 
Date: Sun, 8 Mar 1992 15:11 EST
From: BLUECANARYINNAOUTLET 
Subject: chaos!
To: +dist+~js9b/Public/camc.dl@ANDREW.CMU.EDU
Message-Id: <7AF8050B40001ACE@YANG.EARLHAM.EDU>

Hello all.
 
   First of all, let me say that I am most amazed, amused, and perplexed
at the way this mailing list has come about.  And to think that it all
came from some off-handed musings I made in response to Bill, ages ago,
under the flip title "Corporations Ate My Cat".  Or maybe that wasn't the
root.  Snowballing of effects... well, hey, this is the Net, after all.
This is where things like this happen.  Might as well get used to it.
   Still, I am shaking my head in slight befuddlement at the way the
discussion has gone so far.  From a discussion of technical problems, it
has quickly gone (on the newsgroup, at least) to a debate over ideal forms
of government.  On one hand, I'm thrilled and delighted to see such an
un-technological discussion going on in that unlikeliest of environs, the
alt.cyberetcetera groups.  On the other hand, I wonder if it isn't
becoming a bit... entrenched? At least, I don't see why it has to be in
such absolute terms.
   One of the sources of speculation I have in mind is W. Warren Wagar's
*A Brief History of the Future*.  Wagar's not a terrific writer, and his
attempts at producing characters are not awe-inspiring, but his futuristic
game-playing is quite fascinating and possibly useful.  To summarize
briefly, he writes the next few hundred years of human history in three
stages: first, a period extrapolated from the present, which sees the
inglorious ruin that Global Capitalism makes of the world; next, a phase
of Global Socialism, which repairs that which the previous age left waste
(i.e., the Earth); thirdly and finally, a move to a decentralized world
order, in which many hundreds of "departments" are freed from central
authority to govern themselves as they please.  The society of the latter
stage is most reminiscent of the type of communities that we are
discussing.  Their technosphere is based on small-scale, self-sufficient
food and energy production and so on.  Politically, they are organized
(essentially) however they damn well please, a possibility I don't know
that we've considered directly as of yet.
   I need to reread Wagar's book, because I still can't recall how or if
he solved certain problems that I think would crop up in such a world
order.  First of all, there would no doubt need to be the remnants of some
global authority to enforce interdepartmental issues of environmental
cleanliness, etc.  But I think that even if you gave these small
communities freedom to self-organize to a large extent, there would need
to be a minimal core of global human rights, including the freedom to
leave a community at any time.
   Nevertheless, there is something that I find promising about such a
solution as Wagar's.  Why not give everyone the tools of self-sufficiency,
and try out a dozen possibilities for living? It would allow for a maximum
of diversity, political and cultural... and it avoids the
Apocalyptic-Utopian trap that is evoked for me whenever I see the words
"ideal form of government"... what do people think?
 
   In any case, to make up for some time spent hanging back and watching
the chaos, let me respond to some statements.
 
>From:  IN%"js9b+%ANDREW.CMU.EDU@CARNEGIE.BITNET"  "Jon C. Slenk"
15-FEB-1992 16:26:30.13
>To:    mike@highlite.gotham.com, DRPETE02@ulkyvx03.louisville.edu,
>JESSEC@YANG.EARLHAM.EDU
>CC:
>Subj:  Mailing List
>
>Quick note...
>
>Is it possible that humanity is destroying its environment? Is it possible
>that if humanity does not radically change its approach to production and
>consumption it will basically be committing suicide? If we believe we are
>in trouble then what can we do to amend the problem?
>
>These are the sort of questions that I have been pondering after reading
>the "Corporations Ate My Cat" thread on the cyberpunk.tech newsgroup. I
>have read Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider," which he has acknowledged as
>being a based on Toffler's Future Shock. I am currently reading "The Sheep
>Look Up." When I am done with that, I plan to read Toffler's Future Shock
>since Brunner has me thinking and it was Toffler's words that influenced
>Brunner.
 
