Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 21:41:58 -0700
From: Netscape User <netscape-user-AT-uw.madison>
Subject: Alienation machines


What co-incides with the exclusivity of a new convention center in
Madison, Wisconsin, are the newly installed mapstands that allow people
to conveniently locate points of interest around campus and the downtown
area. There is something else that these machines do. Before their
arrival, it was a simple thing to ask someone for directions. This very
gesture of approaching a stranger is being mediated. It is the
phenomenon
that Virilio described as a psychic swamp. Even though the younger
generation has not received him very well(on the road to denial),
Virilio is a master at perceiving the effects of speed. Now that these
machines are in place,
the people have been fed a convenience that helps atrophy their social
skills. A machine that supposedly alleviates anxiety. On another
surface,
the U.S. Interstate system, hitch-hiking is becoming increasingly
difficult. There is a campaign on to eliminate hitchiking. Anyone who
has
ever thought about doing it should be aware of this. And if one wants to
do it, do it soon. This is also part of the alienation that the control
societies wish to further:. a control of speed and at the same time a
supression of free-floating sociality, undocumented. I love it when the
highway patrol stops me, frisks me, goes through my bag and finds
nothing they can use. It is at this time that I pull out my tobacco pipe
that looks lika a dope pipe. I am saying to them "No, I haven't bought
into the drug assemblage, I slip through your fingers in that department
also." The constitution originally provided for egress on the nations'
highways. Things have changed. The U.S. Interstate system is a private
machine. Therefore, the machines that perpetuate a neurotic alienating
individualism are nursing us down the path of ignorance, in the midst
of abundant means to enlighten oneself and make new connections.
This reader of D&G soon moves out to re-test the societies of control,
on the highway, in three dimensions. When I sent Deleuze an etching from
a French artist I had met, the main thing I hoped for was that he would
understand it immediately. It was a mass gravitating towards the bull's
head. Somehow, I think he did. Bullshit also crouches low like a frog,
within a hunk of metal that burns fossil fuel. 
                                               Weasel