Cybernetics Final
In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
Ad Hoc Committee, The Triple Revolution Manifesto, 1964
The Cybernation Revolution: A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated selfregulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs.
Ad Hoc Committee, The Triple Revolution Manifesto, 1964
The U.S. operates on the thesis, set out in the Employment Act of 1964, that every person will be able to obtain a job if he wishes to do so and that this job will provide him with resources adequate to live and maintain a family decently. Thus job-holding is the general mechanism through which economic resources are distributed. Those without work have access only to a minimal income, hardly sufficient to provide the necessities of life, and enabling those receiving it to function as only "minimum consumers." As a result, the goods and services which are needed by these crippled consumers, and which they would buy if they could, are not produced. This in turn deprives other workers of jobs, thus reducing their incomes and consumption.
Ad Hoc Committee, The Triple Revolution Manifesto, 1964
The major difference between the agricultural, industrial and cybernation revolutions is the speed at which they developed. The agricultural revolution began several thousand years ago in the Middle East. Centuries passed in the shift from a subsistence base of hunting and food-gathering to settled agriculture. In contrast, it has been less than 200 years since the emergence of the industrial revolution, and direct and accurate knowledge of the new productive techniques has reached most of mankind This swift dissemination of information is generally held to be the main factor leading to widespread industrialization. While the major aspects of the cybernation revolution are for the moment restricted to the U.S., its effects are observable almost at once throughout the industrial world and large parts of the nonindustrial world.
Ad Hoc Committee, The Triple Revolution Manifesto, 1964
The present system encourages activities which can lead to private profit and neglects those activities which can enhance the wealth and the quality of life of our society. Consequently, national policy has hitherto been aimed far more at the welfare of the productive process than at the welfare of people. The era of cybernation can reverse this emphasis. With public policy and research concentrated on people rather than processes we believe that many creative activities and interests commonly thought of as noneconomic will absorb the time and the commitment of many of those no longer needed to produce goods and services. Society as a whole must encourage new modes of constructive, rewarding and ennobling activity. Principal among these are activities such as teaching and learning that relate people to people rather than people to things. Education has never been primarily conducted for profit in our society; it represents the first and most obvious activity inviting the expansion of the public sector to meet the needs of this period of transition.
Ad Hoc Committee, The Triple Revolution Manifesto, 1964
"The Cybernation Revolution: A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs."
Agger et. al, The Triple Revolution Manifesto, 1964
Epoch One: Texts. [From the mid-1600s] • Epoch Two: Electronic communication and entertainment media. [1900+] • Epoch Three: Information technology. [1960+] • Epoch Four: Virtual reality and cyberspace. [1984+]
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Will the real body please stand up?, 1991
Habitat is a two-dimensional example of what William Gibson called a "consensual hallucination." First, according to Morningstar and Farmer, it has well-known protocols for encoding and exchanging information. By generally accepted usage among cyberspace engineers, this means it is consensual. The simulation software uses agents that can transform information to simulate environment. This means it is an hallucination.... In the third epoch the older metaphor of reading is undergoing a transformation in a textual space that is consensual, interactive, and haptic, and that is constituted through inscription practices—the production of microprocessor code. Social spaces are beginning to appear that are simultaneously natural, artificial, and constituted by inscription. The boundaries between the social and the natural and between biology and technology are beginning to take on the generous permeability that characterizes communal space in the fourth epoch.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Will the real body please stand up?, 1991
Phone sex is the process of provoking, satisfying, constructing desire through a single mode of communication, the telephone. In the process, participants draw on a repertoire of cultural codes to construct a scenario that compresses large amounts of information into a very small space. The worker verbally codes for gesture, appearance, and proclivity, and expresses these as tokens, sometimes in no more than a word. The client uncompresses the tokens and constructs a dense, complex interactional image. In these interactions desire appears as a product of the tension between embodied reality and the emptiness of the token, in the forces that maintain the preexisting codes by which the token is constituted. The client mobilizes expectations and preexisting codes for body in the modalities that are not expressed in the token; that is, tokens in phone sex are purely verbal, and the client uses cues in the verbal token to construct a multimodal object of desire with attributes of shape, tactility, odor, etc. This act is thoroughly individual and interpretive; out of a highly compressed token of desire the client constitutes meaning that is dense, locally situated, and socially particular. Bodies in cyberspace are also constituted by descriptive codes that "embody" expectations of appearance.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Will the real body please stand up?, 1991
Programming itself involves constant creation, interpretation, and reinterpretation of languages. To enter the discursive space of the program is to enter the space of a set of variables and operators to which the programmer assigns names. To enact naming is simultaneously to possess the power of, and to render harmless, the complex of desire and fear that charge the signifiers in such a discourse; to enact naming within the highly charged world of surfaces that is cyberspace is to appropriate the surfaces, to incorporate the surfaces into one's own. Penetration translates into envelopment. In other words, to enter cyberspace is to physically put on cyberspace. To become the cyborg, to put on the seductive and dangerous cybernetic space like a garment, is to put on the female. Thus cyberspace both disembodies... but also reembodies in the polychrome, hypersurfaced cyborg character of the console cowboy. As the charged, multigendered, hallucinatory space collapses onto the personal physicality of the console cowboy, the intense tactility associated with such a reconceived and refigured body constitutes the seductive quality of what one might call the cybernetic act.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Will the real body please stand up?, 1991
