"Those not busy being born are busy dying" The Anarchives Volume 2 Issue 23 The Anarchives Published By The Anarchives The Anarchy Organization The Anarchives tao@lglobal.com Send your e-mail address to get on the list Spread The Word Pass This On... --/\-- The / / \ \ Central Nervous ---|--/----\--|--- System \/ \/ /\______/\ by Jesse Hirsh -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ -~ "Northern Telecom was born and reared in the midst of revolution.... ...After 100 years of innovation, the telecommunications industry has achieved its potential as an enabler, energizer, and liberating force. Today, it's an industry at the hub of the political, economic, and social structure of global society, propelling momentous change."1 These are the words of the man who leads one of the largest companies in the world. He speaks of his corporation as a vanguard force, rallying support and investment for the revolution. "Networks - wireless, enterprise, switching, and broadband - are the foundation of our future."2 Northern Telecom, a subsidiary of Bell Canada Enterprises, boasts of possesing paradigm technology. As their stock, traded globally, continues to skyrocket, they continue to build the frontier of the information revolution. "The latest cycles began in the years following the Second World War, when the telecommunications industry spearheaded research that brought such key advances as the transistor and the laser. Over the last forty years, the computer industry has ridden the transistor to dominance in the information economy. New laser-based breakthroughs in fiber optics, however, now promise to turn the tide again toward telephony. While the computer will still be king, the network will be computer."3 The metaphor of the network becomes a symbol of change, a new symbol of order and organization. This paper will analyze the network, as media, as technology, as mind, and as an embodiment of political change. Following Marshall McLuhan's idea of 'the medium as the message', the message of the network will be examined, and as a result, a startling structure of power and control is revealed. This paper draws upon a myriad of thinkers in depicting technological change that is also political empowerment. The relationship between propaganda and technology reveals a relationship between institutions and elites. In examining the technology of networks, propaganda becomes a part of the ground, defining reality in a media environment. "Over the next decade, digital networks will provide a new central nervous system for the world economy. Transformed by convergence and computerization, TV will burst forth in a new flowering of choice and empowerment."4 These quotes from Monty and Gilder are from an obvious piece of propaganda distributed by Northern Telecom to technology writers. In examining propaganda its important to go right to the horses mouth to hear what the official 'words' are. Gilder has been able to not only equate king with computer, computer with network, but also network with central nervous system. So will the central nervous system be king? Certainly the brain plays a predominant role in a future of media that are extensions of the psyche: virtual reality, networked intelligence, artificial intelligence. "As man succeeds in translating his central nervous system into electronic circuitry, he stands on the threshold of outering his consciousness into the computer."5 As an extension of the brain, computers begin to 'process information' much the same way the brain did, often in place of human brains. As computers become networked, they handle many media and take on diverse and dynamic roles, in essence duplicating the human-neurological system. Mundane human tasks can be accomplished by machines, freeing up humans for other things. At least this is the rationale behind the technological drive of automation. What does not get taken into account however, is the cost of externalizing one's central nervous system. For example, what role does the central nervous system play within our biological order. "Physiologically, the central nervous system, that electric network that co-ordinates the various media of our sense, plays the chief role. Whatever threatens its function must be contained, localized, or cut off, even to the total removal of the offending organ. The function of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs for the central nervous system, is to act as buffers against sudden variations of stimulus in the physical and social environment. Sudden social failure or shame is a shock that some may 'take to heart' or that may cause muscular disturbance in general, signalling for the person to withdraw from the threatening situation."6 Our central nervous systems control the institution, or even leviathan, that is our person. Our bodies function according to certain criteria, determined and evaluated by our brain. We act and react according to balances of chemicals within our heads. When our conscious and unconscious exist externally, our decision-making processes are also externalized. The need and relevance of democracy ensures our co-habitation. "The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy."7 Political organization has always operated according to the politics of exclusion and the preservation of special interests. Modern democracy