[-empyre-] Starting the Third Week: Michael Boghn and Jerome Sala

[Funkhouser, Christopher T.]

AH  -  nice to know

if you never saw DIU, you might get a kick out of it. or not!
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/diu/

we were much egged on by Don Byrd, who wrote the sailing intro to the
project:

Posthuman Nation / Knowledge and Noise

* 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. 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: 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. 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. 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. "Ðthe 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. 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.
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, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the
Resurrection of the Dead , New York, 1994. Tipler is a widely respected
physicist, and his argument is posed as serious science.) 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, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and
Human Intelligence, 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.) 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. The Imaginary University
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. 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. Otherwise, please, stay at home and watch
MTV. 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. *
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