Programming itself involves constant creation, interpretation, and reinterpretation of languages. To enter the discursive space of the program is to enter the space of a set of variables and operators to which the programmer assigns names. To enact naming is simultaneously to possess the power of, and to render harmless, the complex of desire and fear that charge the signifiers in such a discourse; to enact naming within the highly charged world of surfaces that is cyberspace is to appropriate the surfaces, to incorporate the surfaces into one's own. Penetration translates into envelopment. In other words, to enter cyberspace is to physically put on cyberspace. To become the cyborg, to put on the seductive and dangerous cybernetic space like a garment, is to put on the female... As the charged, multigendered, hallucinatory space collapses onto the personal physicality of the console cowboy, the intense tactility associated with such a reconceived and refigured body constitutes the seductive quality of what one might call the cybernetic act.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Will the real body please stand up?, 1991
Smoothness implies a seductive tactile quality that expresses one of the characteristics of cyborg envy: In the case of the computer, a desire literally to enter into such a discourse, to penetrate the smooth and relatively affectless surface of the electronic screen and enter the deep, complex, and tactile (individual) cybernetic space or (consensual) cyberspace within and beyond. Penetrating the screen involves a state change from the physical, biological space of the embodied viewer to the symbolic, metaphorical "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace; a space that is a locus of intense desire for refigured embodiment.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Will the real body please stand up?, 1991
"Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, driven far astray after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities [a area] he saw and whose minds [ noon or nomon] he learned, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades.''
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
... in some form, the constitutive process of a land-appropriation is found at the beginning of the history of every settled people, every commonwealth, every empire. This is true as well for the beginning of every historical epoch. Not only logically, but also historically, land-appropriation precedes the order that follows from it. It constitutes the original spatial order, the source of all further concrete order and all further law. It is the reproductive root in the normative order of history. All further property relations - communal or individual, public or private property, and all forms of possession and use in society and in international law - are derived from this radical title.
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
As long as world history remains open and fluid, as long as conditions are not fixed and ossified; in other words, as long as human beings and peoples have not only a past but also a future, a new nomos will arise in the perpetually new manifestations of worldhistorical events. Thus, for us, nomos is a matter of the fundamental process of apportioning space that is essential to every historical epoch - a matter of the structuredetermining convergence of order and orientation in the cohabitation of peoples on this now scientifically surveyed planet.
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
In its original sense, however, nomos is precisely the full immediacy of a legal power not mediated by laws; it is a constitutive historical event - an act of legitimacy, whereby the legality of a mere law first is made meaningful.
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
Not to lose the decisive connection between order and orientation, one should not translate nomos as law (in German, Gesetz), regulation, norm, or any simililar expression. Nomos comes from nemein - a [Greek] word that means both "to divide" and "to pasture." Thus, nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible - the initial measure and division of pastureland, i.e., the land-appropriation as well as the concrete order contained in it and following from it.... Nomos is the measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated; it is also the form of political, social, and religious order determined by this process. Here, measure, order, and form constitute a spatially concrete unity. The nomos by which a tribe, a retinue, or a people becomes settled, i.e., by which it becomes historically situated and turns a part of the earth's surface into the force-field of a particular order, becomes visible in the appropriation of land and in the founding of a city or a colony.
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
Only a completely different spatial order ended medieval international law in Europe. It arose with the centralized, spatially self-contained, continental European state that faced emperor and pope, as well as other, similarly organized neighboring states. ·unlimited free space for overseas land appropriations was open to all such states. The new legal titles characteristic of this new, state-centered international law, which were completely foreign to the Christian Middle Ages, were discovery and occupation. The new spatial order no longer was grounded in a secure orientation, but in a balance, an "equilibrium."
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
The Greek word for the first measure of all subsequent measures, for the first land-appropriation understood as the first partition and classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution, is nomos. This word, understood in its original spatial sense, is best suited to describe the fundamental process involved in the relation between order and orientation. Although in antiquity nomos already had lost its original meaning and had sunk to the level of a general term lacking any substance, i.e., a designation for any normative regulation or directive passed or decreed in whatever fashion, I want to restore to the word nomos its energy and majesty.
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
The antithesis of land and sea as an antithesis of diverse spatial orders is a modem phenomenon. It governed the structure of European international law only after the 17th and 1 8th centuries, i.e. , only after the oceans had opened up and the first global image of the earth had emerged.