is a distorted mirror of elite theatre. "Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive."8 Democracy, as a political form of mass indoctrination coupled with elite domination, serves as a theatrical and systemic function, diverting attention from real technical power. "Not only is propaganda itself a technique, it is also an indispensable condition for the development of technical progress and the establishment of a technological civilization."9 The technological change hurtles forth on the wings of profit, progress, and utopia. A whole society submersed in a total media environment become obsessed with the benefits of technological change. With the outering of the conscious, the externalization of the central nervous system, we see ourselves in everything. "The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image."10 Instead of closing our eyes at night to dream of our collective unconscious, we now walk the street in perpetual day, our sexual desires posted on factory walls. We our surrounded by images of ourselves, telling us that consumption will solve our shortcomings, and Coca-Cola will save the planet. "In short, the major media - particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow - are corporations 'selling' privileged audiences to other businesses. It would hardly come as a surprise if the picture of the world they present were to reflect the perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers, and the product. Concentration of ownership of the media is high and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe another, and those who fail to conform will tend to be weeded out by familiar mechanisms."11 Consumer loyalties characterize the tribes of the global village. In the information age we are categorized according to purchasing patterns. What was promised as an empowerment of choice, becomes the loss of voice, and hence monotony of choice. The black market becomes a competing reality. "Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as death squads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps."12 As the Information revolution continues to accelerate, the degree to which all humans live in the total media environment increases exponentially. Greater amounts of human communication become mediated by electronic media. Communications defines the structure of the empire as the information is staple. The role of propaganda within a technological regime becomes paramount as the technological change is equated with social advancement. "Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world. Propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of a regime (it is that also) than the effect of a technological society that embraces the entire man and tends to be a completely integrated society."13 Propaganda and technology work hand in hand fortifying a communications empire that maintains a techno-political elite. "Thus all modern propaganda profits from the structure of the mass, but exploits the individual's need for self-affirmation; and the two actions must be conducted jointly, simultaneously. Of course this operation is greatly facilitated by the existence of modern mass media of communication , which have precisely this remarkable effect of reaching the whole crowd all at once, and yet reaching each one in that crowd. Readers of the evening paper, radio listeners, movie or TV viewers certainly constitute a mass that has an organic existence, although it is diffused and not assembled at one point. These individuals are moved by the same motives, receive the same impulses and impressions, find themselves focused on the same centres of interest, experience the same feelings, have generally the same order of reactions and ideas, participate in the same myths- and all this at the same time: what we have here is really a psychological, if not a biological mass."14 The current media environment is an arena of transformation, as a collective conscious is constructed by various industries of information. "Literal censorship barely exists in the United States, but thought control is a flourishing industry, indeed an indispensable one in a society based on the principle of elite decision, public endorsement or passivity."15 Contemporary agents of social control are saturated into the institutional framework of the current regime. The empire of communications supports all extensions of the empire, enabling global exploitation with a paid-up phone bill. "Especially significant is the fact that the 'information' paradigm belongs to a certain kind of political economy; a paradigm which for all its democratic 'user friendly,' 'people oriented' wrappings has nothing to do with either democracy or users, but rather with very powerful economic and political institutions which are becoming ever more powerful ever more undemocratic while making us believe the opposite." 