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  • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
    Hello, This email message is a notification to let you know that a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the evola_as_he_is group. File :
    Message 1 of 29 , Jul 22, 2014
      Hello,


      This email message is a notification to let you know that
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      File : /TheJewishProblemAncientTimes(study).pdf
      Uploaded by : evola_as_he_is <evola_as_he_is@...>
      Description : The Jewish Problem In Ancient Times (study)


      You can access this file at the URL:
      https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/evola_as_he_is/files/TheJewishProblemAncientTimes%28study%29.pdf


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    • evola_as_he_is
      One of the best features of Yahoo s new interface is that long posts are truncated, posts which, as mentioned some time ago, we intend, slowly but surely, to
      Message 2 of 29 , Jul 23, 2014
        One of the best features of Yahoo's new interface is that long posts are truncated, posts which, as mentioned some time ago, we intend, slowly but surely, to make available in the files, 'The Jewish Problem in Ancient Times' being the first. Another is that private notifications to this effect are posted on the forum.. 


      • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
        Hello, This email message is a notification to let you know that a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the evola_as_he_is group. File : /Le
        Message 3 of 29 , Aug 9, 2014
          Hello,


          This email message is a notification to let you know that
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          File : /Le cinquième état.pdf
          Uploaded by : rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
          Description : Le cinquième état


          You can access this file at the URL:
          https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/evola_as_he_is/files/Le%20cinqui%C3%A8me%20%C3%A9tat.pdf


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        • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
          Hello, This email message is a notification to let you know that a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the evola_as_he_is group. File : /Le
          Message 4 of 29 , Aug 10, 2014
            Hello,


            This email message is a notification to let you know that
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            File : /Le cinquième état.pdf
            Uploaded by : rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
            Description : Le cinquième état


            You can access this file at the URL:
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          • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
            Hello, This email message is a notification to let you know that a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the evola_as_he_is group. File : /Le
            Message 5 of 29 , Oct 18 9:31 AM
              Hello,


              This email message is a notification to let you know that
              a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the evola_as_he_is
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              File : /Le cinquième Etat.pdf
              Uploaded by : rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
              Description : Le cinquième Etat


              You can access this file at the URL:
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              rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
            • evola_as_he_is
              Integral-tradition has written a study on the Jewish question as seen from J. Evola. He was kind enough to upload a file. You are advised to read it. It is
              Message 6 of 29 , Oct 19 6:18 AM

                Integral-tradition has written a study on the Jewish question as seen from J. Evola. He was kind enough to upload a file. You are advised to read it. It is made up of citations which are known to the members, and yet it contains some material, some very interesting material corroborating some of Evola’s views on the Jewish question, which may not be known to them ; besides, the angle of approach is different: the aim is to show that the Jewish spirit and the modern spitit are one and the same. As for the conclusions, most of them are well-known ; they have been voiced previously either on the list or on the website to which it belongs. It is a rather comprehensive account, in which, however, the author intervenes to rectify or to warn against some of the confusions made by the various writers he quotes.


                We will comment on it later.

              • caleb afendopoulo
                do you have a link for this? On Sunday, October 19, 2014 4:19 PM, evola_as_he_is@yahoo.com [evola_as_he_is] wrote:
                Message 7 of 29 , Oct 19 8:42 AM
                  do you have a link for this?


                  On Sunday, October 19, 2014 4:19 PM, "evola_as_he_is@... [evola_as_he_is]" <evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com> wrote:


                   
                  Integral-tradition has written a study on the Jewish question as seen from J. Evola. He was kind enough to upload a file. You are advised to read it. It is made up of citations which are known to the members, and yet it contains some material, some very interesting material corroborating some of Evola’s views on the Jewish question, which may not be known to them ; besides, the angle of approach is different: the aim is to show that the Jewish spirit and the modern spitit are one and the same. As for the conclusions, most of them are well-known ; they have been voiced previously either on the list or on the website to which it belongs. It is a rather comprehensive account, in which, however, the author intervenes to rectify or to warn against some of the confusions made by the various writers he quotes.

                  We will comment on it later.


                • rouesolaire
                  An essay was recently published on this forum. It was removed because some minor changes were made to it before it is posted at
                  Message 8 of 29 , Oct 21 4:06 PM

                    An essay was recently published on this forum. It was removed because some minor changes were made to it before it is posted at http://elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/le-cinquieme-etat/. Moreover, now that it is posted at the previous address, there is little point in reposting it here.

                    Below was transcribed the announcement of the plan and the plan itself. The introduction was rewritten by the administrator.

                     

                    “In this essay, the "essence" of the Fifth Estate and the associated human type will be initially described. Thereafter, three main domains of the Indo-European civilizations will be discussed through the prism of the law of regression of castes: architecture, music and war. The fall leading from the First to the Fifth Estate will be detailed for each domain, while indicating its origins and its consequences.”

                     

                    I) The Fifth Estate

                    1) The Fifth Estate and the pariah

                    2) The anti-Christian Revolution?

                    3) Machine, linearity, virtuality and reign of quantity

                    4) Finance, economy, virtuality and reign of quantity

                    5) The Realm of the Goddess

                     

                    II) Architecture

                    1) The First Estate

                    2) The Second Estate

                    3) The Third and Fourth Estate

                    4) The Fifth Estate

                     

                    III) Music

                    1) The two music

                    2) Musical Semitism

                    3) The "modern" music

                    A) Its modern origin

                    B) Its ancient origin

                    4) Contemporary music

                     

                    IV) War

                    1) The war among Indo-European peoples

                    2) The war among Asian peoples

                    3) Chivalry

                    4) The emergence of "modern" war

                    5) The mass war

                    6) The virtual "war"

                     

                    Conclusion

                    Delete
                  • evola_as_he_is
                    It is a dense, comprehensive, essay, a “summa” almost in the military sense, and so insightful. Since Jünger and, more precisely, his “Arbeiter” is a
                    Message 9 of 29 , Oct 24 9:35 AM

                      It is a dense, comprehensive, essay, a “summa” almost in the military sense, and so insightful. Since Jünger and, more precisely, his “Arbeiter” is a recurrent topic on this list, let us take Rousolaire’s considerations on the machine. Drawing on R. Guénon’s (“the machine is in a sense the opposite of the tool, and is in no way a 'perfected tool' as many imagine, for the tool is in a sense a 'prolongation' of the man himself, when as the machine reduces the man to being no more than its servant; and, if it was true to say that ‘the tool engenders the craft’: it is no less true that the machine kills it...”), he extends them, not only by pointing out that, as should be quite obvious to any differentiated man,” the tool used to be an extension of man, whereas man has now become an extension of the machine, until he becomes a machine himelf through ‘transhumanism’, but also, and even more importantly, by noticing that“, since it is always bound to be changed, ‘improved’, it is never finished, in constant evolution”, making it “what lends itself best to ‘Progres’”, while being the very embodiment, or, to use a term that encapsulate the aforementioned ongoing process of inversion, the very personnifaction of the goddess of Progress. It should be added that, after having ‘materialised’ or ‘solidified’ the world, both the outer world and the physio-psychological part of man, the machine is now applied to its dematerialisation, through computer software. Still to quote Guénon, “in the corporeal world as we know it 'solidification' in fact reaches its most pronounced form in minerals as such, and, interesting enough, minerals happen to be the basis of computers (http://www.nma.org/pdf/m_computer.pdf) The French author seems to have considered “the 'solidification' of the world” as the arrival of this cycle of manifestation at its extreme end-point. However, virtualisation technologies appear to keep it in existence.

