>by Ian O. Angell
>
>Professor of Computer Science, London School of Economics
>Personal advisor to Ernst Stavro Blofeld
Ernst Stavro Blofeld? It seems to me that with this allusion Angell is
telegraphing rather broadly that THIS IS SATIRE. Blofeld is a fictional
character, Angell can only be playing the role of his "personal advisor".
Angell's point, I suppose, is that there is a heap of unexamined and
contradictory nonsense in the hype about the information age and new global
corporate economy but that if you did take the hype at face value you would
end up with a dystopia not a utopia.
Besides alluding to Aldous Huxley and Ian Fleming and quoting Nietzsche,
Angell quotes Baudelaire, Shaw and Machiavelli -- altogether an eclectic but
formidable stable of literary sources. One may assume that someone with such
an apparent literary education is intimately familiar with satire in general
and Jonathan Swift in particular.
Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