16 While public institutions are slashed out of existence, and unemployment skyrockets, communication and financial corporations report record profits. The most obvious example is American Telephone & Telegraph, who with billions in profits and stock prices soaring, recently announced a massive 'restructuring' in the interests of international competition. "AT&T Corp.'s massive cutbacks mark the start of an era of unprecedented upheaval in telecommunications - a time of thousands of layoffs, furious competition and a likely frenzy of mergers and alliances."17 Yet in the face of this dramatic centralization and empowerment of an even smaller elite, arguments of decentralization abound. Corporate soothsayers praise the name of McLuhan, citing the 'media messiah' as the purveyor of decentralization. "Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes."18 For all the things McLuhan had to contribute towards our understanding of media, it's ironic that decentralization continues to be emphasized by contemporaries. "Catholic humanism allowed him to subordinate and forget the question of the private appropriation of technology. And what was, in the final instance, tragic and not comic about his intellectual fate was simply this: it was precisely the control over the speed, dissemination, and implanting of new technologies by the corporate commands centres of North America which would subvert the very possibility of an age of creative freedom."19 It is the decentralization of electricity that is the narcissistic trance that hypnotizes the user to ignore the centralization of capital. Harold Innis accurately addresses the centralizing and decentralizing effects of media: "Concentration on a medium of communication implies a bias in the cultural development of the civilization concerned either towards an emphasis on space and political organization or towards an emphasis on time and religious organization. Introduction of a second medium tends to check the bias of the first and to create conditions suited to the growth of empire."20 Multi-media inherently fulfil the balance of biases described by Innis. The new media of electronic delivery enable the decentralized accessibility of the information, but the reliance on old media such as the printed word and visual content of television enforce traditional reliance on an authority. Centralized ownership of the media ensure that although proliferation of media may be decentralized, the content of the media will remain dependent upon authoritative sources. "One important characteristic of the information age is its non-hierarchical constitution of power. The old pyramid hiearchy has been replaced with a kind of capillary power which is even more insidious than that of the King or dictator, precisely because it operates at the more abstract level of electronics and computers. The new move towards non-hierarchical management is a product of information age power. Yet human beings have never been so controlled, so manipulated, as they are now."21 As responsible government is dismantled due to financial considerations, authority shifts to the ethereal state of corporate consciousness. What was once the public sphere, or the public conscious, has now been privatized. The 'private' sector, the 'private' mind becomes the main decision making body. The methods of control described in this paper are used to maintain elite domination, previously public and national, now increasingly private and international. "Briefly, the American upper class became national in scope in the last half of the nineteenth century, coinciding with the rise of the national corporate economy which was its economic base and the national transportation-communication network which made its cohesiveness possible."22 With the laying of the global information infrastructure, the national elite abandons its traditional institutions to jockey for positions among the emerging global elite. "'The growth of the Executive branch of the government, with its agencies that patrol the complex economy, does note mean merely the 'enlargement of government' as some sort of autonomous bureaucracy: it has meant the ascendancy of the corporation's man as a political eminence.'"23 The philosophy of corporate organization has become imbedded within the Information Revolution, we witness the maturation of corporate governance. Nation states have been supplanted by the international corporate state. The corporate state is founded upon military organization, subsidized by military expansion, and supported by military order. The military order itself has been privatized and incorporated into the corporate order. All as a process of technological change initiated by Information technology. The geographic allocation of the military is no longer necessary in the global village when any military force can be deployed anywhere, real, virtual, or nuclear. The C.E.O. of a large conglomerate is a four star general of industry, and generals from the military sit on the board. The military-industrial complex was a metaphor for the marriage of military and corporate organization. Now we witness the military-industrial-biological, a metaphor for the union of human and machine. "In McLuhan's estimation, "technology is part of our bodies"; and to the extent that corporations acquire private control over the electronic media then we have, in effect, 'leased out' our eyes, ears, fingers, legs, and the brain itself to an exterior power. In the electronic age, this era of collective and integral consciousness, those with control of technological media are allowed 'to play the strings of our nerves in public'. The body is fully externalized, and exposed, in the interstices of the technological sensorium."24 As we all become information, subject to