                       

                      It should be mentionned that the essay of Rousolaire is written from a racial perspective; Seen from this perspective we learn about Computer systems that “virtually all of them rely on the use of an electronic clock which provides a quantitative time. Historically, quantitative time consists of fixed and invariable intervals succeeding each other appeared in China around the early second millennium BC with the invention of the bell, which delimitates this kind of time. This Asiatic invention was imported into Europe by “the first missionaries, [who] used small bells to call people to worship ; bells had been introduced in Christian churches around 400 AD by Paulinus, bishop of Nola in Campania. Its adoption on a large scale did not become apparent until about 550...

                       

                      “In 750, they were so widespread that the Archbishop of York ordered all priests to ring their bells at specific times.” By means of the bell, the Church had found a way of measuring time, and, simultaneously, of forcing a measured time on people. It was not long before the merchants started to use bells to chime the hours of commercial transactions and work hours (see message 1884) “This quantification of time for praticalpurposes, far from being opposed to the teachings of the Christian religion, is in fact the ‘materialisation’ of her own conception of time, which she had borrowed from Judaism and thus one of the manifestations of ‘mental Semitism’. Judeo-Christianity, in spreading its linear conception of time among white people, only prepared them to accept a quantitative, measured time, as well as the myth of ‘Progress’.”

                       

                      As for music, the revisionist views of Rouesolaire are incomparably deeper and sharper than those expressed at 'The Manufacture of Mozart - Preface' - Article. 'The Manufacture of Mozart - Preface' - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart biography: 'the manufacture of mozart - preface'.

                       

                    • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
                      Hello, This email message is a notification to let you know that a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the evola_as_he_is group. File : /A Jewel
                      Message 10 of 29 , Feb 6, 2015
                        Hello,


                        This email message is a notification to let you know that
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                        File : /A Jewel of the papacy.doc
                        Uploaded by : evola_as_he_is <evola_as_he_is@...>
                        Description : A fully documented and thoroughly researched essay on Charlemagne from a revisionnist white perspective


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                      • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
                        Hello, This email message is a notification to let you know that a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the evola_as_he_is group. File :
                        Message 11 of 29 , Feb 12, 2015
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                          File : /Zeitgeist sourcebook part 1.pdf
                          Uploaded by : rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
                          Description : Jesus as an avatar of the Negro-Semitic "solar" dying god. This book was written in order to prove the affirmations made in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt-qYDb7UcI. Concerning the lunar core of Islam, see www.yoel.info/moonotheismv1andv2.pdf.


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                        • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                          Message 12 of 29 , Mar 31, 2015
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                            File : /Islam - Moon-o-theism.pdf
                            Uploaded by : rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
                            Description : A study of a war and moon god religion that was based on the Mideast moon god religion of Sin.


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                          • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
                            Hello, This email message is a notification to let you know that a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the evola_as_he_is group. File :
                            Message 13 of 29 , Mar 31, 2015
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                              File : /Freemasonry And The Hidden Goddess.pdf
                              Uploaded by : rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
                              Description : What are the origins of Freemasonry? What is their purpose? Even Freemasons themselves don’t seem to know this and present many different theories on the origins of Freemasonry. Yet the origins of Freemasonry and purpose of Freemasonry is clearly told in their symbolism, which this book clearly explains.


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                            • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                              Message 14 of 29 , Jul 16, 2015
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                                File : /Le grand secret de l'islam.pdf
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                                Description : http://legrandsecretdelislam.com/


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                              • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                Message 15 of 29 , Jul 16, 2015
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                                  File : /Studies.zip
                                  Uploaded by : rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
                                  Description : The Jewish Problem in Ancient Times - A Jewel of the Papacy - The Jewels of The Papacy - From Freedom to Feedom - Feedom at work


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                                • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                  Message 16 of 29 , Jul 18, 2015
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                                    File : /Jewish Christianity in the Early Church.pdf
                                    Uploaded by : rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
                                    Description : Jewish Christianity in the early Church. How Christianity forgot its Jewish roots.


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                                  • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                    Message 17 of 29 , Jul 18, 2015
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                                      File : /The Modern World A Joint Creation Of China And The 'West'.pdf
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                                      Description :


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                                    • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                      Message 18 of 29 , Jul 19, 2015
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                                        File : /The Egyptian Origins of Western Philosophy.pdf
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                                        Description :


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                                      • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                        Message 19 of 29 , Jul 19, 2015
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                                          File : /The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation.pdf
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                                          Description :


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                                        • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                          Message 20 of 29 , Sep 30, 2015
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                                            File : /Avant-propos.doc
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                                          • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                            Message 21 of 29 , Sep 30, 2015
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                                              File : /Vladimir Poutine.rtf
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                                              Description :


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                                            • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                              Message 22 of 29 , Sep 30, 2015
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                                                File : /Theatricality Beyond the Theater.pdf
                                                Uploaded by : rouesolaire <rouesolaire@...>
                                                Description :


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                                              • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                                Message 23 of 29 , Jan 17, 2016
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                                                  File : /Quelques souvenirs sur René Guénon.pdf
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                                                • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                                  Message 24 of 29 , Jan 23, 2016
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                                                    File : /Schuon on Guenon.pdf
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                                                  • revolvere00
                                                    For those who are interested in the subject of transhumanism , the German documentary film The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet , which has a much
                                                    Message 25 of 29 , Oct 28 7:39 AM

                                                      For those who are interested in the subject of 'transhumanism', the German documentary film 'The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet', which has a much wider and deeper subject than the 'Unabomber' (it is disputed whether this concerns T. Kaczynski), comes as highly recommended.


                                                      It can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLqrVCi3l6E.


                                                      What follows below (and in the subsequent post) are two extensive reviews.


                                                      'Filming the World Laboratory. Cybernetic History in Das Netz', https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/filming-the-world-laboratory/.


                                                      What does it mean to be part of a cybernetic system? For a conscious human being it means taking part in an evolving loop, where you are both the subject and the object of experimentation. This is the relation that has developed between scientific inquiry and world-changing technology. Researchers reshape the environment that defines them, and vice-versa. Such self-affecting loops are the vectors of a radical constructivism, an artificialization of existence. Their content and their continuous metamorphosis are what gives form to life in a cybernetic society. 