   Actually, one of the things you might find more directly helpful
concerning these topics is Alvin Toffler's *The Third Wave*.  He
essentially states the same questions as those you opened with, but
addresses them in terms of "these questions have got to be answered, and the
answers-- social, technical, economic-- are presenting themselves as we
watch.  It's up to us now to apply them in a sane and decent way." For
Toffler, the primary fact of our time is a move towards decentralization.
   I think that he had it right, but I see the continuity between the
largely optimistic *Third Wave* and the more pessimistic (realistic?)
*Powershift* (written respectively in 1980 and 1990); decentralization is
still the movement, but in forms not universally hospitable to human
needs.  The privatization of governmental functions is a decentralization
of authority, in a sense-- albeit one that withdraws wealth from the
public domain and concentrates it in private, wealthy communities.  The
technological decentralization of military killing power into the hands of
tiny groups (via nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry) is our common
peril.  The decentralization of large federal unions, as in the East, is
producing more grief than progress at the moment.
   It is up to us to take hold of the vast, impersonal historical forces,
and direct them to human ends.
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
>From:  IN%"mike%highlite.gotham.com@CARNEGIE.BITNET"  6-MAR-1992 01:45:21.73
>To:    +dist+~js9b/Public/camc.dl@ANDREW.CMU.EDU
>CC:    mike@uunet.uu.net (Mike Wiik)
>Subj:  Hello Hello
>
>Hello Hello to Corporations Ate my Cat Mailing List.
 
   Hello hello yourself. :-)
 
>Sheepishly I admit skipping thru a lot of the CAMC thread.
>I take it this mailing list is about future of humanity and
>possible high tech intentional communities (or was that a
>spinoff(?)). I did once keep some cats, though.
 
   (cute...)
 
>Personally my fave future history is CM's own Hans Moravec's
>_Mind Children_. Extrapolating from this in conjunction with
>K Eric Drexler's _Engines of Creation_ as well as some other
>materials, I envision a future where transcendance drives
>society much more than sci-fi-predicted extension of current
>capabilities.
 
   I've read about Hans Moravec's ideas in many places (his entry in the
Whole Earth Review issue on the "obsolescence" of the body, a book on
robotics and the future which I believe was edited by Marvin Minsky, and
Grant Fjermedal's *The Tomorrow Makers*, plus many magazine articles), but
not read his own book.  Drexler's *Engines of Creation* I've read a couple
of times.  I suppose I have a feel for where you're coming from...
 
>To explain I'll use Dr Tim's SMI2LE formula (don't laff :-)
 
   I'll try... although I think that Timothy Leary and comrades are,
sadly, mostly brain-dead from too many chemical joyrides.
 
>( naturally, everything below is IMHO and not everything is
>  claimed to be original.):
>
>*Space Migration (or Space Travel in general)*:
>
>    All sci-fi dealing with Rocket Ships to the Stars are
>    outdated. Interstellar travel for modern day humans is
>    ridiculous. Worse than sci-fi, The _Futurist_ magazine
>    a couple years ago had a feature on *travel to another
>    galaxy* sometime in the year 5000 or some such. They
>    even had guys in spacesuits crawling around the outside
>    of the ship!
>
>    Instead, I see *intelligent entities* transformed for
>    space travel. I see the intelligence to build entire
>    colonies on distant worlds the size of a small pebble.
>    Near infinite ephemerlization (sp?) reduces interstellar
>    travel power requirements to near-zero.
>
>    The idea of transporting "cargo" sounds expensive. The
>    idea of shipping information sounds cheap. I think it
>    was Arthur C Clark who wrote (paraphrasing) that in the
>    history of humanity "ship" will mostly mean "spaceship".
>    I think "ship" will mostly mean *transport from one place
>    to another* (and I think it does even now)...
 
   Yes, it's odd how people have responded differently to the proposition
of interstellar travel.  The older approach, which is clumsier and less
efficient, treats the immensity of the orders-of-magnitude-greater
challenge of lightyear distances in a geometrical way: simply scale up the
technology to the task, and leave the contents (human beings) largely
alone.  This idea evolves through several intermediate stages (involving
*some* modification of the contents, i.e., cryonic suspension en route,
life extension, etc.) until the artifact and the contents become as one,
in the sort of schemes you describe.  I find this process actually
alarming, as I am *very* reluctant to give my humanity over to
technological necessity.
 
