24fps....

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jean Bernier writes:
>exactly how does Mr. Brand's see the mainframe as "Big Brother"?

My understanding is that this was a very Sixties thing when computers would 
only be affordable by corporations and governments, and access to them thus 
restricted to employees of corps and govts, doing work authorised by corps 
and govts.  Hence the computer was seen as Big Brother's ultimate tool of 
control.

There's an interesting historical argument (aired recently in the NY Review 
of Books) that IBM let Gates have the market for operating systems for 
personal computers because they could not conceive of selling more than a 
couple of thousand PCs a year until around the middle of the 21st Century, 
(and these would be merely standalone toys for boys).

Anyway, people such as Steve Jobs have credited Brand (then Editor of the 
Whole Earth Catalogue) as seeing how the microchip made individual computers 
sitting on people's desks, doing whatever these individuals wanted them to 
do, possible.  As we know, all these standalone computers then got 
themselves wired up to a world (of sorts) thru the net.

Jean adds:
>AND, believing that a PC hooked up to the internet gives you any kind of
>power at all in terms of individual vs. the corporation or individual
>vs. the super-computer is, IMHO, simply naive.  Information isn't instantly
>accessible just because you've got a modem and and a nifty graphical
>operating system.

Lots of people would disagree with you.  For what it's worth, I'm pretty 
much on your (Jean's) side except to say that information can now get out to 
more people more quickly than has ever been the case before.  And the 
children of 24fps are already strutting their stuff in cyberspace - it's 
just that hardly anybody's watching....

jan