                                                      From its earliest beginnings in logic and control engineering, cybernetics grew to become not a single discipline but a full-fledged scientific paradigm, based on the concepts of purpose, information, feedback, circular causality and dynamic equilibrium. Warren McCulloch conceived this science as an “experimental epistemology”: a way of knowing continually tested and modified through laboratory investigations which only that particular way of knowing makes possible.1 Biological processes and man-machine interactions were the initial sites of cybernetic investigation. But as the paradigm expanded, thanks to the patronage of Anglo-American research administrators in the 1940s and 1950s, the laboratory shifted its sites of inquiry from the deepest recesses of the mind to the entire range of social relations, before finally focusing on the most integrated circuit of them all, the ecosystem. Engineers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, neurologists, linguists, psychiatrists, anthropologists and sociologists all made it their business to animate this experimental laboratory, in order to satisfy their own curiosity as well as the demands of the state, the military and the corporations. To the extent that such experimentation continues – using the almost limitless behavioral data furnished by the Internet – we are all part of a cybernetic system, which may be called the world laboratory. One crucial question for understanding the societies we live in today is how this laboratory has developed historically, on what basis, with which raw materials and to which ends: because only through its historical unfolding can an epistemology bring forth a world. Another crucial question concerns our own roles in the construction, alteration or rejection of the world laboratory. 


                                                      Cybernetics was a hot topic in scientific journals and the mainstream press from the end of World War II until the late 1970s. Its public presence then declined, as the disciplines it had transformed began producing their own breakthroughs and as cognitivism arose to provide a more strictly objective paradigm for the sciences of mind. Mass access to the Internet in the 1990s gave millions of people their first chance to use the communications technologies that had been developed in the military labs, to experience their global reach and to verify that information, as Gregory Bateson had explained, is the “difference that makes a difference” in your own life. This turning-point in the experience of everyday existence was accompanied by a spate of fascinating books on the history of cybernetics, whose authors have become well known among hackers, cyberpunks, computer scientists and social theorists. But it was left to an artist and filmmaker, Lutz Dammbeck, to attempt a deeply historical and fully actual critique of this technological way of knowing, in a feature-length documentary film entitled Das Netz.2 


                                                       Dammbeck is a former East German, born in 1948, the year that Norbert Wiener published his foundational work, Cybernetics: or Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine. His distance from the Western euphoria over computers has given rise to the most probing and skeptical documentary film yet  to  be made about networked technologies. In the tense, militarized atmosphere of post-9/11 America, he uses interviews and archival research to explore the relations between the Internet, Adorno, LSD and the motivations of Ted Kaczynski: the mathematician, madman and violent eco-revolutionary known to the world as the Unabomber. 


                                                      Pushing his outsider status to the hilt, Dammbeck raises questions that most American intellectuals do not dare to formulate, because they challenge our basic sense of legitimacy.3 Why did control engineering leave such a deep mark on postwar social science, and indeed, on the American psyche? How did avant-garde artistic culture become so entangled with the ultra-rationalized discourse of cybernetics and the libertarian techno-utopia of the Internet? What else might be strung on the red thread that binds together the Cold Warriors of repressive military psychiatry, the psychedelic Merry Pranksters of the 1960s and the hybrid entrepreneurs of the New Economy? And what were the motivations of the man who mailed deadly letter bombs to a number of figures located precisely within that paradoxical triangle? 


                                                      Feedback in the Flesh


                                                      The film begins with artistic images, like Marshall McLuhan’s face distorted into a spiral on one of Nam June Paik’s early videos: an exploration of reality’s fundamental plasticity. Dammbeck uses a cool female voice-over for his distanced commentaries, but he also stages himself as a faux-naive narrator. He has just bought a new Macintosh: intrigued by the shared multimedia rhetoric of ’60s artistic vanguards and ’90s consumer electronics, he sets off on a trip to the USA, to do interviews with figures from the histories of experimental art and informatics. On the plane he sketches a network of interconnected concepts: Art, Technology, Computer. The network will morph and transform as the investigation continues. His first contact is John Brockman, a former investment banker who became the literary agent of a hybrid group of scientists, artists and entrepreneurs called “the Digerati.”4 


                                                      Brockman sees technology as a fundamentally artistic or artificializing force. His reminiscences take us through a world of circuit diagrams, mainframe computers, avant-garde cinematographers and cybernetic theorists. He quotes the biologist J.Z. Young: “We create tools and then we mold ourselves in the use of them.” This is a doctrine of radical constructivism. But when Dammbeck asks Brockman about the Unabomber – who mailed a letter-bomb to David Gelernter, a member of the Digerati network – the businessman suddenly freezes up, cutting short the conversation and leaving the room. Such a brusque reaction only sparks the narrator’s curiosity. What might lie behind Brockman’s refusal to even speak about Ted Kaczynski? And why would anyone want to attack the Digerati? 


                                                      The quest for an answer propels him from the New York skyscrapers to a houseboat on the San Francisco Bay, for an interview with another member of the Digerati: Steward Brand, the hippie promoter of cybernetics and back-to-the-land survivalism in the 1960s. Brand worked as an artist with the multimedia group USCO, then helped organize Ken Kesey’s acid tests in San Francisco. He traveled with the Merry Pranksters on Kesey’s psychedelic bus (described by Dammbeck as a “moving laboratory”) and along with copious doses of electric Koolaid he absorbed the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson, using them to create the immensely popular Whole Earth Catalog. He went on to set up the pioneering WELL network in the 1980s, the forerunner of today’s virtual communities.5 In the film he appears as one of the cultural gurus of what Dammbeck calls “an alternative form of cybernetics,” marked by an enduring fascination for the libertarian appeal of “open systems.” His psychedelic catalogue featured cybernetic ideas and technologies alongside craftsman’s tools for ecological homesteaders. It also included the plans for the tiny backwoods cabin where Ted Kaczynski lived for some twenty-five years, writing the Unabomber Manifesto and fashioning his deadly letters. 


                                                      Unlike Brockman, Stewart Brand admits to a contradiction in his vision, between ecology and computers. He acknowledges that he was eventually forced to choose, and he chose the side of technology. Yet he is still able to see down the road not taken. He describes Kaczynski as a classic counter-cultural figure, who used “vile means” to be sure, but whose legitimate critique of technological society was ultimately heard. With that admission, the scattered pieces of the film’s introduction fall into place. Dammbeck has gained a mandate to find out what it was about postwar cybernetic culture that drove Kaczynski to terrorism. 


                                                      Scenes filmed by anarchist protesters skid erratically over the screen of the Macintosh, along with quotes from the Unabomber Manifesto urging the use of advanced technologies to distribute the anti-technological message. With these activist clips Dammbeck explores the revival of 1970s ecological critique in the turn-of-the-century revolt against the WTO in Seattle. Cut without transition to the sophisticated cityscapes of Boston and an astounding archival sequence, opening with architectural plans of MIT – a key site in the collaboration between universities and the military-industrial complex – then moving rapidly to the wartime career of Norbert Wiener, the invention of cybernetics and the rise of the United States to superpower status. “How does a utopia emerge?” asks the cool off-screen voice. “Does it come into being by chance, are there one or more inventors, or is there a plan?” 


                                                      The images – German dive-bombers, circuit diagrams, cut-away anatomical heads, primitive mainframe computers – are strange, distant, arresting. They show the dramatic origins of a technological cosmos, an engineer’s universe of circuits and feedback loops: “The pilot becomes one with his plane, the boundary between man and machine is blurred, and what emerges is an anonymous mechanized opponent whose actions can be modeled in war labs.” Under the cybernetic gaze, the brain is no longer the place “where ego and identity are mysteriously created through memory and consciousness.” Instead, humanity has become a “flesh machine.” The sequence lingers over bluish recordings of carefully numbered neuroanatomical models and early mainframe computers, before culminating in excerpts from staged propaganda clips displaying the global command-and-control systems of the Cold War. In a vertiginous acceleration of historical time, we watch an arcane scientific theory become worldwide practice. Before gaining its aura of countercultural liberation, cybernetics would be the operating code of America’s imperial dominance in the postwar period. 