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
The originally terrestrial world was altered in the Age of Discovery, when the earth first was encompassed and measured by the global consciousness of European peoples. This resulted in the first nomos of the earth. It was based on a particular relation between the spatial order of firm land and the spatial order of free sea, and for 400 years it supported a Eurocentric international law: the jus publicum Europaeum. In the 16th century, it was England that dared to take the step from a terrestrial to a maritime existence. A further step was taken with the industrial revolution, in the course of which the earth was newly conceived and newly measured. It was essential that the_ . industrial revolution occurred in the country that first had taken the step to a maritime existence. This is the point at which we can approach the mystery of the new nomos of the earth. Until now, only one author, Hegel, has come close to this arcanum [secret]. His words will serve to conclude this .corollary: "The principle of family life is dependence on the soil, on firm land, on terra firma. Similarly, the natural element for industry, animating its outward movement, is the sea."
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
Today, as a result of a new spatial phenomenon - the possibility of a domination of air space - firm land and free sea alike are being altered drastically, both in and of themselves and in relation to each other. Not only are the dimensions of territorial sovereignty changing, not only is the efficacy and velocity of the means of human power, transport, and information changing, but so, too, is the content of this effectivity. This always has a spatial dimension and always remains an important concept of international law for land appropriations and land-occupations, as well as for embargoes and blockades. Consequently, as a result of these developments, the relation between protection and obedience, and with it the structure of political and social power and their relation to other powers, is changing. We are on the threshold of a new stage of human spatial consciousness and global order.
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
the earth is bound to law in three ways. She contains law within herself, as a reward of labor; she manifests law upon herself, as fixed boundaries; and she sustains law above herself, as a public sign of order. Law is bound to the earth and related to the earth. This is what the poet means when he speaks of the infinitely just earth: justissima tellus. The sea knows no such apparent unity of space and law, of order and orientation. Certainly, the riches of the sea - fishes, pearls, and other things - likewise are won by the hard work of human labor, but not, like the fruits of the soil, according to an inner measure of sowing and reaping. On the sea, fields cannot be planted and firm lines cannot be engraved. Ships that sail across the sea leave no trace. "On the waves, there is nothing but waves."
Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 1950
Psychoses. Despite all the care exercised, there remains a strong possibility that somewhere in the course of a long space voyage a psychotic episode might occur, and this is one condition for which no servomechanism can be completely designed at the present time.
Clynes and Kline, Cyborgs and Space, 1960
The cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.
Clynes and Kline, Cyborgs and Space, 1960
What are some of the devices necessary for creating self-regulating man-machine systems? This self-regulation must function without the benefit of consciousness in order to cooperate with the body's own autonomous homeostatic controls. For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term "Cyborg."
Clynes and Kline, Cyborgs and Space, 1960
A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate m· threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. lip till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. (gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985
I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we arc living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scarv, new networks I have called the informatics of domination...
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985
THIS CHAPTER IS AN EFFORT to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of US politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialistfeminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985
"It is worth contemplating for a moment a very simple and commonplace instance of the act on of the price system to see what precisely it accomplishes. Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose-and it is very significant that it does not matter which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere, and that in consequence they must economize tin... The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.-brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process."
Friedrich Hayek, The use of knowledge in society, 1945
"On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions. The conditions which the solution of this optimum problem must satisfy have been fully worked out and can be stated best in mathematical form: put at their briefest, they are that the marginal rates of substitution between any two commodities or factors must be the same in all their different uses."
Friedrich Hayek, The use of knowledge in society, 1945
"Professor Schumpeter argues that the possibility of a rational calculation in the absence of markets for the factors of production follows for the theorist "from the elementary proposition that consumers in evaluating ('demanding') consumers' goods ipso facto also evaluate the means of production which enter into the production of these goods. Taken literally, this statement is simply untrue. The consumers do nothing of the kind. What Professor Schumpeter's "ipso facto" presumably means is that the valuation of the factors of production is... implied in, or follows necessarily from, the valuation of consumers' goods. But this, too, is not correct. Implication is a logical relationship which can be meaningfully asserted only of propositions simultaneously present to one and the same mind. It is evident, however, that the values of the factors of production do not depend solely on the valuation of the consumers' goods but also on the conditions of supply of the various factors of production. Only to a mind to which all these facts were simultaneously known would the answer necessarily follow from the facts given to it... That an economist of Professor Schumpeter's standing should thus have fallen into a trap which the ambiguity of the term "datum" sets to the unwary can hardly be explained as a simple error. It suggests rather than there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man's knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired."
