the paperless society>
glyphic theatre>
irreal hypertext >
info-noise
"Many people collect music that they like and surround themselves with it. I do the reverse: I don't keep music around me; I keep noise." John Cage
"Computation should be like electricity. You plug into the wall and use as much of it as you need whenever you need it. I think that is the direction we're heading in....What I'm talking about now goes against decentralist ideas. Let me make the analogy to electric power. Microcomputers are like batteries, they're nice but they're limited. Imagine if your refrigerator or your house lights had to be run off a battery. The interesting thing about this parallel technology is you can build an arbitararily large source of computing power, and I think people will use it in a utility sense. I think personal computers will be not such an important mode of computation anymore. They'll still have their place, but the sort of computation you'll have in your home appliances will draw on that central source of computation when they need it....a single fiberoptic is as much bandwidth as your house and all the people in it could absorb.... to have a certain amount of intelligence sometimes. You want your alarm clock, when you shout at it to shut up in the morning, to decide whether or not to shut up based on what you said....people will see for a while this trend continuing of decentralization of computers, because of the diseconomies of scale of large computers. But then I think when this technology goes in you'll get much more of a practice of shared communal computing resources." Daniel Hillis
There will be, in the future, a paperless society because there will be no trees. Nature will be replaced by information & the intellect of society will be serviced by cyber-mnemonic prosthetics. The HUMAN is still a corporeally efficient machine for inputting data, but it is the HUMAN's lack of memory storage & recall which makes the HUMAN rely on pieces of paper to temporarily jog the memory. By implementing machine-driven "virtual memory" a cyber-human would have no need to make notes or no need to read anything since simultaneous electronic access to the collective memory would make the act of reading, watching & hearing obsolete.
Humans were (apppropriate with the ecosophy* of their times) content for thousands of years in a paperless ur-society of polypsychic ambiguities.
The society of the text has returned to the glyphic theatre of ur-history. Every symbol is charged with many times more meaning than it can signify, colliding with each other like bombarded molecules. Thousands of years ago wealth was judged by who owned the most cattle, now it is controlled by who owns & exploits the most needed information The result is an unnavigatible info chaos where there can be little connotative control & even less predictability. Life-as-theatre, glyphic babelism, is one of the few modes of response which allows spontaneity to fuse with visionary directedness & invention without being swallowed up by global misinformation.
In post-scarcity society, the grossly misunderstood sixth sense will provide the machinery for cyberpsychic ( Intuitive mental imaging into a collective unconscious, like computers connected by bulletin board via modemality. Produkt Imaginator, Amendant Hardiker refers to this brainwave network as the CyberPsychic Bulletin Board) communication. Computers as we know them will be electromagnetic relics suitable for museumization. Beliefware is the planetary fertilization of a form of communication that is the result of universal pain & struggle, discovery & joy, & every conceivable permutation. Crossmedia potentials include sampled sound, computer synthesized speech, hypertext implementation, graphic cataloging, animatography, interactive authoring, language & text generation & design by encounter.
Silence is distractions are omens....
The consistent model for hypertext creations has been one of orderly progression & logical links, in otherwords institutionalized clarity. I guess what I am suggesting is that the traditional hypertext model of westernized linear rationalism is hardly consistent with the word, HYPERTEXT. "Hyper" in its latin form connotes above, beyond, superior. To get beyond the text as we know it means that one has to construct, learn & receive information using human mental facilities such as intuition, association, clairvoyance, & presumptive belief. Read hypURtext. That the desire to invent true hypertextual consciousness is identical with the dream of linking spontaneously to the past & the future. In this state information-mongering is no longer a simulation but rather an experience in itself.
The simultaneous appearance of very particular phenomena in both science & culture suggest that ideas & inventions are subpsychic viral energy which spontaneously replicate within a molecular control-system of its own, far outside the human's facility to imprint & exploit it. The computerization of thought navigation should be consistent with a neurological understanding of brain functions & the social interconnectedness of imagination. A hypertext machine should be able to learn enough from its user to recognize when coincidences & synchronicities appear, & to give the user tools to manipulate these phenomena. For this to happen the notion of hypertext has to merge with the notion of hypermedia (interactive computer intermedia) so that when people are talking about hypertext as a new model for rendering the unknown complexities of consciousness easily accessible, these people will be talking about not only thoughts & words but also sounds, graphics, animation, subliminals & simulations.
