Nigelle:
Your scenario reminds me of a plot in a movie from the late
Sixties called "The President's Analyst" with James Coburn who
played a shrink who's on the run because he's got the inside track
on the President's psyche and everyone, every intelligence agency,
wants what he alone knows. To his credit, both the CIA and KGB
operatives who are tasked with bringing him in from the cold,
happen to be his clients so he eventually he maintains his
independence more or less. However, one of the hidden players who
are interested in what Coburn knows is The Phone Company who needs
his insights to further develop their communications revolution for
the public. Their "better idea" is to bypass the phone hardware
altogether and implant at birth communication chips, small
receivers and transmitters make it so, Number 1. There's a nifty
idea for you; people really will be hearing voices in their heads
but whose voices will they be? and when, of course will they be
able to turn them off? That's something to factor into the next
communications bill before the Congress, isn't it? When I'm in the
city and walking about, I see lots of people for whom that kind of
imposition will be welcome; they'll just be staring off into space,
and the authorities at Bellevue won't know who to admit (maybe
everyone?). New York City will have to deal I suppose with a whole
new crop of wackaroons, wont' that be some fun? Ah progress!
Of course “The President's Analyst” was putting a uncomfortable
spin on the idea of progress, a fashionable Sixties paranoid vision
which now seems too quaint in the ‘90s as you yourself have
noted. In the course of doing research on “Play School” [which was
published under the title “Teenage Nervous Breakdown” -- buy a copy! --Ed.], I came on something that J.H. Huizinga, the Dutch historian remarked on in the late Thirties which bears on our discussion. In “The Shadow of Tomorrow “ he pinpointed our dilemma. Like our 18th and 19th century forebears we too have confused, "..the assurance of the bigger and better with the purely directional conception of "further". He goes on to say that,"the expectation that every new discovery or
refinement of existing means must contain the promise of higher
value or greater happiness is an extremely naive thought, heirloom
of the charming age of intellectual, moral and sentimental
optimism." He wrote this in 1936 as he was staring into the maw of
Nazi Germany and the fashionable totalitarians it engendered in
Italy and Japan who were also big boosters of "progress". I think
that he was also of the opinion that though technology has a way of
bringing everyone up to speed in terms of mass goods and services,
its downside is to be reckoned with. In the drive to live modern
lives we give up our individual preferences in favor of statistical
models of what they might happen to be. Truth becomes lies, hell
truth is lies if we believe Mark Twain's dictum that there are
three kinds of lies: "lies, damn, lies and statistics."
It's bad odds for us poor bastards if truth these days is
statistics and they are eminently cook-able.
Scored with statistical notes and time signatures, graphs and
readouts, the siren songs of cyber-babble accompany our visions of
progress while we as individuals are absolved from responsibility
from what we have set in motion. "The computer's down", sorry; "my
terminal's dead", sorry; "must have been a glitch", sorry. Sorry,
sorry, sorry, everyone's so fucking sorry! If so many people
weren't convinced it was OK to do their work on psychic autopilot,
less of those kinds of mistakes would occur. And where is the
wisdom is building multimillion dollar computer mainframes and
then paying those who service them with data substandard wages
which make the conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
positively benign in comparison? It's a wonder there isn't even
more sabotage and anarchy than there is out there in the real
world. For that matter, there very well might be, but we have no
real way of knowing. It's more a way of looking again at time, of
not living in the present with a presence of the past. But who has
the time?
What a paradox! the more "advanced" our technology becomes,
the more atrophied our humanness, the more self-centered,
solipsistic, and strange, we become alienated not only from our
fellow humans, but even from ourselves. It's a lie that somehow
what we're doing in "virtual" reality is real, unless conceptual
reality has been taken to the bridge so to speak and dropped off.
and dropped off. Lady of Spain I abhor you -- couldn't resist.
And the first casualty really is our sense of humor, because
in cyber world there's no room for guffaws, only cynical dispirited
snorts of derision, or to use the word-de-jour, irony, which though
of infinite knee-jerk utility to the present generation, doesn't
help deal with the future. But these days, there is no future or
human past, only a present which the "now" of goods promotes, you
are your hard drive until you get a newer update sort of thing. Guys
used to brag about their cars, now it's their hard drives and
mother boards, go figure.
And since we're all "cyber-"involved, we allow ourselves to
blame the cyber world instead of ourselves for allowing it to
happen in the first place. I mean boy howdy! ever try to fix a
problem at your bank from a data error? You can have all the
receipts and talk to all sorts of people up and down the chain of
command and still nothing happens. You explain and they say yes
we'll put that into the file and the very next month, the same item
shows up and the same round of dunning calls. What has cyber world
wrought save a whole new job explosion in the area of dunning
specialists who are cleaning up what the keypunch personnel have
wrought. The real question is how do we bring some sense of human
scale back into the world, not how we continue to find ways to
obliterate it. No blame, no gain? or have I got that backwards? We
entrust billion dollar companies to underpaid number crunchers and
"data specialists" who are getting more and more pissed off to be
techno-helots, and we wonder why things are getting more and more
screwed up.