Friedrich Hayek, The use of knowledge in society, 1945
"There is hardly anything that happens anywhere in the world that might not have an effect on the decision he ought to make. But he need not know of these events as such, nor of all their effects. It does not matter for him why at the particular moment more screws of one size than of another are wanted, why paper bags are more readily available than canvas bags, or why skilled labor, or particular machine tools, have for the moment become more difficult to acquire. All that is significant for him is how much more or less difficult to procure they have become compared with other things with which he is also concerned, or how much more or less urgently wanted are the alternative things he produces or uses...It is in this connection that what I have called the economic calculus proper helps us, at least by analogy, to see how this problem can be solved, and in fact is being solved, by the price system. "
Friedrich Hayek, The use of knowledge in society, 1945
"This is, perhaps, also the point where I should briefly mention the fact that the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision. It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place, and that the central planner will have to find some way or other in which the decisions depending on them can be left to the "man on the spot."
Friedrich Hayek, The use of knowledge in society, 1945
"This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces. And the economic calculus which we have developed to solve this logical problem, though an important step toward the solution of the economic problem of society, does not yet provide an answer to it. The reason for this is that the "data" from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society "given" to a single mind which could work out the implications, and can never be so given.The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources-if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality."
Friedrich Hayek, The use of knowledge in society, 1945
"Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others in that he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation. We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and special circumstances. To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody's skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques."
Friedrich Hayek, The use of knowledge in society, 1945
"The language of Milton is peculiarly distinguished by this species of variety. Not only does the substantive often precede the adjectives by which it is qualified, but it is frequently placed in their midst. In the first few lines of the invocation to Light, we meet with such examples as the following: "Offspring of heaven first-born. " "The rising world of waters dark and deep ." "Bright effluence of bright essence increate ." Now these inverted forms are not simply the fruits of a poetic license. They are the natural expressions of a freedom sanctioned by the intimate laws of thought, but for reasons of convenience not exercised in the ordinary use of language. "
George Boole, The laws of thought II, 1854
"We have seen that the symbols of Logic are subject to the special law, x2 = x. Now of the symbols of Number there are but two, viz. 0 and 1, which are subject to the same formal law. We know that 02 = 0, and that 12 = 1; and the equation x2 = x , considered as algebraic, has no other roots than 0 and 1. Hence, instead of determining the measure of formal agreement of the symbols of Logic with those of Number generally, it is more immediately suggested to us to compare them with symbols of quantity admitting only of the values 0 and 1. Let us conceive, then, of an Algebra in which the symbols x , y , z , etc. admit indifferently of the values 0 and 1, and of these values alone. The laws, the axioms, and the processes, of such an Algebra will be identical in their whole extent with the laws, the axioms, and the processes of an Algebra of Logic."
George Boole, The laws of thought II, 1854
Proposition I. All the operations of Language, as an instrument of reasoning, may be conducted by a system of signs composed of the following elements, viz.: 1st. Literal symbols, as x, y, &c., representing things as subjects of our conceptions. 2nd. Signs of operation, as +, −, Å~, standing for those operations of the mind by which the conceptions of things are combined or resolved so as to form new conceptions involving the same elements. 3rd. The sign of identity, =. And these symbols of Logic are in their use subject to definite laws, partly agreeing with and partly differing from the laws of the corresponding symbols in the science of Algebra.
George Boole, The laws of thought II, 1854
An organism is a mode of being that is exceptional in that there is, strictly speaking, no difference between its existence and its ideal, between its existence and its rule or norm... the ideal of the organism here is clear to everyone—it is the organism itself... The living organism is a type of being that is characterized by the constant presence and permanent influence of all its parts on each of them. What is proper to an organism is to live as a whole and not to be able to live except as a whole. This is made possible by the existence in the organism of a set of apparatuses or mechanisms of regulation whose effect consists precisely in the maintenance of this integrity, in the persistence of the organism as a whole.
Georges Canguilhem, Problem of Regulation in the organism and in society, 1989
An organism is a mode of being that is exceptional in that there is, strictly speaking, no difference between its existence and its ideal, between its existence and its rule or norm... the ideal of the organism here is clear to everyone—it is the organism itself.
Georges Canguilhem, Problem of Regulation in the organism and in society, 1989
Is the frequent comparison [assimilation ] of society to an organism—sometimes scholarly, sometimes popular—anything more than a metaphor?
Georges Canguilhem, Problem of Regulation in the organism and in society, 1989
One could say that in the organic order, the use of an organ, a device, an organism is patent; what is sometimes obscure, what is often obscure, is the nature of a disorder. From the social point of view, it seems on the contrary that abuse, disorder, and evil [mal] are clearer than normal circumstances... the same men who agree on a social ill part ways on the subject of reforms, so what appears to some as a remedy appears to others as a state worse than the ill itself, precisely because of the fact that the life of a society does not inhere in society itself.
