone who wished to lay aside his assurance about the superiority of modern psychology might find in Plato a richer explanation of the diversity of erotic expression, which so baffles us and has drive us to our present nonsense. He would see there a rewarding articulation of the possibilities and impossibilities of the fulfillment of erotic desires. Plato both enchants and disenchants eros, and we need both. At least in Mann the tradition in which we could refresh ourselves is present, if not exactly alive. With what he gives us we might  embark on our own journey and find more interesting prey than is an Aschenbach. However, in America that slender thread, which was already almost stretched to its limit in Mann, has broken. We have no more contact with the tradition. Eros is an obsession, but there is no thought about it, and no possibility of thought about it, because we now take what were only interpretations of our souls to be facts about them. Eros gradually becomes meaningless and low; and there is nothing good for man which is not informed by thought and affirmed by real choice, which means choice instructed by deliberation. Saul Bellow has described his own intention as “the rediscovery of the magic of the World under the debris of modern ideas.” That gray net of abstraction, used to cover the World in order to simplify and explain it in a way that is pleasing to us, has become the World in our eyes. The only way to see the phenomena, rather than sterile distillations of them, to experience them in their ambiguity again, would be to have available alternate visions, a diversity of profound opinions. However, our ideas have made it difficult to have such experiences in practice, and impossible in theory. How does a youngster who sees sublimation where Plato saw divination learn from Plato, let alone think Plato can speak to one? Souls artificially constituted by a new kind of education live in a World transformed by man’s artifice and believe that all values are relative and determined by the private economic or drives for pleasures of the flesh of those who hold them. How are they to recover the primary natural experience? #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Usually depicted positively, as a revelation of truth free of the contingencies of time and place, the impossibility of such a formulation only illuminates another moment of falseness about art. Kierkegaard found the defining trait of the aesthetic outlook to be its hospitable reconciliation of all points of view and its evasion of choice. This can be seen in the perpetual compromise that at once valorizes art only to repudiate its intent and content with, “We,, after all, it is only art.” Today culture is commodity and art perhaps the star commodity. The situation is understood inadequately as the product of a centralized culture of industry, a la Horkheimer and Adorno. We witness rather, a mass diffusion of culture dependent on participation for its strength, not forgetting that the critique must be of culture itself, not of its alleged control. Daily life has become aestheticized by a saturation of images and music, largely through the electronic media, the representation of representation. Image and sound, in their every-presence, have become a void, ever more absent of meaning for the individual. Meanwhile, the distance between artist and spectator had diminished, a narrowing that only highlights the absolute distance between aesthetic experience and what is real. This perfectly duplicates the spectacle at large: separate and manipulating, perpetual aesthetic experience and a demonstration of political power. Reacting against the increasing mechanization of life, avant-garde movements have not, however, resisted the spectacular nature of art any more than orthodox tendencies have. In fact, one could argue that Aestheticism, or “art for art’s sake,” is  more radical than an attempt to engage alienation with its own devices. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

The late nineteenth-century art pour l’art development was a self-reflective rejection of the World, as opposed to the avant-grade effort to somehow organize life around art. A valid moment of doubt lies behind Aestheticism, the realization that division of labor has diminished experience and turned art into just another specialization: art shed its illusory ambitions and became its own content. The avant-garde has generally staked out wider claims, projecting a leading rile denied it by modern capitalism. It is best understood as a social institution peculiar to technological society that so strongly prices novelty; it is predicated on the progressivist notion that reality must be constantly updated. However, avant-grade culture cannot compete with the modern World’s capacity to shock and transgress (and not just symbolically.) Its demise is another datum that the myth of progress is itself bankrupt. Dada was one of the last two major avant-garde moments, its negative image greatly enhanced by the sense of general historical collapse radiated by World War I. Its partisans claimed, at times, to be against all “isms,” including the idea of art. However, painting cannot negate painting, nor can sculpture invalidate sculpture, keeping in mind that all symbolic culture is the co-opting of perception, expression and communication. In fact, Dada was a quest for new artistic modes, its attack on the rigidities and irrelevancies of bourgeois art a factor in the advance of art; Hans Ricther’s memoirs referred to “the regeneration of visual art that Dada had begun.” If World War I almost killed art, the Dadaists reformed it. Many people are interested in nanotechnology. It is described as being a shotgun marriage of chemistry and mechanical engineering, with physics (as always) presiding. This makes a complete evaluation difficult for most of today’s specialists, because each of these fields is taught separately and usually practiced separately. Many specialists, having highly focused backgrounds, find themselves unequipped to evaluate proposals that overlap other disciplines. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