analysis on information networks, we sacrifice what little autonomy our literate culture afforded us. The power that resides within computerized information networks is alarming, and arguably uncomprehendable. Certainly, in light of the evidence presented in this paper, the beneficiaries of the current technological change are not 'we the people'. In fact the most alarming conclusion is that people will not be the end beneficiaries at all. Technology has accelerated past the efforts of humanity and has appropriated our autonomy for its own. "Neural networks are essentially statistical devices for inductive inference. Their strengths (and weaknesses) accrue from the fact that they need no a prior assumptions of models and from their capability to infer non-linear underlying relationships."25 In layterms, neural networks can take incredible amounts of input, such as global market data, or the globe itself reduced to data, then from this amass of input, decipher and identify patterns, take action in the face of such recognition, and learn from its own actions. Modelled after the human brain, neural networks are based upon analogue technology instead of digital, measuring rates of exchange rather than the content of the information, combining pattern recognition with system memory. A neural network, acting as a central nervous system, can be connected to a global information network, and the information network will be absorbed into the decision making properties of the neural network. Thus the flourishing industries of thought control, as described by Chomsky, can be co-ordinated by one grand machine. In the face of such a dystopic vision of the future, the reader and likewise the author, are left with a bleak sense of futility. Yet it is important to remember that it is always darkest before the dawn. History itself is built upon elite domination of political, social, and economic society. What sets the present apart from the past, certainly the recent past, is the knowledge of existing political relations. "Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody."26 Resisting a technological regime that is based upon the domination of the psyche is indeed a difficult task. The current technological change is at both political and religious, fulfilling the balancing properties described by Innis. Resistance and revolution must begin by addressing the essence of the current regime, that being the focus on technology itself. In resisting the automation of our bodies, and the machination of our souls, humanity must shift the unconscious emphasis on technology, to a collective emphasis on ecology. This shift must be in a cultural, political, economic, and social manner, re-examining the basic assumptions of our human relations. As the medium is the message we must examine ourselves as media, in an effort to determine our own messages. What will then occur is a mass healing and a mass therapy of coming to grips with a culture that has been removed from awareness by runaway technology. With awareness of the present, maybe we can hack ourselves a future, outside of the technological paradigm that consumes all within the metamorphosis of its change. Notes: 1 John C. Monty, CEO Northern Telecom, from: World Of Networks; Northern Telecom 1995 (Corporate Communications Department) 2 John C. Monty 3 George Gilder, From Nortel, World Of Networks 4 George Gilder, NorTel 5 McLuhan, Marshall & Powers, Bruce; The Global Village; Oxford University Press, New York 1989, pp. 94 6 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, Oxford University, 1964 New York, pp. 43 7 McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 47 8 Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, Anansi House, 1991, Toronto, pp. 3 9 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1961 pp. x 10 McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 41] 11 Chomsky, Neccesary Illusions, pp. 7 12 Chomsky, Neccessary Illusions, pp. 10 13 Ellul, Propaganda, pp. xvii 14 Ellul, Propaganda, pp. 8 15 Noam Chomsky, Pirates And Emperors, pp. 42 16 Rolando Perez, The Ideology of Information, Stranger Books, NYC 1994 pp. 10 17 from Wall Street Journal, Jan 4 1996 18 McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 36 19 Arthur Kroker, The Canadian Mind, pp. 82 20 H.A. Innis, Empire And Communications, University Of Toronto Press, 1951 pp. 170 21 Perez, Ideology Of Information, pp. 10 22 Domhoff, Who Rules America, pp. 12 23 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, pp. 114 24 Kroker, The Canadian Mind, pp. 79 25 Apostolos-Paul Refenes (ed); Neural Networks In The Capital Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Toronto 1995, pp. 14 26 McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 15 http://www.lglobal.com/TAO/ ___ ___ ___ / /\ / /\ / /\ / /:/ / /::\ / /::\ / /:/ / /:/\:\ / /:/\:\ / /::\ / /:/ /::\ / /:/ \:\ /__/:/\:\ /__/:/ /:/\:\ /__/:/ \__\:\ \__\/ \:\ \ \:\/:/__\/ \ \:\ / /:/ \ \:\ \ \::/ \ \:\ /:/ \ \:\ \ \:\ \ \:\/:/ \ \:\ \ \:\ \ \::/ \__\/ \__\/ \__\/ -------------------------------------------------------------- To receive the Anarchives via email send a note to Majordomo@lglobal.com with the message in the body: subscribe anarchives To get off the list, send to the same address but write: unsubscribe anarchives Also check out: http://www.lglobal.com/TAO/