Georges Canguilhem, Problem of Regulation in the organism and in society, 1989
Thus, society, being neither an individual nor a species, but a being of ambiguous genus, is as much a machine as it is a living thing; not being its own end, it simply represents a means, it is a tool. Consequently, not being an organism, society presupposes and even calls for regulations; there is no society without regulation, and there is no society without rules, yet in society, there is no self-regulation. There, regulation is always, if I may say so, something added on and always precarious.
Georges Canguilhem, Problem of Regulation in the organism and in society, 1989
What defines the organism is precisely that its purpose, in the form of its totality, is present to it and to all its parts. I apologize—I will perhaps scandalize you—but a society has no proper purpose; a society is a means; a society is more on the order of a machine or of a tool than on the order of an organism.
Georges Canguilhem, Problem of Regulation in the organism and in society, 1989
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Society of Control, 1992
It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services and what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus it is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner-state or private power-but coded figures deformable and transformable-of a single corporation that now has only stockholders.
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Society of Control, 1992
Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines.
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Society of Control, 1992
The different internments or spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. On the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point. This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at a level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision.
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Society of Control, 1992
The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest-the flock and each of its animals-but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold in as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies.
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Society of Control, 1992
The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines-levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects the factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production.
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Society of Control, 1992
(1) By a self-organizing system I mean that part of a system that eats energy and order from its environment. (2) There is a reality of the environment in a sense suggested by the acceptance of the principle of relativity. (3) The environment has structure.
Heinz von Foerster, "On Self-Organizing Systems, 1959
For instance, in a chromosome or a gene, you may have a complex molecule involving about 106 particles. Now, how valid is the thermodynamics of 106 particles or the theory which was originally developed for 1023 particles? If this reduction of about 1017 is valid in the sense that you can still talk about "temperature" there is one way you may talk about it. There is, of course, the approach to which you may switch, and that is information theory. However, there is one problem left and that is, you don't have a Boltzmann's constant in information theory and that is, alas, a major trouble.
Heinz von Foerster, "On Self-Organizing Systems, 1959
For instance, when I am teaching a class, and I want to have something remembered by the students particularly well, I usually come up with an error and they point out,"You made an error, sir." I say,"Oh yes, I made an error," but they remember this much better than if I would not have made an error. And that is why I am convinced that an environment with a reasonable amount of noise may not be too bad if you would really like to achieve learning.
Heinz von Foerster, "On Self-Organizing Systems, 1959
I propose to continue the use of the term "self-organizing system," whilst being aware of the fact that this term becomes meaningless, unless the system is in close contact with an environment, which posseses available energy and order , and with which our system is in a state of perpetual interaction, such that it somehow manages to "live" on the expenses of this environment.
Heinz von Foerster, "On Self-Organizing Systems, 1959
With this example, I hope, I have sufficiently illustrated the principle I called "order from noise," because no order was fed to the system, just cheap undirected energy; however, thanks to the little demons in the box, in the long run only those components of the noise were selected which contributed to the increase of order in the system. The occurrence of a mutation e.g. would be a pertinent analogy in the case of gametes being the systems of consideration.
Heinz von Foerster, "On Self-Organizing Systems, 1959
... no matter how direct the causal connections may be between the changes of state of the components and the state which they originate in the total system, the implications in terms of design alluded to by the notion of function are established by the observer and belong exclusively to his domain of description. Accordingly, since the relations implied in the notion of function are not constitutive of the organization of an autopoietic system, they cannot be used to explain its operation.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis: the organization of the living, 1974
A universe comes into being when a space is severed into two. A unity is defined. The description, invention and manipulation of unities is at the base of all scientific inquiry.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis: the organization of the living, 1974
An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis: the organization of the living, 1974
As is apparent from all that has been said, the key to the understanding of the biological phenomenology is the understanding of the organization of the individual. We have shown this organization to be the autopoietic organization.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis: the organization of the living, 1974
Autopoietic systems define the world in which they can exist in relation to their autopoiesis, and some interact recursively with this world through their descriptions, it being impossible for them to step out of this relative descriptive domain through descriptions. This demands an entirely new cognitive outlook: there is a space in which different phenomenologies can take place; one of these is autopoiesis; autopoiesis generates a phenomenological domain, this is cognition.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis: the organization of the living, 1974
It is presently obvious that scientific statements made about the universe acquire their validity through their operative effectiveness in their application in the domain where they pretend validity. Yet any observation, even that one which permits us to recognize the operational validity of a scientific statement, implies an epistemology, a body of conceptual explicit or implicit notions that determines the perspective of the observations and, hence, what can and what cannot be observed, what can and what cannot be validated by its operative effectiveness, what can and what cannot be explained by a given body of theoretical concepts.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis: the organization of the living, 1974