                                                      Das Netz is a brilliantly constructed film, but the demands of its narrative flow permit only this brief evocation of the genesis of an experimental epistemology. Dammbeck recalls the key notions of informational feedback and error-correction along the pathway to a goal, as developed in Wiener’s writings, but he does not even mention the logical ancestor of cybernetic automation: the Turing machine, a conceptual model developed in the late 1930s by the British mathematician, Alan Turing. This theoretical device consists of a hypothetical mechanical “head” that can read and inscribe binary symbols (zeros and ones) on the square sections of an infinitely long tape, which it moves to the left or the right. The tape is processed according to “transition rules” stored in a “table”; any specific input on the tape will yield the output values of a particular mathematical function. As Turing noted, “it is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.”6 The transition rules of all these singular machines could then be recorded on the tape itself, so as to constitute a “universal Turing machine” capable of performing every mathematical operation on every computable number. The abstract logic of this proposal – exactly what Deleuze and Guattari would later call an “abstract machine” – is what opened the way for the multipurpose computers that would be built after the war. 


                                                      Yet Turing alone would not have led to the cybernetic paradigm. The striking images of anatomical models and the evocation of the “flesh machine” are the film’s allusions to the ground-breaking work of the neuroanatomist, Warren McCulloch, and the logician, Walter Pitts. Together they developed an intricate system for notating the pathways of electrochemical signals through networks of idealized neurons. Their notation was based on the assumption that each single neuron either fires or does not fire according to the kind and quantity of signals received from other neurons. What this means is that the brain, too, is conceived to function with a binary code of zeros and ones, just like the Turing machine. But in the brain as McCulloch and Pitts imagine it, computation does not proceed along an infinite linear tape. Instead, complex series of equations are mapped out as pathways through a finite network of neurons. Patterns of electrochemical impulses correspond to the propositions of symbolic logic, expressed in the mathematical terms developed earlier in the century by logical empiricists such as Carnap (with whom Pitts had studied).7 Thus, the very process of thinking in language becomes equivalent to neural computation. In this way, the two scientists arrived at their fundamental breakthrough, stated in the title of their 1943 paper: “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.”8 What they had done was to map out the possible circuits of feedback in the flesh. 


                                                      The crucial thing to realize is that this model of nervous activity both preceded and inspired the logical architecture of the computer, sketched out by John von Neumann in 1945 after he had encountered the work of McCulloch and Pitts.9 Yet their influence did not stop with the computer. The incarnation of Turing’s abstract machine in the anatomical model of neural nets served as the primary example of a potentially endless extension of computational intelligence into physical matter. This is what allowed cybernetics to become, not just a specialized domain of control engineering, but a general model for the informational manipulation of all dynamic systems, reiterating its structural principles in psychiatry, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, genetics, etc.10 In a similar sense, Wiener would speak of cybernetics as the study of communication and control in both the animal and the machine. Today it is difficult to even imagine the prestige that came to surround this model, which promised both a unifying paradigm for the sciences and a formula for their application to the man-machine systems of industrialized society. The age of the world laboratory begins with the ambition to extend the universal model of coded informational loops into every substrate, whether physical or biological. 


                                                      The influence of cybernetics was as international as American hegemony itself, and as Dammbeck shows, it responded to the need for procedures of control at a distance that had arisen during the multi-theater combat of WWII. These are the military realities that Internet enthusiasts of the 1990s were loath to remember, despite the inexorable rise of the surveillance society. Yet the extent of this influence on the social sciences and the humanities has been just as frequently neglected over the last twenty years, even as the everyday use of information technology has expanded. For example, very few students of linguistic theory now recall that Wiener’s founding book was first published in France at the instigation of a French editor, and that the information theory developed in parallel by Wiener and the telecommunications engineer, Claude Shannon, came to exercise a decisive influence on the linguist, Roman Jakobson, the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan – in short, on the entire range of French structuralism.11 Without this background, how can post-structuralist theories be understood and evaluated? Even Félix Guattari’s fascination with abstract machines appears to have its origins in an ambiguous nexus of attraction-repulsion toward cybernetics, which would later morph into his post-68 opposition to Lacanian psychoanalysis.12 


                                                      This kind of intellectual history is absent from Dammbeck’s film, which has a more pressing agenda. What’s represented on the screen is the relation of hunter and hunted, of attacker and target, from which the concepts of the feedback loop and the man-machine system first emerged. Das Netz provides a filmic approach to the “ontology of the enemy” that the historian of technology, Peter Galison, has identified at the origins of cybernetics.13 By focusing on the German bombers of the Battle of Britain and the response they elicited from Norbert Weiner, the film lets us see and feel how the victors of World War II internalized the aggressive science that informed the Nazi war machine. This rarely explored psychic drama could have been the subject of the entire documentary: the exchange of a deadly will to power between the two contenders for world hegemony.14 What both Dammbeck and Galison suggest is that the characteristic relations of this dialectical combat have been inscribed into the very circuits of cybernetic devices. But the film takes one step further than this, by analyzing the cultural and political articulations of postwar economic liberalism and thereby leading us onward to the more intricate and disorienting predicaments of the present. It shows how a command-and-control logic focused on the ontology of the enemy was transformed into its seeming opposite: the “open systems” of today’s supposedly borderless world society. 


                                                      Another accelerated sequence evokes the Macy Conferences of 1946 to 1953, which gathered the outstanding minds of an era to develop the operating technologies of America’s new global governance. Conference members included McCulloch, Pitts, Wiener, Von Neumann, Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, Kurt Lewin and many others. These meetings wrote the prehistory of the digital age – but precisely here, where contemporary commentators locate the origins of computing, cognitive science and the Internet, Dammbeck shifts the focus to behavioral research in sociology and psychiatry. He claims that the participants “registered a particular interest” in a book called The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 under the direction of Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School.15 The authors, including T. W. Adorno, used the statistical methods of empirical sociology to analyze the American population for elements of the “authoritarian matrix” of traditional European nationalism, which in their view had given rise to fascism in Germany. The authoritarian matrix would have to be identified, dismantled and transformed to prevent any future outbreaks of racist or totalitarian aggression. This, for the filmmaker, is the focus of struggle on “the Cold War battlefield of the unconscious,” where cybernetics became the weapon of choice in the configuration of a new world order. 


                                                      The evidence that Dammbeck can provide for direct connections between the Macy Conferences and The Authoritarian Personality is slim. But it is clear from the historical record that the dissolution of nationalist cultures and the creation of a new “world-mindedness” had been a major preoccupation of American social scientists since the 1940s. The total mobilization of the liberal principles of civilization against the Nazis led the anthropologist and future Macy Conference participant Margaret Mead to declare: “We must see this war as the prelude to a greater job – the restructuring of the culture of the world.” 16  For Mead, cybernetics would be a vital contribution to this civilizing project, because it helped her see how change could be offered as a possibility to be freely chosen, rather than a straitjacket to be imposed by force. Victory in 1944-45 would set the stage for new and highly sophisticated forms of “democratic” social engineering.   


