We look upon computing as ubiquitous and all-encompassing, which of course it is.
But this was preceded by the mainframe, very big, very rare, with the authority of science and its priesthood of programmers. Each unit confined to a building all of its own. More representative of bureaucratic institutional control than capital, which came later. In the sixties mainframes were decried as a major symbol of the modern, dystopic state. Relative to which personal computers (coming in the wake of the Whole Earth "ecology") were seen as a force of liberation. As Apple said, "Think Different!" -- which as corporate utopist propaganda might even have been half sincere, at a time when Microsoft was the devil incarnate. Today, Microsoft passes as a benign (?) grandfather and Apple says "Think Apple!" Joe. > Le 4 mars 2019 à 22:28, Morlock Elloi <morlockel...@gmail.com> a écrit : > > Not to sound skeptical, but is there another way of viewing it? > > The new Pretorian Guard, a guild tending the computing machinery for the > pedestrian cause of concentrating control tools of the capital, needed its > mythology, and cyberpunk was born. Historically speaking, there is no > evidence of spontaneity in the recent cultural, ehm, movements: > > https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.PDF > > https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/finks-by-joel-whitney/ > > > >> *As a cyberpunk ideologue, I’m touched that this subject would come up on >> nettime. As it happens, I know where all the cyberpunks are. At the >> moment, they’re in London, San Francisco, Vancouver, Providence, Austin, >> Raleigh, Los Gatos, Seattle, and the village of Nottingham, New Hampshire. > > > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