The relations that define a machine as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interactions and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity, constitute the organization of the machine. The actual relations which hold among the components which integrate a concrete machine in a given space, constitute its structure. The organization of a machine (or system) does not specify the properties of the components which realize the machine as a concrete system, it only specifies the relations which these must generate to constitute the machine or system as a unity. Therefore, the organization of a machine is independent of the properties of its components which can be any, and a given machine can be realized in many different manners by many different kinds of components.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis: the organization of the living, 1974
What about human societies, are they, as systems of coupled human beings, also biological systems? Or, in other words, to what extent do the relations which characterize a human society as a system constitutively depend on the autopoiesis of the individuals which integrate it? If human societies are biological systems the dynamics of a human society would be determined through the autopoiesis of its components. If human societies are not biological systems, the social dynamics would depend on laws and relations which are independent of the autopoiesis of the individuals which integrate them. The answer to this question is not trivial and requires considerations which in addition to their biological significance have ethical and political implications. This is obviously the case, because such an answer requires the characterization of the relations which define a society as a unity (a system), and whatever we may say biologically will apply in the domain of human interactions directly, either by use or abuse, as we saw it happen with evolutionary notions. In fact no position or view that has any relevance in the domain of human relations can be deemed free from ethical and political implications nor can a scientist consider himself alien to these implications.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis: the organization of the living, 1974
As has been said in various ways, men are noise narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of "programming themselves contingently" on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their "pre-programming." Men naturally speak redundant languages organized around objects and coherent actions and employing 20 to 60 elementary symbols. Computers "naturally" speak nonredundant languages, usually with only two elementary symbols and no inherent appreciation either of unitary objects or of coherent actions.
J.R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960
It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, 'thinking centers" that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.
J.R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960
Men will set the goals and supply the motivations, of course, at least in the early years. They will formulate hypotheses. They will ask questions. They will think of mechanisms, procedures, and models. They will remember that such-andsuch a person did some possibly relevant work on a topic of interest back in 1947, or at any rate shortly after World War II, and they will have an idea in what journals it might have been published. In general, they will make approximate and fallible, but leading, contributions, and they will define criteria and serve as evaluators, judging the contributions of the equipment and guiding the general line of thought.
J.R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960
The main goal is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways. Imagine trying, for example, to direct a battle with the aid of a computer on such a schedule as this. You formulate your problem today. Tomorrow you spend with a programmer. Next week the computer devotes 5 minutes to assembling your program and 47 seconds to calculating the answer to your problem. You get a sheet of paper 20 feet long, full of numbers that, instead of providing a final solution, only suggest a tactic that should be explored by simulation. Obviously, the battle would be over before the second step in its planning was begun. To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.
J.R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960
The main suggestion conveyed by the findings I just described is that the operations that fill most of the time allegedly devoted to technical thinking are operations that can be performed more effectively by machines than by men. Severe problems are posed by the fact that these operations have to be performed upon diverse variables and in unforeseen and continually changing sequences. If those problems can be solved in such a way as to create a symbiotic relation between a man and a fast, information-retrieval and data-processing machine, however, it, seems evident that the cooperative interaction would greatly improve the thinking process.
J.R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960
...assuming that life on any planet would be bound to use the fluid media-oceans, atmosphere, or bothas conveyor belts for raw materials and waste products, it occurred to me that some of the activity associated with concentrated entropy reduction within a living system might spill over into the conveyor-belt regions and alter their composition. The atmosphere of a life-bearing planet would thus become recognizably different from that of a dead planet.
James Lovelock, Gaia, 1979
At best, the literature [on life] read like a collection of expert reports, as if a group of scientists from another world had taken a television receiver home with them and had reported on it. The chemist said it was made of wood, glass, and metal. The physicist said it radiated heat and light. The engineer said the supporting wheels were too small and in the wrong place for it to run smoothly on a flat surface. But nobody said what it was.
James Lovelock, Gaia, 1979
Even the new science of cybernetics has not tackled the problem, although it is concerned with the mode of operation of all manner of systems from the simplicity of a valve-operated water tank to the complex visual control process which enables your eyes to scan this page. Much, indeed, has already been said and written about the cybernetics of artificial intelligence, but the question of defining real life in cybernetic terms remains unanswered and is seldom discussed.
James Lovelock, Gaia, 1979
I found myself asking some rather down-to- earth questions, such as, 'How can we be sure that the Martian way of life, if any, will reveal itself to tests based on Earth's life style?' To say nothing of more difficult questions, such as, 'What is life, and how should it be recognized?'
James Lovelock, Gaia, 1979
Our results convinced us that the only feasible explanation of the Earth's highly improbable atmosphere was that it was being manipulated on a day-to-day basis from the surface, and that the manipulator was life itself. The significant decrease in entropy-or, as a chemist would put it, the persistent state of disequilibrium among the atmospheric gases-was on its own clear proof of life's activity.