                                                      Following his dialectical method, Dammbeck focuses on the contributions of the German émigré thinkers to the new American hegemony. The off-screen voice intones: “According to the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, a member of the Macy Group, the old values and balances must be destroyed, in order to make conditions ‘fluid.’” A cut to flashback-style images of laboratory surgery, followed by the zany oscillations of Nam June Paik’s electronic art, gives a hint of how such fluidity could be achieved. “Then it is possible to establish new balances and values,” the cool narrative voice continues. “Re-education will then develop into self-re-education. This would transform the world into a post-national, multi-ethnic society, with no fixed borders.” The scene cuts from a pharmaceutical production line of the 1950s, with thousands of little white pills flowing in even ranks toward their destinations, back to a contemporary American lunch-buffet under electric lights, filled with attractive and colorful dishes from around the globe. A standardized cube of orange jello trembles ever so slightly, like cellular plasma on a spoon. 


                                                      At this point another figure enters the narrative: Henry Murray, who invented the Thematic Apperception Test used by the researchers of The Authoritarian Personality. Murray, a psychologist, had worked for the US government on a personality profile of Hitler, then devised stress-tests for soldiers. During the war he adopted the ideas of the World Federalist movement and argued for a process of global political unification, which, as he wrote in a letter to Lewis Mumford, “involves transformations of personality such as never occurred quickly in human history; one transformation being that of National Man into World Man.”17 As we hear in the film, “Murray sees psychology and the new social sciences as destined to make a contribution to a world that can live in peace and harmony: in a new world order, with world laws, a world police force and a world government.”  


                                                      These were the ideals of wartime liberalism, instituted by the United Nations, the World Health Organization and UNESCO, then revived in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the opening of international borders and the meteoric rise of the World Trade Organization. Yet here again we are invited to look at the dark side of the democratic project: for it was also Murray, the idealist of the post-war period, who administered damaging psychological tests to groups of Harvard students in the years 1949-1962. Ted Kaczynski was among the subjects in the year 1958. Although the laboratory reports of these studies have not been released, we know that the future Unabomber was given the code-name “LAWFUL.” 


                                                      Dammbeck passes over the Harvard period very rapidly, retaining only key clues and symbols. Looking at the documents of the case, one discovers astonishing facts that underlie the tightly edited version of the story in the film. The year-long ordeal administered to the students by Henry Murray was designed to examine the effects of extreme psychological stress in order to improve screening and selection processes for the military. It required the participants to spend a month writing a statement of their highest ideals, in preparation for what they were told would be an inspiring discussion with a brilliant young lawyer. But in reality the lawyer’s role was to engage in character assassination, totally destroying the ideal ego of the experimental subject. For Murray, this one-to-one combat was a chance to explore the smallest of all social units, what he called “the dyad”: the exact point where psychology spills over into sociology. In other words, it was a chance to explore the psychodynamics of a social system under conditions of intense aggression, where the very plasticity of being is exposed to violent metamorphosis.18 Here again, at the heart of a carefully calibrated laboratory experiment unfolding in the calm and privileged atmosphere of a liberal university, we discover the ontology of the enemy. 


                                                      Das Netz confronts us with the demons of the past: the inscriptions of the Cold War military-industrial complex on an individual psyche, standing in for the experiences of an entire population. But the important question is what this final avatar of military-industrial coercion could mean later on, in Ted Kaczynski’s adult life in 1970s and 1980s, and then again in our own era. What becomes of the world laboratory during the heyday of alternative cybernetics and “open systems”? And in what form do its violent experiments return, in the age of unlimited surveillance and the War on Terror? 


                                                      Blowback in Society


                                                      The extravagant, utopian world of the year 2000, buoyed up by speculation on the Internet revolution, was suddenly shaken by the attacks of September 11. A forgotten atmosphere sprang back to the fore: executive privilege, domestic surveillance, military secrecy. Dammbeck’s strategy in Das Netz is to examine the networked society through the dark crystals of Cold War behavioral science, in the attempt to catch some prescient glimmer of America’s resurgent will to social control and sovereign power in the present. The intellectuals on whom he focuses all provide insights into the artificial nature of today’s society. During the 1940s, the sociologist Kurt Lewin was preoccupied with such questions as how to contribute to the war effort by changing the eating habits of average families. His highly influential research on group dynamics showed that citizens of a democracy could be far more effectively manipulated when they were given an active role in the process that changed their own beliefs.19 As for Henry Murray, his early work in personality assessment is considered “the first systematic effort to evaluate an individual’s personality to predict his future behavior.”20 It was subsequently used by the personnel departments of major corporations and by the CIA for the recruitment of foreign agents. Moreover, the personality assessment of Hitler which Murray produced during the war featured extensive commentary on the German national psyche, its relationship to the Nazi leadership and the most effective ways to shake that authoritarian grip and convert the population to a more liberal mentality.21 But it is the scholars with the least substantiated links either to the Macy Conferences or to Kaczynski – namely, the Frankfurt School and their study of The Authoritarian Personality – that allow Dammbeck to forge his most provocative speculations on the artificially induced “second nature” of contemporary society. 


                                                      There is a parallel here with my own research into the psychosocial transformations of contemporary culture. In an essay called “The Flexible Personality,” published in 2002, I tried to show how a more pliable subjectivity emerged from the 1960s revolts against the military regimentation and industrial discipline that had produced the authoritarian character.22 The critique of the time was largely successful, according to this argument; but the openness of counter-cultural practices also proved remarkably amenable to the needs of the emerging neoliberal economy. The highly adaptive production system of the 1980s and 1990s, with its exaltation of mobility and its emphasis on cultural labor, was informed and qualified by the preceding attempts at a revolution of everyday life, whose demands for flattened hierarchies and spontaneous communications finally helped legitimate the new electronic toolkits and to distract attention from their built-in capacities for surveillance, exploitation and oppression. Flexibility, in short, was a ruse of capitalist history. Thus the authoritarian personality gave way to its dialectical successor. 


                                                      Dammbeck’s analysis of Internet culture also hinges on this transition away from authoritarianism. But his conclusions are far more radical. Recurrent images of industrialized food services, coupled with scenes of people swallowing LSD on paper strips and sugar cubes, insinuate the idea that the fluid, borderless culture of a liberal “open system” was literally fed to Americans in the 1960s, along with the softer utopia of an alternative cybernetics. One generation later, he suggests, that same kind of culture was exported to the entire world by the multimedia magic of the Internet, bringing the liberal utopia to its culmination in the globalized economy. Here is where the focus on specific social scientists takes on an uncanny pertinence. It is as though Lewin’s experiments in manipulating a population’s eating habits with the full consent of the participating subjects had been applied on a massive scale, across several concerted waves of societal transformation. 


