I wrote this to a friend but FW came into it as I wrote. It occurred
to me that it might not be very much OT here. I haven't much
re-edited it for FW except to obfuscate DG's name. DG is a digital
tech wizard, friend of a friend whom I've only met once long ago.
This exchange relates to a recent happenstance email encounter.
---
Hi B --
Did you send my comment on his remark to [DG]?
(Recap:)
dg> As a race, we are about to give up the, shall we say, self
dg> sufficiency of what it was that got us here. There is so much to
dg> say, yet so much ambiguity in a future that a technologic positive
dg> feedback loop can bring us. Or maybe not just us. How would we
dg> know once we cross the threshold or singularity or whatever you
dg> want to call it?
We approach the threshold as the Monstrous Blobs grow and exfoliate
and the vast space in which they float is gradually reduced to mere
interstices between them. We cross the threshold when the interstices
between the Monstrous Blobs become discontinuous. Regrettably, neither
we, the motes of biomass in the interstices nor they, those within the
Monstrous Blobs, can have a sufficiently global view to determine just
when that has happened.
I think it has already happened. Telecom infotech has hastened it. I
think I may have to write a whole rant on this.
---
[Later]
I still haven't written the rant but I may yet. This is on topic to
the FutureWork mailing list I'm on, as well.
Some of William Gibson's characters had this notion of "when it
changed". That cusp in Neuromancer was very science-fictiony. In the
Bridge trilogy, the change at the end of the last book was
science-fictiony, too. But a couple of guys with special abilities
grasped that it had "all changed" once before, agreed that it was some
time in 1911, that the death of Pierre Curie under the wheels of a
horse-drawn wagon in 1906 was somehow a trigger. When it all
changed....
My FutureWork pals haven't got the "when it all changed" notion but I
infer from their remarks (or short essays) that they intuit such a
thing. Candidate loci are Nixon's repeal of Breton Woods, Reagan's
firing of the air traffic controllers, repeal of Glass-Steagall under
Clinton and others. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is
the most recent one.
If it has "all changed", one (or all) of those may have been triggers,
releasers, what you may call it, but "when it all changed" has to do
with the interstices. Too late at night to do a real rant now but
here's an example:
Gas stations.
Oil companies are Blobs, have been during my lifetime. But gas
stations were interstitial -- or at least an interface with the
interstitial. Really dumb guys could pump gas, do oil change and
lube, change tires. Smart guys with little education could be really
good mechanics. Guys of moderate or even mediocre abilities could run
a gas station biz. Ex-cons could work in gas stations. Gas stations,
certainly rural ones and even many urban ones, were social foci,
technology foci. All of this was, in a sense, infrastructure for
people who lived in the interstices.
Now there are no gas stations under that rubric. There are self-serve
pumps, usually with an attached "convenience" store, wholly owned by a
Blob oil company and run by a franchisee who operates out of a ring
binder. Yes, there's a clerk or three but there's no pride, no
texture, no fabric to being a minwage clerk. I once worked for half a
year next to a genuine retard. He was a whiz grease man and took pride
in his work. He wouldn't have been able to do clerking right and
wouldn't have taken any pride in it if he had.
So the oilco Blobs have squeezed together, squeezed one part of the
interstitial landscape almost out of existence. There are still a few
stand-alone repair shops, some as adjuncts to junk yards, but they're
now more or less isolated examples. This particular kind of interstix
has become a thinly distributed scattering of discontinuous cells.
This has all happened since I worked as a mechanic in Amherst [Mass.].
Just one example. If you think of gas stations as a paradigm, you can
spot other instances where interstices that once propagated social
fluid have been squeezed into discontinuous cells of relative stasis.
Your words for the day. Send them to [DG] if you're inclined.
-m
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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