James Lovelock, Gaia, 1979
Some biologists may believe that the process of life is adequately described by some mathematical theorem of physics or cybernetics, and some physicists may assume that it is factually described in the recondite writings on molecular biology which one day he will find time to read. But the most probable cause of our closed minds on the subject is that we already have a very rapid, highly efficient life-recognition programme in our inherited set of instincts, our ·readonly' memory as it might be called in computer technology. Our recognition of living things, both animal and vegetable, is instant and automatic, and our fellow-creatures in the animal world appear to have the same facility.
James Lovelock, Gaia, 1979
The real bonus [of space travel] has been that for the first time in human history we have had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information gained from seeing from the outside our azure-green planet in all its global beauty has given rise to a whole new set of questions and answers. Similarly, thinking about life on Mars gave some of us a fresh standpoint from which to consider life on Earth and led us to formulate a new, or perhaps revive a very ancient, concept of the relationship between the Earth and its biosphere.
James Lovelock, Gaia, 1979
The result of this more single-minded approach was the development of the hypothesis that the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts... Disequilibria on this scale suggest that the atmosphere is not merely a biological product, but more probably a biological construction: not living, but like a cat's fur, a bird's feathers, or the paper of a wasp's nest, an extension of a living system designed to maintain a chosen environment.
James Lovelock, Gaia, 1979
We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback. or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet. The maintenance of relatively constant conditions by active control may be conveniently described by the term 'homoeostasis'.
James Lovelock, Gaia, 1979
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather... Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
John Perry Barlow, A declaration of the independence of cyberspace, 1996
"More money is withdrawn from circulation at the finish than was thrown into it at the start. The cotton that was bought for £100 is perhaps resold for £100 + £10 or £110. The exact form of this process is therefore M-C-M', where M' = M + D M = the original sum advanced, plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call "surplus-value." The value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains intact while in circulation, but adds to itself a surplus-value or expands itself. It is this movement that converts it into capital. "
Karl Marx, Capital, 1867
"Nay, more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into private relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value; as the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110. "
Karl Marx, Capital, 1867
"The independent form, i.e., the money-form, which the value of commodities assumes in the case of simple circulation, serves only one purpose, namely, their exchange, and vanishes in the final result of the movement. On the other hand, in the circulation M-C-M, both the money and the commodity represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the money its general mode, and the commodity its particular, or, so to say, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form to the other without thereby becoming lost, and thus assumes an automatically active character [und verwandelt sich so in ein automatisches Subjekt]. If now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding value successively assumes in the course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions: Capital is money: Capital is commodities.13 In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs."
Karl Marx, Capital, 1867
"The simplest form of the circulation of commodities is C-M-C, the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy. But alongside of this form we find another specifically different form: M-C-M, the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the latter manner is thereby transformed into, becomes capital, and is already potentially capital. "
Karl Marx, Capital, 1867
Focusing on the Pattern now was like shifting to view another night sky within his own head. A mental universe. Other Patternists were seen as points of light constantly changing in shape, color, and size, reacting as individual Patternists changed their thoughts, their emotions, their actions. When a Patternist died, a point of light blinked out. Teray, seemingly bodiless, only a point of light himself in this mental universe, discovered that he could change his point of view without seeming to move. He was suddenly able to see the members of the Pattern not as starlike points of light but as luminescent threads. He could see where the threads wound together into slender cords, into ropes, into great cables. He could see where the cables joined, where they coiled and twisted together to form a vast sphere of brilliance, a core of light that was like a sun formed of many suns. That core where all the people came together was Rayal. Because Teray was doing something he had never done before, he first had difficulty understanding that the sphere of light was not a thing that he had to travel to, but a thing that he was a part of. He could not travel along the thread of himself. He was that thread. Or at best, that thread was a kind of mental limb, a mental hand that Teray discovered possessed a strong instinctive ability to grasp and hold. Teray grasped. And instantly, he was grasped.
Octavia Butler, Patternmaster, 1976
He could see its beauty, its perfection, even more clearly now. What was it the Clayarks called themselves? Sphinxes. Creatures out of ancient mythology, lion-bodied, human-headed. The description was not really accurate. The Clayarks were furless and tailless, and they did possess hands. But they were much more sphinxes—creatures who were at least partly human—than they were the animals Teray had always considered them.
Octavia Butler, Patternmaster, 1976
It was the disease again, blocking the way. A disease that protected its carriers and killed their enemies. The disease of Clay's Ark, brought back hundreds of years before, so the old records said, by the only starship ever to leave Earth and then return. A starship. A mute contrivance that had supposedly ended the reign of the mutes over the Earth they had sought to leave. That part of history had always held a grim fascination for Teray. His own race had been small then, scattered, disunited, a mere offshoot of the mutes. His people had been carefully bred for mental strength— bred by one of their own kind who happened to have been born with as much mental strength as he needed. One whose specialty had not been healing, teaching, creating art, or any of the ordinary talents. The Founder's specialty had been living. He had lived for thousands of years, breeding, building the people who were to become Patternists. Finally, he had been killed by one of his own daughters—she who first created and held a Pattern.