                                                      No doubt this all sounds conspiratorial, if not frankly delirious. But when you know that the vast majority of early LSD research was sponsored by the CIA’s MKULTRA program – acting through the Macy Foundation among others – then such radical speculations take on their full significance.23 To be sure, as John Marks indicates, “the men from MKULTRA remained oblivious, for the most part, to the rebellious effect of the drug culture in the United States.”24 But as we have seen, nothing could be more widespread in postwar America than the involvement of social scientists in experiments seeking to impart the liberal values of a capitalist democracy even while insuring their military-industrial foundations. Where the CIA acted out brutal fantasies of “mind control” – going so far as to slip LSD-laced whiskey to unsuspecting clients in a phony brothel outfitted with two-way mirrors, or working with doctors who administered the drug in conjunction with electroshock therapy – social scientists like Murray and Lewin set up less intrusive, more rigorous and ultimately more effective experiments. What Das Netz asks us to perceive and measure are their continuing consequences on our own minds and sensoriums. 


                                                      The most challenging thing the film suggests is that Ted Kaczynski was a distorted product of efforts to transform the national character: an unwanted side-effect of psychosocial engineering. As Dammbeck hints, at least some part of Kaczynski’s bizarre and twisted fate can be attributed to complex, time-delayed blowback from the American absorption of Nazi science after WWII. But this notion of unforeseen consequences takes on greater resonance when one reflects that just a few years after the publication of the Unabomber Manifesto, Al Qaeda emerged as blowback from the CIA’s attempts to subvert the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The post-9/11 atmosphere in which the film unfolds connects the isolated and eccentric American ecoterrorist to a far more successful movement of Islamist revolutionaries operating on the other side of the globe. The subject of the film now appears as a symbolic crystal, traversed in every direction by an uncanny system of interlocking fractures – or “circular causalities” – that allow the major conflicts of the present to be glimpsed in all their historical, spatial and ideological displacements. Behind them, what one begins to see is something like a cybernetic unconscious, structured at the level of entire populations by the unbearable coercion of command-and control experiments whose breakdown unleashes violence and psychic trauma. Yet as I said at the outset, in a cybernetic society, one is always both the object and the subject of the experiment. All that can be done with a powerful feedback loop is to subtly change its informational contents, its flow parameters, its intensity and modulation. Rather than remaining a neutral, external observer of American society, Dammbeck enters into the fractured networks of this dark crystal. He does so by exchanging letters with the letter bomber. 


                                                      In a radical transgression of the unwritten law that bars the terrorist from ever appearing as a subject (or as an experimenter) Dammbeck lets Kaczynski speak for himself throughout the entire film, in haunting German phrases read aloud from his letters (German being one of the subjects at which the future Unabomber excelled in his Harvard days). The theme to which the prisoner continually returns in these letters is the right of resistance against a technoscientific utopia. Here is a key passage: 


                                                      When I wrote that the concept of a “utopia” is crazy and dangerous, I didn’t mean that all utopias are crazy and dangerous, but rather the utopia that makes possible the creation of a society according to a specific, ideal design. You yourself, I am sure, will have your own idea of utopia. Someone else will have a different idea, which may diverge considerably from yours. How would you like it if he forced his utopia on you? Do you have the right to force your utopia on him?  


                                                      Kaczynski’s rejection of the technoscientific utopia is based on arguments borrowed from deep ecology, or from mid-century critics of rationalization like Jacques Ellul. He asks whether one would want to live in a virtual world, where machines are smarter than men and all the animals and plants have been made artificial by the application of biotech. Dammbeck contrasts his resistance to the euphoric celebration surrounding the Internet, whose benefits nobody in the film seems able to question. “What do I have thus far?” he asks himself midway through the film. “I have a former mathematician, but none of my interview partners want to talk about his criticism of the system. And I have engineers and artists who are obsessed with technology.” News flashes about Afghanistan and Al Qaeda punctuate the media background as the filmmaker works his way through this national elation with the miracles of the Internet. The enthusiasm reaches its height in an interview with Robert Taylor, a former NASA engineer who managed the development of the Arpanet in the late 1960s under contract from the Pentagon, but who denies any connection between his own creation and “communication systems on today’s fully electronic battlefield.” In the opening scene of the interview where he will explain the genesis of the networked society, Taylor is shown playing the videogame Civilization on his desktop computer. One feels compelled to place the engineer’s enthusiasm and the ecoterrorist’s resistance within some larger societal pattern – or indeed, some wider net. What springs to mind is the extraordinary doctrine of a geostrategist working for the US Navy. 


                                                      Over the last ten years, in a continuous stream of books, articles, websites and briefing sessions aimed primarily at the military, but also at the fears and hopes of a civilian audience, the idea-man Thomas P. Barnett proclaims that “disconnectedness defines danger.”25 He explicitly conceives the US military as the “enabler” of financially driven corporate globalization, whose “new rule sets” he studied in collaboration with the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald in joint seminars held on the upper floors of the former World Trade Towers, before the firm’s offices and most of its personnel were blown to pieces on September 11. Emboldened by the real occurrence of what he had theorized as a “system perturbation,” Barnett attempted to sketch a new doctrine, and even a new geography, for the projection of US military force. Wherever flows of capital and communication are violently cut off or simply do not penetrate, he explained, the Pentagon must prepare to intervene. Not surprisingly, the areas he maps out as most likely for invasion – what he calls the “Non-Integrating Gap” – contain both the majority of the planet’s oil reserves, and the majority of its indigenous and Muslim populations. The map is a battle plan for America’s civilizing project in the twenty-first century. This the Great Game for the Pentagon’s cartographer. And the connectivity of the Internet that allows you to play it is literally the utopia that must be imposed upon world populations. It is “a future worth creating,” as he puts it in his recent book, Blueprint for Action. 


                                                      Radical constructivism reaches its height in a networked map that is destined to become the territory. When official geostrategists publish books like Barnett’s, nothing remains for paranoid critics to reveal. Conspiracy theories of the Right and the Left pale before the doctrines of today’s world-shaping elites. But what Dammbeck adds to our understanding of cybernetics is not any unveiling of hidden secrets, but instead an ontological question. What about the ground realities of life and death, he asks, in a world that has instituted the shape-shifting potential of the virtual as its dominant order? This is the question that the Unabomber raises, when he refuses to be the recipient of a technological utopia imposed by others and sends them his deadly letters in return. To be sure, the filmmaker insists that the Unabomber is part of a system, that his feedback only adds to its implacable dynamics. Still he reiterates the terrorist’s question throughout the film, by quoting his correspondence and continually bringing up his name in the interviews with the cyber-elites. Responding, as it were, to Lacan’s early fascination with cybernetics, Dammbeck attempts to be “the instance of the letter” in the American technological unconscious.26 Yet what kind of reality principle does he bring to a civilization that has placed itself entirely within the realm of the signifier – transforming not just the mind but the world itself into a flesh-and-blood experiment with the mathematical formalisms of a universal Turing machine? 


                                                      From the first scene of the film, Dammbeck places Das Netz beneath the fallen star of the mathematician Kurt Gödel, who proved the impossibility of laying a perfect axiomatic ground for the sciences, then lapsed into the waking nightmares of paranoia. An eerie psychedelic dirge by the Grateful Dead moans in the background; a hand-held video camera wavers through the forest toward the site of one of Kaczynski’s abandoned workshops. This text stands out against the pixellated trees: 


                                                      In 1930, the Viennese mathematician Kurt Gödel shakes the foundations of mathematics with his incompleteness theorems. He demonstrates that in every formal-logical system there are problems that are not solvable or exclusively determinable. 