When asked to do so, they will state feelings of discomfort, because although they cannot identify any particular problems, they cannot verify the entire concept as sound. Scientists and engineers with multidisciplinary backgrounds, or with access to specialists from other fields, can evaluate the idea from side. Increased human abilities have routinely been used to damage the environment and to make war. Even the crude technologies of the twenty-first century have taken us to the brink. It is natural to feel exhilarated (or terrified) by a prospect that promises (or threatens) to extend human abilities beyond most past dreams (or nightmares). It is better to feel both, to meld and moderate these feelings, and to set out on a course of action that makes bad outcomes less likely. We are convinced that the best course is to focus on the potential good while warning of the potential evils. Those in failing health may be justified in saying this; others are expressing an opinion that may well be wrong. It would be optimistic to assume that benefits are around the corner, and prudent to assume that they will be long delayed Conversely, it would be optimistic to assume that dangers will be long delated, and prudent to assume that they will arrive promptly. Whatever good or ill may come of post-breakthrough capabilities, the turbulence of the coming transition will present a real danger. While we invite readers to take a “What if?” stance toward these technologies, it would be imprudent to listen to the lulling sound of the promise “not in our lifetimes.” Even today, public acceptance of man’s coming exploration of space is slow. It is considered an event we may all be able to experience in our lifetime, or that our children will surely experience. The opportunities of nanotechnology are enormous. The resulting changes will be disruptive, sweeping industries aside, upending military strategies, and transforming our ways of life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Thinking about advertisement, when it is not in bas taste? Do they mean that interrupting people’s lives to start hawking products is not rude and offensive behavior at any time? If someone came to your door every night to do that, you would soon call the police. Advertising is always in bad taste. What advertisers mean when they use the “bad taste” excuse is that when something really real happens on television, it may affect how well the ad works. In the context of concrete reality, advertising can be understood as vacuous, absurd, rude, outrageous. Advertising can succeed only in an environment in which the real merges with the fictional, and all become semireal with equal tone and undifferentiated meaning. In that context advertising can use its technical tricks to jump forward out of the medium, creating its artificial unusualness. The best environment for advertising is a dull and even one, where it can become the highlighted event. This explains the tendency to sponsor programs that have that quality of even tone, from Walter Cronkite to Archie Bunker to Jensen Ackles. They all merge with each other, making an appropriate backdrop for the advertising. In probably the most brilliant article that has ever been written on television (“Sixteen Notes on Television,” reprinted in Literature in Revolution), Todd Gitlin said: “The commercial is the purpose, the essence; the program is the package.” The program is only the excuse to get you to watch the advertising. Without the ads there would be no programs. Advertising is the true content of television, and if it does not remain so, then advertisers will cease to support the medium, and television will cease to exist as the popular entertainment it presently is. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

While sleep is healing, Adam and Eve found their second-born son Abel sleeping day and night. He was lying by his altar in his field, one morning, with his head crushed and his face and body drenched in blood. He said his eldest brother Kain struck him down. Then he spoke no more, and fell asleep. They laid him in his bed and washed the blood away, and they were glad to know that the hurt was light and that he had no pain; for if he had had pain he would not have spelt. In was in the early morning that Adam and Eve found Abel. All day he slept that sweet reposeful sleep, lying on his back, and never moving, never turning. It showed how tired he was, poor thing. He was so good, and worked so hard, rising with the dawn and laboring till the dark. And now he was overworked; it would be best the he tax himself less. Still, all the day he slept. And Eve made food for him which he never ate. And still Able slept with his eyes wide; a strange thing, and it made Eve think he was awake at first, but it was not so, for she spoke and he did not answer. Eve kissed him on his cheek and he was cold. Adam and Eve tried to warm him up with sacks of wool, but he was still cold. They could not wake him! With Eve’s arms clinging about him, she looked into his eyes, through the veil of her tears, and begged for one little word, and he would not answers. “Oh, is it that long sleep—is it Death? And will he wake no more?” Eve wandered. Death has entered the World, the creatures are perishing, one of the Family is fallen; the product of the Moral Sense is complete. The Family think ill of Death—they will change their mind. If one’s purpose good, bear it aloft, but if one does not purpose good—sin before the door, a beast lying in wait, unto thee his desire, but prevail one over him. The word which is absent from the tale of the Fall, the word “sin,” and it is apparently the name of a demon who, by nature a “beast the lies in wait,” at times lurks on watch at the entrance to a soul that does not purpose good, to see if it will fall pray to him, that soul within whose power it still lies to overpower him. “O Lord, wilt thou grant unto us that we my have success in bringing them again unto thee in Christ,” reports Alma 31.33 #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Our bathroom at #Havenwood Model 4 is perfect for anyone who’s an AQUA-holic! Look at that tub! The shower! 🚿 It’s paradise. 🙌

Need more info? This home is Lot 26 – and it’s ready for you! When you contact our sales center at (916) 409-5595, ask to see more about this gorgeous home; we can’t wait to show it off.

Small town charm, family values, and easy access to all the amenities you and your family desire.

#CresleighHomes