M.A.D. Internet roots

[Dave Monroe]

Not a fair comparison.  The key phrase in the Pynchon
passage is "the internet, a development that PROMISES
social control on a scale those quaint old
20th-century tyrants [...] could only dream about"
(emphasis added, of course).  Its origins in military
CCC did indeed give it an initial spin toward command
and control--with large-scale social implications--as
well as communication--with large-scale ....  Sure,
the eventual dissemination of the Internet did rather
let the genie out of the bottle, even as software like
Raptor does much to suck it back in, if not quite cork
it.  But the internet and WWW are hardly the
freewheeling egalitarian-to-anarchistic utopias some
want or even believe them to be, either.  Indeed, my
very first e-mail ever was to Wm. J. Mitchell of the
MIT School of Architecture in response to his
assertion of e-mail's egalitarianism in his City of
Bits.  Contrary to what he seems to believe, that
"mit.edu" at the end of his name does rather tend to
trump, say, my "yahoo.com."  He never answered me, by
the way.  A floor wax AND a dessert topping ...

--- Jasper Fidget <jasper at hatguild.org> wrote:
> 
> Corollary: The Aegis Destroyer evolved from the
> concept of the canoe, therefore the canoe was
> designed with the Aegis Destroyer in mind.
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> >
> > In "our" 1984, after all, the integrated circuit
> > chip was less than a decade old, and almost
> > embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of
> > computer technology circa 2003, most notably the
> > internet, a development that promises social
> > control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century
> > tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only
> > dream about.
> > -Thomas Pynchon, Foreword to _1984_

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