                                                      Gödel appears as the tragic genius who exposed the gaping hole at the heart of early twentieth-century pretensions to certainty in mathematical physics. “The truth is superior to provability,” asserts Dammbeck in white letters on the screen. But at the center of his inquiries into the cybernetic theories of the late twentieth century, the filmmaker places a figure who both accepts and undermines that assertion: the brilliant Viennese physicist and philosopher of science Heinz von Foerster, who moved to the US shortly after the Second World War and became the secretary of the Macy Conferences. Von Foerster initiated the reflexive turn of second-order cybernetics in the early 1970s by insisting on the inseparability of all feedback systems from the thought-processes of their scientific observers.27 Interviewed shortly before his death in 2002, he repeats with childlike candor his belief in radical constructivism, that is, in the artificial nature of all perception, which is only brought to its specific forms through the creative activity of thinking. “The environment as we perceive it is our invention,” he wrote in his 1973 essay, “On Constructing a Reality.”28 


                                                      Strangely enough, this apparently solipsistic proposal led him to a unitary theory of systems. In an initial interview with the scientist – whose recording he then watches on the fold-out screen of Dammbeck’s ever-present Macintosh – the self-reflexive Von Foerster explains that the Indo-European root of the word “science” (but also of “schism” and “schizophrenia”) is scy, which means to separate; whereas the root sys points in the opposite direction, toward ideas of joining, merger, integration. Systems theory is an attempt to go beyond the split between observer and observed. What he sees as common to both research and art is the movement “from science to systemics.” 


                                                      Von Foerster was both a contract researcher for the military and a fundamental critic of instrumental reason in the sciences, deeply interested in the social contestation of the 1960s and close to the radical Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. His insistence on a self-reflexive ethics of the observer’s role within any observed system gradually permeated all of cybernetic thinking, ultimately drawing it outside the pale of the objective sciences and thus effecting a deep epistemological subversion. Seen from this angle, Von Foerster becomes something like a double-agent in the American technoscientific establishment. Yet here again, one must remain aware of the ambiguity that presides over the passage from the 1960s to the 1980s. For in the new era of the world laboratory inaugurated by massively distributed networked communications, Von Foerster’s enchanting system of self-constructed representations would become yet another justification for an entire world of simulacra and simulation, an integrated “Matrix” of semiotic illusions without any critical divide, without any trait of distinction or separation. The social order that arose in the the period of financialized abundance, after the paranoiac nightmares of the Cold War, would increasingly appear as a kind of total, all-embracing hallucination, a system of perpetually suspended disbelief whose unstable equilibrium is maintained by the continuous computerized production of images and signs, constantly adapted by networked feedback to the changing fantasies and desires of entire populations. It is this overwhelmingly fictional world, still trembling with the shock of terrorist attack, that Dammbeck encounters in America. 


                                                      Despite the intense critique that permeates the film, something about Von Foerster’s ambiguous philosophy clearly appeals to the author of Das Netz. Indeed, the self-reflexive visual trope that recurs with subtle variations in each interview, when the filmmaker shows the subject framed between a video recorder and its real-time output on the screen of his personal computer, can be seen as an artistic homage to the constructivist epistemology of Heinz von Foerster. If an all-embracing utopia of command and control has been deconstructed, Dammbeck seems to ask, does that give us a fresh chance for face-to-face dialogue? Or does it resolve into nothing more than myriad representations of irrevocably different worlds, each of them archived solipsistically in our personal computers? This was the kind of dilemma with which the second-order cyberneticians had to grapple, when they set out on their quest to understand how the human activity of representing and modeling both natural and social processes inevitably contributed to shaping and altering those very same processes. 


                                                      On the one hand, the exploration of the individual’s ethical position within the collective activity of scientific modeling could point outside the instrumental logic of the world laboratory and beyond the notion of “experimental epistemology,” toward an ecological understanding of the interdependency of living beings. This would be the path of Gregory Bateson, of Francisco Varela, of Félix Guattari, whose work I will describe in a following essay. On the other hand, it could lead to an infinite multiplication of clearly circumscribed and incommensurable world-models, open to manipulation by anyone with a superior understanding of the modeling process and its effects on the lives of those who engage in it. This would be the path that was massively taken by the entrepreneurial cultures of the new economy, giving rise to the highly sophisticated productive devices of the control society, in which most forms of artistic creativity are now caught and instrumentalized for financial, ideological and military purposes. 


                                                      The second cybernetics would be far more expansive than the first, creating an entire universe of fictions. For the Viennese philosopher of science, even the subatomic particles studied by contemporary physicists are mere inventions, ways to patch holes in inadequate theories. Yet unlike Gödel, Von Foerster is not paranoid and betrays no particular anxiety about scientific incompleteness. “All that is relevant” he concludes in his discussion of the new subatomic models, “is how interesting a story each one invents to explain the origin of the universe.” He goes on to describe physics as a cosmological struggle between different poets, and when Dammbeck asks whether a theory full of holes isn’t an uncertain and dangerous basis for a worldwide system of networked machines, he offers this reply: 


                                                      – “ All theories are correct… because they can all be deduced from other theories… It goes on deducing indefinitely… That’s the good thing about it. You can go on forever.” 


                                                      – “ In logic,” chides the interviewer. 


                                                      – “ Yes, precisely,” replies the cybernetician. 


                                                      – “ But in reality? ” asks Dammbeck insistently. 


                                                      Von Foerster protests that there is no reality, he continues his excited gesturing. The scene is extraordinary: a wizened old man on the edge of the grave, discovering dazzling new universes. In a few minutes of candid philosophical testimony, one of the last living participants of the Macy Conferences reveals the underlying structure of the “mirror worlds” that were described in the the 1990s by the Internet enthusiast David Gelernter – the member of the Digerati who was targeted by Kaczynski. 


                                                      For Gelernter, the founder of a dotcom company, the multiplication of informational worlds is simply advantageous – it offers an easier way to contact obscure offices at his university.29 For Kaczynski, who blew off Gelernter’s hand and eye with a letter bomb, the replication of the human world in a virtual counterpart is a threat, a shattering of nature’s wholeness. For Von Foerster, the self-fragmenting structure of linguistic reflexivity is itself absolute: the cybernetic system is the unity of its infinite divergences, an infinitely expanding mirror-world inherent to humanity’s very powers of creation – and therefore, a second nature of a higher and more complex logical order. Three figures of truth dispute the stage, beyond all provability. Still it is Dammbeck’s insistent question that makes the deepest impression on our minds. Is logic the only fundament of human existence? Can representations be multiplied to infinity? Where is the ground of reality in this worldwide system of machines? 

                                                    • revolvere00
                                                      Included here is a second review. (An alternative review which is no less extensive can be found at
                                                      Message 26 of 29 , Oct 28 7:43 AM

                                                        Included here is a second review.