>    It's fun to read of cylindrical L-5 colonies, but more
>    likely (and vastly cheaper and easier to maintain) might
>    be open-ended (as in, no caps, no atmosphere, no trees,
>    etc) colonies consisting of honeycombed encased brain
>    tissue + supercomputers. Energized by the Sun, cooled
>    thru the vacuum of space, consisting of trillions of
>    intertwined semi-artificial and artificial intelligences.
 
   Not to be flip yet again, but read this sentence with an exclamation point
or question mark alternately:
 
                                 "What fun"
 
>*Intelligence Increase*
>
>    Dr. Tim acknowledged this as the driver behind the others.
>    In some sense he may have implied that SM and LE are the
>    "results", the products of increasing intelligence. What
>    I'm thinking is that I2 is the most important result it-
>    self. It doesn't need the others to justify it. We will
>    *transcend* the physical universe long before we colonize
>    it. This is why we not seeing more aliens visiting Earth,
>    they're all out exploring *other realities*.
 
   Interesting.  Perhaps, to bring this back to our discussion a bit, you
are thinking of the problem in different terms? Let me use the organizing
concept employed by someone relevant to both trains of thought going on
here: J.D. Bernal, who is mentioned in Nigel Calder's excellent
*Spaceships Of the Mind.* Bernal wrote a book called *The World, The
Flesh, and the Devil*, which described the problems of humanity as
threefold: first, the physical challenges of the external world (the
World); second, the limitations of the human body (the Flesh); and third,
the problems of government and society (the Devil).  I think that most of
the people have been talking in terms of the World and the Devil, whereas
you want to begin with the Flesh.  In a way, this makes perfect sense to
me: if human beings have problems, why not change what it is to be human?
But, as I say, I am pretty skeptical of the wisdom of this approach.  It
seems to me to be not a far cry from another approach that has been
suggested towards addressing human problems: annihilation of the problem.
 
>*Life Extension*
>
>    Current Science debates how long life can be extended.
>    Perhaps the whole question is moot. I think the concepts
>    of *life*, *death*, and even *identity* will radically
>    change their meaning long before conventional medicine
>    would give us multicentury lifespans. We'll be able to
>    choose our forms, perhaps even our level of involvement
>    with the "physical universe".
>
>*Time Travel* (ok, not in SMI2LE but that would make it SMI2TTLE)
>
>    Outdated Sci-Fi envisions time travel machines which propel
>    themselves + occupants back to past eras or forward to
>    future civilizations. Massive computational power + nano-
>    archiological research trivializes "actual" (whatever that
>    means) time travel replacing it with artificially generated
>    past + possible future worlds at an atomic level of detail.
>    Which of course leads us to:
>
>*Universe Creation*
>
>    Creationism: laffable science but definite possibility. I'd
>    do some now if somebody had some supercomputers with a few
>    picobytes of RAM to spare. People will be creating their own
>    software universes, perhaps some already are. After thinking
>    about this for a second or two the thought occurs that it's
>    probably already happened and *we're in it*.
>
>CUTE SMI2LE
>
>    Ok, I'll call it *Creation of Universes* and *Time Engineering*
>    to make the new CUTE SMI2LE acronym. Imho, economics alone
>    dictate the view above: it's vastly cheaper than the sci-fi
>    conventional approach.
 
   In fact, you seem to want to alter both ends of the equation: since
human beings have a set of problems in this universe, therefore alter the
nature of human beings and the universe.  Rational; sensible; bordering on
the completely unthinkable, to my mind.  Could I induce you to read the
play *Doctor Faustus*? The word "hubris" is printed in red neon over my vision.
 
>THAT'S FINE, BUT WHERE ARE ALL THE ALIENS?
>
>    Their nano-ships explore space while they enjoy super-
>    accelerated mental masturbation techniques to not only
>    gain new knowledge / create various applications but also
>    to have fun. Mega-fun.
 
   I love this! :-)
 
>SO WHAT'S THE MEANING OF LIFE, MIKE?
>
>    The meaning of life is: *to play with electronic equipment!*
 
   This is amazing... your argument becomes its own self-parody... it's
sure as hell confusing, but fun to watch!
 
