I'm having hellacious e-mail troubles here from the
ex-cybercommune with the T1 line running into the wall and the
Mac/Win workstation that resembles the bridge of the starship
Enterprise--I am at present looking at three monitors, and local
devices that comprise over 10 gigabytes of storage. This
inability to communicate consistently thanks to the complexity of
the technology reasserts for me the wisdom of low-tech
communication, such as we do from the Despised Hinterlands of
rural America, with our older boxes and 14.4 baud modems. But I
digress.
Anyway, I've been thinking a lot lately about the privatization
of Extension, as per the National Research Council's '96 report
on the Land Grant colleges of ag and the niches they can/should
fill, and thinking about how that all relates to sustag....
And thinking about Laurie's question about who owns Pioneer...my
own answer to which got zapped on this computer system
(twice)...(Dale was right--duPont purchased 20% of Pioneer's
shares in '97, with a 16-year moratorium on further acquisitions
and two seats on Pioneer's BOD)...and remembering my time working
for duPont in the early 80s....
And given that my host in SF works for Pacific Bell, recently
acquired by SBC, a Texas-based communications kraken now seeking
to acquire Ameritech (which provides telecomm services for the
Midwest), I'm thinking a lot about the Telecomm Act of '96...and
how the reconsolidation of the Baby Bells relates to the Consent
Decree of '84 that broke up AT&T, which was desperate to get into
the silicon game at any cost....and also remembering with
suitable indigestion Mark Fowler, the Reagan-appointed head of
the FCC who spent a good portion of the 80s stripping off public
rights to the airwaves established in the Telecomm Act of 1934
and commercializing bandwidth in the name of "efficiency" and
"competition"...the quantum physics of unbridled greed and
control....
And thinking of the conversation I had in rural Lake County, CA,
on Sunday morning, with a sanitation engineer and his postal
carrier wife, at a cafe run by ex-Wisconsinites (every fourth
person I meet out here is an expatriate Cheezer) in a tiny remote
town struggling to cater to tourists who pass thru in Eddie Bauer
edition suburban Assault Vehicles, and after we talked about
groundwater protection and policy, ranching, motorcycles, the UAW
strike, and holistic medicine, he informed me that the big telcom
corporations are now trying to get out of providing the E-rate (a
special discounted usage rate to educational institutions and
rural communities, one of the few redeeming features of the
Telecomm Act of '96), which was news to me, and I was glad to get
it by such a route as this rather than, say, the Internet....
And thinking about my own work and career as an educational
communicator in sustainable ag for 8 years now...and thinking
about all of us here in the SAN community, and how this community
has evolved since I first joined it in '92....
And since all this was burbling about in my head, communications
and sustag, sustag and communications, and food and famine and
farming and corporate monopolies on everything, and since I ran
across the following this morning while reading out on the
backstair landing as the local Anna's hummingbird cruised the
bougainvilleas (a few blocks from Mission Dolores), I thought I'd
pop it down for those of you as might be interested. I thought it
related to sustag pretty clearly. But then I think most things
do.
Thanks for listening to those of you who choose that; apologies
to those of you annoyed by this.
peace
misha
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Human society can be structured either according to the principle
of authority or according to the principle of liberty.
Authority is a static social configuration in which people act as
superiors and inferiors: a sado-masochistic relationship. Liberty
is a dynamic social configuration in which people act as equals:
an erotic relationship. In every interaction between people,
either Authority or Liberty is the dominant factor. Families,
churches, lodges, clubs, and corporations are either more
authoritarian than libertarian or more libertarian than
authoritarian.
...
All authority is a function of coding, of game rules. Men have
arisen again and again armed with pitchforks to fight armies with
cannon; men have also submitted docilely to the weakest and most
tottery oppressors. It all depends on the extent to which coding
distorts perception and conditions the physical (and mental)
reflexes.
...
The mechanism by which authority and submission are implanted in
the human mind is coding of perception. That which fits into the
code is accepted; all else is Damned. It is Damned to being
ignored, brushed aside, unnoticed, and--if these fail--it is
Damned to being forgotten.
A worse form of Damnation is reserved for those things which
cannot be ignored. These are daubed with the brain's projected
prejudices until, encrusted beyond recognition, they are capable
of being fitted into the system, classified, card-indexed,
buried. This is what happens to every Damned Thing which is too
prickly and sticky to be excommunicated entirely. As Josiah
Warren remarked, "It is dangerous to understand new things too
quiickly." Almost always, we have not understood them. We have
murdered them and mummified their corpses.
A /monopoly on the means of communication/ [authors' italics] may
define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian
formula of "monopoly on the means of production." Since man [sic]
extends his [sic] nervous system through channels of
communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc.,
he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system
of every member of society. The contents of these media become
part of the contents of every individual's brain.
Shea and Wilson, /The Illuminatus! Trilogy: Leviathan/, pp.
792-796, Dell, 1975
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