Octavia Butler, Patternmaster, 1976
Which do you prefer, Amber, really?" She did not pretend to misunderstand him. "I'll tell you," she said softly. "But you won't like it." He looked away from her. "I asked for the truth. Whether I like it or not, I have to know." "Already?" she whispered. He pretended not to hear. "When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women," she said. "And when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men." "You mean you haven't made up your mind yet." "I mean exactly what I said. I told you you wouldn't like it. Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other.
Octavia Butler, Patternmaster, 1976
At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age: the Californian Ideology. This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA.
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The californian ideology, 1955
The fear of the rebellious 'underclass' has now corrupted the most fundamental tenet of the Californian Ideology: its belief in the emancipatory potentiality of the new information technologies. While the proponents of the electronic agora and the electronic marketplace promise to liberate individuals from the hierarchies of the state and private monopolies, the social polarisation of American society is bringing forth a more oppressive vision of the digital future. The technologies of freedom are turning into the machines of dominance.
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The californian ideology, 1955
"And because all great circles intersect, in this language the word for great circle is always ÔX. It carries the information right in the word. Just like bus stop or foxhole carry information in English that la gare or le terrier-terrier-comparable words in french-lack. 'Great circle' carries some information with it, but not the right information to get us out of the jam we're in. We have to go to another language in order to think about the problem clearly without going through all sorts of roundabout paths for the proper aspects of what we want to deal with. "What language is this?" Asked Calli. "I don't know its real name. For now it's called Babel-17. From what little I know about it already, most of its words carry more information about the things they refer to than any four or five languages I know put together - and in less space."
Samuel R. Delaney, babel 17, 1966
"First of all, General," she was saying, "Babel-17 isn't a code. His mind skidded back to the subject and arrived teetering. "Not a code? But I thought Cryptography had at least established -" ... "You mean we've just been trying to decipher a lot of nonsense?" "It's not a code," she repeated. "It's a language." ... "[codes] have this in common: once you find the key, you just plug it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own internal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with words that span various spectra of meaning. There is no key you can plug in to unlock the exact meaning."
Samuel R. Delaney, babel 17, 1966
"Message from Rydra Wong, delivered verbatim, noncomprehension of its significance." Suddenly the face took on its familiar animation. Her hands grasped each other, and she leaned slightly forward: "Mocky, am I glad you got here. I can't sustain this very long, so here goes. Babel-17 is more or less like Onoff, Algol, Fortran."
Samuel R. Delaney, babel 17, 1966
"You can program a computer to make mistakes, and you do it not by crossing wires, but my manipulating the "language" you teach it to "think" in. The lack of an "I" precludes any self-critical process. In fact it cuts out any awareness of the symbolic process at all—which is the way we distinguish between reality and our expression of reality... Chimpanzees ... are physically quite coordinated enough to learn to drive cars, and smart enough to distinguish between red and green lights. ... [But] they don't have the symbolic process. For them, red is stop, green is go.
Samuel R. Delaney, babel 17, 1966
It is a primary aim of industrial cybernetics to harness this ability of a system to teach itself optimum behaviour. To do it, however, we must know how to design the system in the first place as a machine-for-teaching-itself. There must be exactly the right flow of information in the right places; rich interconnectivity; facilities for the growth of feedbacks and many-one transformation circuits; and so on. The exceedingly complex system must be designed as a black Box.
Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and Management, 1960
Probably the best example of an industrial system of this kind [exceedingly complex probabilistic] is the Company itself. This always seems to me very much like a cross between the first two examples. The Company is certainly not alive, but it has to behave very much like a living organism. It is essential to the Company that it develops techniques for survival in a changing environment: it must adapt itself to its economic, commercial, social and political surroundings, and it must learn from experience.
Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and Management, 1960
He controlled more than raw data now; if he could master them, the continent's computers could process this avalanche, much the way parts of the human brain preprocess their input. More seconds passed, but now with a sense of time, as he struggled to distribute his very consciousness through the System. Then it was over, and he had control once more. But things would never be the same: the human that had been Mr. Slippery was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become. There simply was more there than before. No sparrow could fall without his knowledge, via air traffic control; no check could be cashed without his noticing over the bank communication net. More than three hundred million lives swept before what his senses had become... Every ship in the seas, every aircraft now making for safe landing, every one of the loans, the payments, the meals of an entire race registered clearly on some part of his consciousness. With perception came power; almost everything he saw, he could alter, destroy, or enhance. By the analogical rules of the covens, there was only one valid word for themselves in their present state: they were gods.
Vernor Vinge, True Names, 1981
In the once-upon-a-time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for—the stories go—once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer's true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As times passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names...
Vernor Vinge, True Names, 1981