>    In this way we not only Increase our Intelligence but push
>    our global capitalist system to create even newer and better
>    toys. It's what all the Aliens are doing. Once we get better
>    toys we'll be able to talk to them.
>
>    A rocket ship plods along from point a to point b. The
>    spherical nano-wave explores all space simultaneously at
>    99.99% c. Older civilizations send us their records allow-
>    ing us to improve our simulations of past eras. Eventually
>    all matter/energy throughout spacetime combines into the
>    vast Universal Mind, then implodes itself forming a new
>    Big Bang and a new universe (having run out of things to
>    process in the current one). The child process returns
>    control to it's parent process. (angelic choir sounds).
 
   Very 2001.
 
>--------------------------------------------------------------
>All the above is Copyright 1992 by Michael Wiik. Permission
>given to discuss and distribute as long as no commercial use
>is made of the above material.
>--------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Well, anyway, here's something to discuss. I hope it's seems
>worthwhile to you.
 
   Yes, worthwhile... but needs to be more firmly connected to the
discussion underway.  I've tried to here, and I certainly invite others to
do so.
 
>Re: High-Tech Utopias. An easy way to begin might be to have
>an electronic equipment cooperative. I've got some electronic
>toys, and am looking for metro dc area residents to share rent
>on a studio and establish some sort of cooperative use system.
 
   Toffler talked about the idea of cooperative production being a nice
sort of "external mission" to give direction to an alternative community,
such as those we're envisioning...
 
>Think Like Me! Read These Books! :-)
>
>Besides the two nonfics mentioned above I've enjoyed a lot of
>Greg Bear's fiction, especially:
>
>_Eternity_ (the sequel to _Eon_, and imho, a much better book).
>_Blood Music_ (everyone thinks it's a doom scenario except me)-:
>_Queen of Angels_
 
   I've read all of the above... wonderful, all of them (especially the last)...
 
>and of course Vernon Vinge:
>
>_True Names...and Other Dangers_ (I admit I only read the title
>novella :-(
 
   I've read the entire collection...
 
>_Across Realtime_ (new volume combining _The Peace War_,
>_Marooned in Realtime_, plus a short story).
 
   I read only *The Peace War*, and then decided eventually that Vinge is
a terrible author and a technophilic Randroid besides.  Sorry if I'm
dissing a favorite of yours, but there it is.
 
>plus all the usual cbpk, magick, and psychological stuff.
 
   Um... ditto, I think.
 
>        -Mike
>
>   | o==== . : ... :  :  .     |Mail Me Neat Stuff->POB 3703 Arlington VA 22203
> --@-- . o o o ... O -O- o o : |No disclaimers needed: I actually pay for this.
>   |           ... :  :        |-----------------------------------------------
>mEssAGE fRoM sPAcE ARt stUdiOs |                 SinGulaRNosC!
 
   A few more books to recommend (ignore this, those who I've mentioned them
to before): *Green Machines* and *1984* by Nigel Calder.  (No, the latter
is not a rip-off of Orwell, although it puns heavily on that novel.)
Calder's a fascinating author, and a thorough techno-anarchist.  Also,
*Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, and City Farming*, by John and Nancy Jack Todd
(of the long-running New Alchemy Institute), is *extremely* relevant to
our discussion (plus it has many nifty illustrations).  Finally, I might
recommend the novel *Woman On the Edge of Time*, by Marge Piercy, on which
I just wrote a long paper for an Intro to Womens' Studies class-- it
combines something from each of the approaches to the problem in the
phrase "the World, the Flesh, and the Devil".  Which phrase, come to think
of it, might have made a neater subject heading for this letter.
 
   One last note: I wonder how willing each of us is to devote at least a
period of our lives to this kind of experiment? What does this really mean
to you, on a personal level? I can't speak for myself as of yet, because
I'm still unsure of what Reality will be like, once all my temporary
hedges against it (like college :-) are done.  But I'd like to try making
this discussion a bit more real...
   Take care, all--
 
 
      --Jesse.
 
PS-- I will be off for spring break for two weeks after the 13th, so I
won't be responding to mail during that time... but I will receive any
that you send in that period when I get back! (I think.  Ah, me: a
technocompetent I'm not...) Thanks for participating, everyone.
 
   --m'self.

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