Date: Sun, 28 May 1995 00:10:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: glevy-AT-acnet.pratt.edu
Subject: Re: WIRED Magazine 


It occurred to me, when reading Brad's post (see below), that there is an 
ideological component of Bill Gates's philosophy.  Gates's perspective on 
technological change seems to be based more on business and profit needs 
than on social and human needs.  His ideology, it would seems, is that of 
a technocrat and an engineer -- perspectives that fail to address many 
social needs and concerns related to technology.

On Sat, 27 May 1995 Brad4d6-AT-aol.com wrote:

> glevy-AT-acnet.pratt.edu wrote:
> 
> >This list has been relatively quiet -- let's see if we can bring it to 
> life again.
> 
> Alan Sondheim wrote:
> 
> > Gates is like WIRED itself: dissembling, carrying vestiges of 60s 70s 
> > leftism, but ultimately foreclosing any possibility of radicality. And I 
> > don't think that either Gates or WIRED may be aware of their tunnel 
> > vision, and the fact that this results in tunnels being built for all of
> us.
> 
> There was an article about WIRED in the 20 May New York Times Sunday
> magazine, which (seemed to me, at least) to present WIRED as a bunch of
> egotistical people on a "power trip" (fuelled by lots of ad revenues $$$ from
> multi-national corporations like IBM and Absolut Vodka.  The WIRED people
> proclaim Marshall McLuhan as their patron saint, but their idea is to unleash
> technology and see what surprises it has in store for us, whereas McLuhan was
> highly *concerned* about technological change out of control, and believed we
> needed to try to understand it and manage it for humane social purposes.
> 
> The NYT article presented the WIRED people's idea of social responsibility as
> (e.g.) eliminating the nation's school system, thus "freeing up" $450 billion
> (presumably for people to spend on the Internet).  WIRED seems to have no
> sense of real face-to-face human community (which, whatever their failings
> and limitations, the interpersonal teacher-student and student-student
> interactions in schools do foster by the mere structure of the existential
> situation, unlike solitary interaction between individuals and their
> computers).
> 
> The same NYT magazine also had an article about Prof Gelerntner (sp?) at Yale
> who had been a victim of one of the Unabomber's letter bombs.  Gelerntner
> explicitly expressed concern about people who know about nothing except
> technology influencing the shape of society.  He also cited a personal
> example of the importance of "old-fashioned" face-to-face human relations:
> After the bomb had blown up and he was dying, Gelerntner had to drag himself
> across the street to the Yale medical department.  He managed to do this, in
> part by recalling to mind memories of a person who had been particularly warm
> and caring.  (This struck me as reminiscent of Heinz Kohut's essay "On
> Courage", about martyrs recalling to mind images of the people who loved
> them, as they go to their deaths).  --The contrast of Gelerntner's struggle
> with death, and the WIRED article about abstract digital experience, was
> striking.
> 
> I suggest two things which are needed are: (1) to try to think about and
> proactively to manage technological change rather than letting ourselves be
> carried away by intoxication with it (again, I would refer to Jacques Ellul's
> "The Technological Bluff" to which someone on this list referred me, and
> which I found very valuable, if also depressing in its unoptimistic
> assessment of the prospects for succeeding in getting technology under
> control), and (2) to try to nurture the kind of intensely meaningful
> personal, face-to-face interactions between individuals that have the power
> (as in Gelerntner's example) to help us cope with even the worst disasters in
> life.  (The rank order of urgency of these two items, surely, is #2 first,
> both because the need for it may arise at any moment (as in the story of
> Everyman), and also to help inform efforts at #1!)
> 
> Can recollections of things read in WIRED magazine (or seen on a CRT...) give
> a person the courage (succor, etc.) to cope with extreme life situations?  
> 
> Brad McCormick   
> 
> 
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> 


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