Date: Thu, 04 Feb 1999 06:33:14 -0800
From: Austin Meredith <kouroo-AT-uci.edu>
Subject: Re: FW: Totalitarianism is latent in technology


Eric Weiss offered, as his reading of Virilio, that:
> Any system of organizing human beings that requires massive conformity
> to a relatively uniform way of life is totalitarian.

For succinctness, I propose we designate this the Kaczynski take on the
matter.

I went to school with Nasty Brutish Short Kaczynski back in the early 1960s
and I think by now I have come to understand him.

That such an attitude toward technology is incorrect may be readily seen.
If there is any system of organizing human beings that truly mandates
massive conformity to a relatively uniform way of life, it is the
anti-technological way of life.

If conformity to a relatively uniform way of life were totalitarian, then
if we all followed the UNABOMER and and attempted to live our lives
minimizing technology -- we'd all be living in low-rent inaccessible shacks
with dirty faces the way he did, eating rabbits we'd trapped when and if we
managed to trap one, and having the sort of difficulty he had, in keeping
up our body weight. We'd be out of touch with one another and, it goes
without saying, we'd also be up shit crick without a clue.

Offhand I can't think of any more conformitarian way of life, than for us
all to live like Ted. Although there are many many different ways for us to
lead technologically enhanced lives, there's in fact only one boring,
stultifying manner in which one may scrape the bottom of that barrel. Every
dawn begins the same daily struggle for the basic ingredients of mere
survival for another day, over and over again -- much like the movie
"Groundhog Day."

Lev Lafayette has offered, as a superior reading of Virilio, that:
> Instrumental technologies amplify the effects of moral decisions....

The difficulty I see is that destruction is always more easy to accomplish
than construction, and therefore, as we more and more over the centuries
amplify the effects of our moral decisions, we are forever making it easier
and easier for us to accomplish our own ultimate destruction. As a mnemonic
device, let us pretend that this is a process which began on the 1st Guy
Fawkes day, with the attempted use of stacked barrels of gunpowder to raise
the level simultaneously of a Parliament and of a Monarch. This is a
process which has continued ever since Guy Fawkes was hanged and drawn and
quartered, for the most massive and sustained exercise in human cooperation
which the world has ever seen has been the project by which we have
invented and created and manufactured arsenals of nuclear, biological, and
chemical weapons with which we may trash ourselves and foul our nest. 

And I haven't any idea, what the solution to this is going to be.

\s\ Austin Meredith <kouroo-AT-uci.edu> "Stack of the Artist of Kouroo" Project


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