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<p>oh no! <br>
</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/21/16 8:50 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote
cite="mid:CAC0TkuZ2tP+UyKtidAtB5w5iS02T7yRP_yf1vow3LdGS9rp5aA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------</pre>
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<div>I have very bad news. Extraordinary writer, equally
extraordinary human being and a member of the editorial board
and contributor to <i>Dispatches</i> <b>Benjamin Hollander</b>
sadly passed away today. Those who know him will mourn him
deeply.<br>
<br>
</div>
Murat<br>
<div><br>
<br>
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<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 8:13 PM, Craig
Saper <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:csaper@umbc.edu" target="_blank">csaper@umbc.edu</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre-
soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
<div style="word-wrap:break-word">
<div>Yes, somehow Dispatches and DIU and this essay seemed
distant or at least in a future instead of upon us and
beyond us.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
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<div><br>
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<br>
<div>
<div>On Nov 21, 2016, at 3:42 PM, Funkhouser,
Christopher T. <<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:christopher.t.funkhouser@njit.edu"
target="_blank">christopher.t.funkhouser@<wbr>njit.edu</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br
class="m_-5360264178214481443Apple-interchange-newline">
<div>----------empyre- soft-skinned
space----------------------
<div dir="ltr"><br>
<div class="gmail_extra">AH - nice to know<br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra">if you never saw DIU, you
might get a kick out of it. or not!<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/diu/"
target="_blank">http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/<wbr>ezines/diu/</a><br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra">we were much egged on by
Don Byrd, who wrote the sailing intro to the
project:<br>
<br>
<center>
<h2>Posthuman Nation / Knowledge and Noise</h2>
</center>
<p>
<font size="4">
<strong>
</strong></font></p>
<font size="4"><strong> The function of the
traditional university is conservative. It
collects, archives, judges, and redistributes
the culture hoard. In times of stability, it
works well. It keeps track of every hint of
innovation and tests it brutally. Even most of
the good ideas are found lacking.
<p> In times of dramatic change, however, the
traditional university is worthless or worse
than worthless, because first it rejects
precisely the new ideas and new knowledges
that are required, and then, after change is
unavoidable, it opens itself more or less
uncritically to every fad. Once its
tradition of wisdom is in question, it has
no grounds for judgment. In an important
document from the 1960's, "On the Poverty of
Student Life," an anonymous essay by members
of the Situationist International and
students of the University of Strasbourg, we
read:
</p>
<div>
<br
class="m_-5360264178214481443webkit-block-placeholder">
</div>
<blockquote> Once upon a time the universities
had a certain prestige; the students persist
in the belief that they are lucky to be
there. But they came too late. Their
mechanical, specialized education is as
profoundly degraded (in relation to the
former level of general bourgeois culture)
as their own intellectual level, because the
modern economic system demands a mass
production of uneducated students who have
been rendered incapable of thinking. The
university has become an institutional
organization of the ignorance; "high
culture" itself is being degraded in the
assembly-line production of professors, all
of whom are cretins and most of whom would
get the bird from any audience of
highschoolers.
</blockquote>
Since that time, students have come
increasingly to doubt that they are
privileged. They have lost the sense of
themselves as the producers of education and
think they are consumers as they are consumers
of everything else in their world. The
institution accommodates them or even
encourages their misconception. Rather than
teaching how to think, it offers an array of
finished thoughts from which the students
choose, as they choose from shoes.
<p> The rapacious prosperity of the 50's and
60's was generated by the production of the
immoral equivalent war and time in the world
economy (the World War that began in 1914
never ended). The arms race had the dual
effect of generating widespread prosperity
in the West and eventually bankrupting the
Soviet Union, now leaving the filthy rich in
unopposed control of the world. "Šthe
world's 358 billionaires have a combined net
worth of $760
billion, equal to that of the bottom 45
percent of the world's population" (Richard
J. Barnet). With the fear of a worldwide
communist movement whipping up class hatred
removed, the liberal concessions to the
working-class and the poor are revoked. The
masses are controlled by an organized
assault on the attentions by the media,
drugs, fear of difference packaged as
religion, misdirected education, and random
law enforcement. The focus of consciousness
is dulled and its continuity disrupted. It
is thus not possible for the exploited even
to recognize their exploitation or to have a
language in which their dissatisfaction can
be articulated. Their self-expression, like
every thing else, is sold to them in the
form of talk radio, gangsta rap, grunge
rock, escapist movies, as well as all of the
merchandise in the shopping mall. Underwear
and chocolates are forms of self-expression.
Consumption is the only sanctioned mode of
identity.
</p>
<p> The world is now organized to serve the
immortality of the billionaires or their
children and grandchildren. The scenarios
are numerous, most of them, like most sci-fi
scenarios, no doubt too probable.
</p>
<p> Consider: a century hence, when the earth
is so polluted that the working stiffs of
the world will be groggy with bad air and
contaminated food and water, and the great
artificial environments of the billionaires
will be in danger of breaking-down beyond
the abilities of the impaired maintenance
crews to fix them, the space ships of our
cosmic imperialism will lift off, carrying
the human genome as its pay-load; the
billionaires will take off for the stars,
leaving the rest of us the planet they have
despoiled. (See Frank J. Tipler, <i>The
Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology,
God, and the Resurrection of the Dead</i>
, New York, 1994. Tipler is a widely
respected physicist, and his argument is
posed as serious science.)
</p>
<p> Or consider: a century hence, certain
patents will confer rights of paternity, and
Bill Gates will be declared the
great-grandfather of a new super computer
with a self-aware brain a hundred times more
complex than the brains of its human
progenitors. It will become the billionaire
and take charge of the future of the
evolution of complexity in the cosmos. The
ecological needs of systems based on silicon
are much less troublesome than the ecology
of hydrocarbons. (See Hans Moravec, <i>Mind
Children: The Future of Robot and Human
Intelligence</i>, Cambridge, 1988. Moravec
is the director of the robotics lab at
Carnegie-Mellon University. He argues that
we are at a crisis moment in the evolution
of cosmic complexity and that humans will
become obsolete within the next century.)
</p>
<p> These extrapolated futures are in the
great western tradition of migration and
despoilation that began some time before
1000 BC. All of the fresh starts on earth,
all of the fresh starts for humans, have
been squandered. This is our advantage. We
have lost our innocence. We are not Adam and
Eve. <b>The Imaginary University</b> exists
because those who matriculate produce it.
The students write all of the books in its
library, plan the syllabi of the courses. We
examine ourselves, we confer our own
certificates and degrees.
</p>
<p> Now those who educate themselves as
posthumans begin to produce a nation. The
course of study is difficult, the chances
for graduation nil. If you want to study and
act, you will be welcome. <i>Otherwise,
please, stay at home and watch MTV</i>.
You should know, however, that our Nation of
Noise and Knowledge is at war with the
United Nations and all of its members. You
will be required to undertake dangerous
missions. The stakes could not be higher.
</p>
</strong></font><br>
<br>
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empyre forum
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