Crime & Puzzlement [7/8]
- From
- Max Belankov (2:5054/2.31)
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- All ()
- Date
- 1996-08-29T23:11Z
- Area
- PERM.LANGUAGE
Hello All!
=== Cut ===
******
The Fear of White Noise
"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity."
-- Sigmund Freud,
appearing to me in a dream
I'm a member of that half of the human race which is inclined to
divide the human race into two kinds of people. My dividing line
runs between the people who crave certainty and the people who
trust chance.
You can draw this one a number of ways, of course, like Control vs.
Serendipity, Order vs. Chaos, Hard answers vs. Silly questions, or
Newton, Descartes & Aquinas vs. Heisenberg, Mandelbrot & the
Dalai Lama. Etc.
Large organizations and their drones huddle on one end of my scale,
busily trying to impose predictable homogeneity on messy
circumstance. On the other end, free-lancers and ne'er-do-wells
cavort about, getting by on luck if they get by at all.
However you cast these poles, it comes down to the difference
between those who see life as a struggle against cosmic peril and
human infamy and those who believe, without any hard evidence,
that the universe is actually on our side. Fear vs. Faith.
I am of the latter group. Along with Gandhi and Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm, I believe that other human beings will quite
consistently merit my trust if I'm not doing something which scares
them or makes them feel bad about themselves. In other words, the
best defense is a good way to get hurt.
In spite of the fact that this system works very reliably for me and my
kind, I find we are increasingly in the minority. More and more of
our neighbors live in armed compounds. Alarms blare continuously.
Potentially happy people give their lives over to the corporate state as
though the world were so dangerous outside its veil of collective
immunity that they have no choice.
I have a number of theories as to why this is happening. One has to
do with the opening of Cyberspace. As a result of this development,
humanity is now undergoing the most profound transformation of its
history. Coming into the Virtual World, we inhabit Information.
Indeed, we become Information. Thought is embodied and the Flesh
is made Word. It's weird as hell.
Beginning with the invention of the telegraph and extending through
television into Virtual Reality, we have been, for a over a century,
experiencing a terrifying erosion in our sense of both body and place.
As we begin to realize the enormity of what is happening to us, all
but the most courageous have gotten scared.
And everyone, regardless of his psychic resilience, feels this
overwhelming sense of strangeness. The world, once so certain and
tangible and legally precise, has become an infinite layering of
opinions, perceptions, litigation, camera-angles, data, white noise,
and, most of all, ambiguities. Those of us who are of the fearful
persuasion do not like ambiguities.
Indeed, if one were a little jumpy to start with, he may now be fairly
humming with nameless dread. Since no one likes his dread to be
nameless, the first order of business is to find it some names.
For a long time here in the United States, Communism provided a
kind of catch-all bogeyman. Marx, Stalin and Mao summoned forth
such a spectre that, to many Americans, annihilation of all life was
preferable to the human portion's becoming Communist. But as Big
Red wizened and lost his teeth, we began to cast about for a
replacement.
Finding none of sufficient individual horror, we have draped a
number of objects with the old black bunting which once shrouded
the Kremlin. Our current spooks are terrorists, child abductors,
AIDS, and the underclass. I would say drugs, but anyone who thinks
that the War on Drugs is not actually the War on the Underclass
hasn't been paying close enough attention.
There are a couple of problems with these Four Horsemen. For one
thing, they aren't actually very dangerous. For example, only 7
Americans died in worldwide terrorist attacks in 1987. Fewer than 10
(out of about 70 million) children are abducted by strangers in the
U.S. each year. Your chances of getting AIDS if you are neither gay
nor a hemophiliac nor a junkie are considerably less than your
chances of getting killed by lightning while golfing. The underclass is
dangerous, of course, but only, with very few exceptions, if you are a
member of it.
The other problem with these perils is that they are all physical. If we
are entering into a world in which no one has a body, physical threats
begin to lose their sting.
And now I come to the point of this screed: The perfect bogeyman
for Modern Times is the Cyberpunk! He is so smart he makes you
feel even more stupid than you usually do. He knows this complex
country in which you're perpetually lost. He understands the value
of things you can't conceptualize long enough to cash in on. He is the
one-eyed man in the Country of the Blind.
>[To /44: это многое объясняет... -- MB]
In a world where you and your wealth consist of nothing but beeps
and boops of micro-voltage, he can steal all your assets in
nanoseconds and then make you disappear.
He can even reach back out of his haunted mists and kill you
physically. Among the justifications for Operation Sun Devil was
this chilling tidbit:
"Hackers had the ability to access and review the files of hospital patients.
Furthermore, they could have added, deleted, or altered vital patient
information, possibly causing life- threatening situations."
Perhaps the most frightening thing about the Cyberpunk is the
danger he presents to The Institution, whether corporate or
governmental. If you are frightened you have almost certainly taken
shelter by now in one of these collective organisms, so the very last
thing you want is something which can endanger your heretofore
unassailable hive.
And make no mistake, crackers will become to bureaucratic bodies
what viruses presently are to human bodies. Thus, Operation Sun
Devil can be seen as the first of many waves of organizational
immune response to this new antigen. Agent Baxter was a T-cell.
Fortunately, he didn't know that himself and I was very careful not to
show him my own antigenic tendencies.
I think that herein lies the way out of what might otherwise become
an Armageddon between the control freaks and the neo-hip. Those
who are comfortable with these disorienting changes must do
everything in our power to convey that comfort to others. In other
words, we must share our sense of hope and opportunity with those
who feel that in Cyberspace they will be obsolete eunuchs for sure.
It's a tall order. But, my silicon brothers, our self-interest is strong. If
we come on as witches, they will burn us. If we volunteer to guide
them gently into its new lands, the Virtual World might be a more
amiable place for all of us than this one has been.
Of course, we may also have to fight.
=== Cut ===
With best wishes,
Max
Kime: Очень тpудно что-либо пpедвидеть, особенно на будущее.
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* Origin: Кто к нам с чем -- тот оттого и того... (2:5054/2.31)