Doug and Capitalism

[pynchonoid]

--- s~Z <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:
> >>>  Was it guilt or just
> somethimg Michael said? <<<
> 
> Doug is very pro-capitalist. He laughs all the way
> to the bank and markets
> himself and his book regularly on this list.
> 

Yeah, I just went and bought my second Ferrari from
the book royalities I've conned from the P-list. Not
to mention my dog's ruby-and-gold-encrusted collar.

Throw all the red herrings you'd like.  Pynchon
remains on the money in his insights re the Internet
and its potential for Big Brother-style social
control. 

It's interesting how Pynchon differs on this issue
from the younger, cyberpunk writers who have otherwise
looked to him for inspiration.  William Gibson and
Bruce Stirling seem enamored of the cyberpunk outlaw
characters they've created, to the point of confusing
the freedom they exercise when they write fiction to
the realities of today's Internet -- and how the
Internet has evolved from a network designed to help
the US survive nuclear war, to a communications
playpen, and now back to a finely-tuned tool for
surveillance, investigation, propaganda,
misinformation, etc. The house always wins, friends.
When you play on their machine, that should come as no
surprise.

Please let the name-calling and red herring flinging
continue...

-Diamond Doug

More of Pynchon's insights:

[...] But we now live, we are told, in the Computer
Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will
mainframes attract the same hostile attention as
knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers
of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word
processors. Machines have already become so
user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of
Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old
sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond
this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge
really is power, that there is a pretty
straightforward conversion between money and
information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be
worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is
so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common
ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful
army of technocrats who were supposed to have the
"future in their bones." It may be only a new form of
the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or
it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has
now come to reside in the computer's ability to get
the right data to those whom the data will do the most
good. With the proper deployment of budget and
computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves
from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody,
detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk
-- realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.
The word "Luddite" continues to be applied with
contempt to anyone with doubts about technology,
especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no
longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable
machines. As well-known President and unintentional
Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left
office, there is now a permanent power establishment
of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against
whom us average poor bastards are completely
outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way.
We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to
go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it
becomes every day less possible to fool any of the
people any of the time.
If our world survives, the next great challenge to
watch out for will come -- you heard it here first --
when the curves of research and development in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and
robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and
unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us
devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It
is certainly something for all good Luddites to look
forward to if, God willing, we should live so long.
Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however
minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously
improvised song, in which he, like other observers of
the time, saw clear identification between the first
Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd! [...]

Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a
subject of serious concern, there is little question
that Sloth will continue to evolve away from its
origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when
daily life really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work
and time was a story, with a beginning, middle and
end. Belief was intense, engagement deep and fatal.
The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth -- defiant
sorrow in the face of God's good intentions -- was a
deadly sin.
Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning
against what now seems increasingly to define us --
technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow, despite
technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our
heads in virtual reality, glumly refusing to be
absorbed in its idle, disposable fantasies, even those
about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old
days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with
the ruthless villains of the Acedia Squad. [...]

The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a
police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a
civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him
past, all the while addressing the drive of the car
personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though
people I tried to share it with only shrugged,
assuming that of course the driver's name (along with
height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained
from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as
soon as the offending car's license number had been
tapped into the terminal -- so what?
Stone Junction was first published in 1989, toward the
end of an era still innocent, in its way, of the
cyberworld just ahead about to exponentially explode
upon it. To be sure, there were already plenty of
computers around then, but they were not quite so
connected together as they were shortly to become.
Data available these days to anybody were accessible
then only to the Authorized, who didn't always know
what they had or what to do with it. There was still
room to wiggle -- the Web was primitive country,
inhabited only by a few rugged pioneers, half loco and
wise to the smallest details of their terrain. Honor
prevailed, laws were unwritten, outlaws, as yet
undefinable, were few. The question had only begun to
arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape
altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control
without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas
of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then -- a
question we are still asking. Where can you jump in
the rig and head for any more -- who's out there to
grant us asylum? If we stay put, what is left to us
that is not in some way tainted, coopted, and
colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital
in nature? Does anybody know the way to William
Gibson's "Republic of Desire?" Would they tell if they
knew? So forth. [...] 

One popular method of resistance was always just to
keep moving -- seeking, not a place to hide out,
secure and fixed, but a state of dynamic ambiguity
about where one might be any given moment, along the
lines of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Modern
digital machines, however, managed quickly enough to
focus the blurred ellipsoid of human freedom even more
narrowly than Planck's Constant allows.
Equally difficult for those who might wish to proceed
through life anonymously and without trace has been
the continuing assault against the once-reliable
refuge of the cash or non-plastic economy. There was a
time not so long ago you could stroll down any major
American avenue, collecting anonymous bank checks, get
on some post office line, and send amounts in the
range "hefty to whopping" anywhere, even overseas, no
problem. Now it's down to $750 a pop, and shrinking.
All to catch those Drug Dealers of course, nothing to
do with the grim, simplex desire for more information,
more control, lying at the heart of most exertions of
power, whatever governmental or corporate (if that's a
distinction you believe in). [...] 









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