The cyberbabble which lies at the root of the latter
Twentieth Century which promotes that purely directional line of
reasoning of "better" is the enemy I suppose and takes place to an
increasing within a world of statistical abstracts to which, for
convenience (whose?) everything is ultimately reduced. If a whole
culture is freighted on those computer-generated statistical models
and attitudes, and indeed our political survival is increasingly
couched in those terms, how much easier is it for corporations or
states (which are one in the same) to do something truly awful and
honestly have no clue? Isn't that special? And just imagine the
poor geek who can't even "score" in a chat room? Imagine what kinds
of destructive visions he/she will nurture?
But enough levity, change if still possible will have to take
place within individuals,and not through the machines they may use,
individuals and the power of their individual visions. What's it
all mean, Mister Natural? Kid it don't mean shit
What? my time's up? And now a word from our sponsor, the
Eureka Ear Trumpet Company. Remember our slogan, "We can't all play
like Wynton Marsalis, but we can buy a Eureka Ear Trumpet."
Unnaturally,
David
So, nu, Jake --
Your description of the underpaid workforce that's happily or not so happily making a hash of the computer software that runs (or is that ruins) our lives reminds me of a poor zhlub (yes, I remember what you told me, that a zhlub is a ragpicker's assistant) who used to work for the Cosmodemonic Data Corporation (CDC). He was a Valley boy, a bit of an innocent, ripe for the plucking, so to speak, in his late 30s and kind of hung up on the good old days. Well, so he meets this dotty Englishwoman wackaroon at a Grateful Dead concert, and before he knows it, she's convinced him she's the answer to his prayers, and he's married her, right? Within nine or ten months she's gotten pregnant, had the kid, then decided that marriage and motherhood is a drag and gone drifting away to follow the Dead around again, leaving him with a broken heart and a baby boy to raise. Some relative wangles him a job at CDC, in the department where they compile the main credit data files they use to decide if you can rent an apartment or get a credit card.
Now Milton is pretty despondent, and day after day he's sitting there in his little cubicle, just him and the Unix workstation, and he's mooning and pining and humming "Sugar Magnolia" to himself and not really giving his undivided attention to the work at hand. He's programming these long lists of names and credit ratings -- tedious work under the best of circumstances. Well, one day he feels so lousy he drops some windowpane and then goes in to work as usual, only it isn't as usual. He's somewhere in the middle of the letter "H", and when he sits down at the terminal and calls up his file, it looks like it's in Egyptian hieroglyphics. He sits there scratching his head and peering into the screen until finally the Sphinx comes strolling over and asks him how he's doing and he notices the Sphinx is wearing a Jerry Garcia tie -- far fucking out! And then the Sphinx asks him again if he's feeling all right and he realizes he must maintain his coolness or perhaps after all not having a job might be at least interesting if not quite what he had in mind, and he says, "Oh, sorry, Mr. Bradley," and the Sphinx shuffles away again, leaving him to think of Esme instead of Hamilton, Ralph. In the process of conjuring up incredible synesthetic images of Esme playing the skin flute, Milton finds his slippery palms sliding all over the keyboard, and the oblivious Mr. Hamilton winds up with a whole string of late payments appended to his name -- Mr. Hamilton having been the most punctual Republican imaginable, and just about to go to the bank for a small business loan. Poor Mr. Hamilton. But he's not as unfortunate as Harrington, John J., who will magically acquire a bunch of chargeoffs, or Herman, Walter, left forever to wonder how that skip tracer got into his file and could never be tracked down, or Horn, Bernice, transformed, in one gorgeous flash of polychromatic light, into an embezzler.
When Mr. Bradley begins to get complaints from various lenders, reporting in turn complaints from consumers who can't figure out how the hell they got blackballed when they've been paying their Monkey Ward bills like clockwork every fucking month, he calls the feckless and despondent Milton into his office. But the damage has been done, and in fact, chaos has already begun to spiral outward like an oil slick over troubled waters...because poor Milton, in his purple haze, has inadvertently dumped thousands of individuals into the Immediate Collections file, alerting collection agencies across the country to swing into action and enter the names into their master computer archives, which in turn are maintained by other servers who...
Just be glad Milton wasn't working for the county probation department or tabulating the ballots in the next Presidential election, for that matter.
Entropically yours,
N.