Max Matthews, head technician at Bell Labs for many years tells the story that because Bell was losing so much money from people not hanging up their phones, a research scientist was assigned to find the perfect annoying penetrating & irritating tone to terrorize people into hanging up their phones ASAP. The longer the phone was off the hook, the more it cost Bell. Reportedly the scientist remained assigned to this projekt for 15 years(!)
Information Theory gave us the basic law that there is "noise" (communication failure) in every communication between one information system and another. But Info Noise is nothing new . . . Info Noise perpetrated the Fall of the Tower of Babel. What has changed is that science and culture is only beginning to acquire a vocabulary & a workable equation of the effect of noise on evo-entropy. What is called schizophrenia & mental disease is really the body's inability to override the noise in the system. But it is not just a matter of breaking thru, but broadening the definition of the received information to accept the whole transmission. Often time it is the noise which feedsback the true response. In the system of global ecology, pollution & contamination is the most apparent noise. Planetary survival is contingent on examining that breakdown. In the social construction of pure information it is information which cannot be divided into noise & communication which overturns the automated digestion of info into bite-sized tidbits. If the info cannot be reduced to a consumer-objekt, it exists in a territory all its own. By describing MARGINALITY as a revolution of information....
"Nanotechnology is the science of "computers" or servo-mechanisms built on the scale of molecules, and genetic engineering has already indicated that organic nanotechnology is feasible. The creation of such "machines" out of inorganic molecules is expected soon by most workers in this field. Theoretically, a molecular "computer" on this level could travel through a human body repairing every defective cell it found; other suggested applications are even more staggering." Robert Anton Wilson
"...from the outset, Shannon was beset by the understandable confusion that arose between his restricted use "information" and the conventional meaning of the word. From his point of view, even gibberish [I can think of many times when the speech I did not understand was the intelligible speech & what made most sense was the multi-layered fragments of babble overheard in a crowd of noise.] might be "information" if somebody cared to transmit it. After all, a message translated into a secret code would appear to be gibberish to anyone who did not know the code; but it would be well worth sending by anyone who did." Theodore Roszak
The technology & the apparel necessary to begin operating the future is readily & cheaply available. The language of the future is the language of noise & information. "Nanotechnology will probably cause a jump in "ephemeralization" that will give us astounding output for very little input." Robert Anton Wilson
"Thanks to the high success of information theory, we live in a time when the technology of human communication has advanced at blinding speed; but what people have to say to one another by way of that technology shows no comparable development. Still, in the presence of so ingenious a technology, it is easy to conclude that because we have the ability to transmit more electronic bits more rapidly to more people than ever before we are making real cultural progress--and that the essence of that progress is information technology." Theodore Roszak
* Ecosophy can be sensorily explained as a TERRARIUM WITHIN WHICH profound ecological strategy is current with environmental behavior & earthling(kical) intuitive plasma. To understand what exoecosophy is substitute confusion(?) for terrarium.
BRITAIN TO MAKE RADIO BRAIN
...Revolutionary developments in aerodynamics, which will enable jet-planes to fly at speeds vastly in excess of that of sound, are expected to follow the British invention of 'Ace', which has been commonly labelled the electronic 'brain'. ...Professor Hartree said: 'The implications of the machine are so vast that we cannot conceive how they will affect our civilisation. Here you have something which is making one field of human activity 1000 times faster. In the field of transport, the equivalent of Ace would be the ability to travel from London to Cambridge...in five seconds as a regular thing. It is almost unimaginable. ...Dr. Turing, who conceived the idea of Ace, said that he foresaw the time, possibly in 30 years, when it would be as easy to ask the machine a question as to ask a man. Dr. Hartree, however, thought that the machine would always require a great deal of thought on the part of the operator. He deprecated, he said, any notion that Ace could ever be a complete substitute for the human brain adding: 'The fashion which has sprung up in the last 20 years to decry human reason is a path which leads straight to Nazism.' ---from the Daily Telegraph, London, 1946
"Chaos: Making a New Science", James Gleick, Viking Penguin, NY, 1987.
"The Society of Mind", Marvin Minsky, Simon & Schuster, 1986.
"Alan Turing: The enigma", Andrew Hodges, Simon & Schuster, 1983.
"The Computer Pioneers", David Ritchie, Simon & Schuster, 1986.
"The Cult of Information", Theodore Roszak, Pantheon Books, 1986.
"Conversing with Cage", edited by Richard Kostelanetz, Limelight Editions, 1988.
Computer lib/dream machines, Theodor Nelson, Tempus Books, 1987.
"The Science of Blessing & Curing" by Robert Anton Wilson, Critique 30, 1989.
Robert Anton Wilson, Trajectories Newsletter, 1989.