                                                        (An alternative review which is no less extensive can be found at https://heliosliterature.com/2015/12/16/the-net-the-unabomber-lsd-and-the-internet/)


                                                        PRELUDE 

                                                         "In 1930, Viennese mathematician Kurt Godel shakes the foundations of mathematics with his incompleteness theorems. He demonstrates that in every formal logical system there are problems that are not solvable or conclusively determinable. The truth is superior to provability."

                                                        Mathematician Kurt Godel 

                                                        THE NET 

                                                        We begin on a commuter plane travelling from Frankfurt to New York. Director Lutz Dammbeck explains that he has some interviews lined up for a film he's been working on about the evolution of information technologies. But lately he's become distracted. He explains:

                                                         "Working on this film, I chanced upon something strange. One of the most spectacular criminal cases in the US. It started very harmlessly. I noticed while setting up my new computer that many terms were already familiar to me from other contexts: multimedia, virtuality. Boundary-crossings and revolutions of all kinds, which also belonged to the agenda of avant-garde artists in the 1960's who wanted to erase the boundaries between art and life: Change Now! ... a cocktail mixing revolt, rock and pop ... fascinating! The message was: 'Everything is possible. Reality can be altered at will. You are what you want to be.'"

                                                        I interrupt to note that there is more than a mere frisson of Thelema in the message Dammbeck quotes here. It is not so great a leap, after all, from "Everything is possible. Reality can be altered at will. You are what you want to be" to Aleister Crowley's edict: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." One also detects an echo of the infamous declaration of Hassan-i Sabbah, leader of the Nizari Ismaili Assassins: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." 

                                                        I don't mean to suggest that Dammbeck intentionally implies any direct connections between the creation of the Internet, Crowley's system of Magick, and/or a Crusade-era Persian cult. I mention them only because I, myself, believe there are some interesting parallels and connections to be made in both cases, and I hope these will become more obvious as we continue exploring this film. 

                                                        Dammbeck continues: "Strange, the way these two worlds met: computer and art. Why did artists and scientists, in constructing their machines, use apparently similar patterns and concepts? Was there a secret basic pattern and system?"

                                                        'Secret basic patterns and systems...' This, in my opinion, is the red meat of parapolitical inquiry, in a nutshell. At this point, Dammbeck begins drawing a diagram, one to which he will frequently return throughout the film. 

                                                        ART / TECHNOLOGY / COMPUTER

                                                        "My research led me to a publisher in New York: John Brockman. In the 60's, he is part of the New York multimedia scene centered around John Cage, Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol. He becomes rich and famous in the 80's when multimedia art and new technologies turn into big business. Brockman becomes an agent for books by physicists, genetic researchers and computer scientists. He markets them like pop stars. In the 90's, his publishing company is the center of a global network of scientists, artists and media managers whom he refers to as the Digerati, a cyber-elite that successfully combines multimedia and business."

                                                        One of the newspaper headlines that flashes past the camera during a montage of press clippings about Brockman reads: "New Cyber-Elite?" The question mark hints at the possibility of room for skepticism and/or concern. In any case, elite seems to be the key word, here, as Brockman's coinage, Digerati, manages to conflate Glitterati - or the beautiful people - with everyone's favorite conspiracy theory bugaboo, the Illuminati, or enlightened ones. 

                                                        Dammbeck: "In 1993, John Brockman's network is hit by a bomb attack. The victim is computer scientists David Gelernter. The FBI arrests a former mathematics professor and graduate of Harvard University, Ted Kaczynski, as the perpetrator. Why would a mathematician become a terrorist? John Brockman is my first interview. He came to New York in 1963 and began his career as an investment banker."

                                                        Brockman describes the day he met avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas while playing his banjo in Central Park. They struck up a conversation, and within a day Brockman had been named director of the Film-Makers' Cinematheque. Mekas gave Brockman his mandate: to create a festival devoted to combining cinema with other forms of art. In other words, to combine film with dance, film with poetry, film with music, etc. The only requirement was, according to Brockman, that the work produce "a total derangement of the senses", a concept and strategy first expressed thusly by poet Arthur Rimbaud, and familiar today to even the most novice of psychonauts. Eventually, the Film-Maker's Cinematheque evolved into the Expanded Cinema Festival.

                                                        According to Brockman, early members of this new group or movement included such luminaries as the painter Robert Rauschenberg, the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, pioneering video artist Nam June Paik and the USCO media arts collective, among others. At one point, Brockman declares: "Nobody was talking about cybernetics at the time, but they were all reading Marshall MacLuhan." Rauschenberg gave Brockman some of the famous Canadian philosopher’s books to read, and avant-garde musician John Cage gave him another book: Norbert Wiener's immensely influential “Cybernetics”, about which a great deal more will be said later.

                                                        After learning about the Expanded Cinema Festival, A.K. Solomon, then head of bio-physics at Harvard, contacted Brockman and invited him, along with a group of cutting-edge artists, to visit Harvard's science faculty and hold a symposium on their "mutual interests” – in other words, an exploration of the increasingly blurry divide between Art with a capital A and Science with a capital S. While at Harvard, the artists are given a tour of the facilities and shown "The Computer".

                                                        It's obvious that this encounter with the near future had a lasting effect on Brockman, and not only because he was soon to leave the artistic world to become a manager of researchers and theoreticians at the cutting edge of a number of then-emerging fields of scientific study. Brockman seems inordinately comfortable with the concept of technological abstraction from mere biology.

                                                        Brockman even cracks half a smile and gets a faraway look in his eye while paraphrasing Oxford biologist  J.Z Young, saying: "We create tools, then mold ourselves to the use of them." Reading this simple statement caused Brockman to realize something: "Reality isn't some thing in front of us on a proscenium stage; it's a movable feast. We are creating technologies, then we  are the technologies. Our heart isn't like a pump, it  is a pump. Our brain isn't like a computer it  is a computer. Until the next thing comes along. Now you're a neural net. Now you're an information system." 

                                                        After the Harvard symposium, Brockman's circle was no longer restricted to artists and so began to widen, allowing in the likes of World Cyberneticists Organization dean Heinz von Foerster, Ecology of Mind theoretician Gregory Bateson and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand.

                                                        As a brief aside, I would like to point out that von Foerster was co-creator in 1960 of the so-called Doomsday Equation, a group of formulae which mathematically prove that, based on all available historical data at that time, population growth would essentially become INFINITE by Friday, November 13, 2026. Thus does he represent this film's first tangential shiver in the direction of that other great parapolitical bugaboo, population control.

                                                        At this point, Dammbeck brings up the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who apparently used journalist John Markoff's New York Times profiles of various Brockman circle insiders to find targets for his letter-bomb terror campaign. Brockman, perhaps understandably, becomes defensive and stand-offish, suggesting that Kaczynski had to kill people to get his manifesto published simply because it was so poorly written. With that, he ends the interview, and Dammbeck treats us to a montage of images representing modern urban life. We see streets lit up with neon and high-powered LEDs, a building-sized outdoor Wall Street stock ticker, and a library computer room where hundreds of webcams stare down at the users, unblinking, monitoring their every move.
                                                         
                                                         Dammbeck: "John Brockman's reaction to my question about Ted Kaczynski surprises me. What is this 'Manifesto' that he mentions? Between 1978 and 1995, the USA is shaken by a series of bomb attacks. Three people are killed and 23 are injured, some of them seriously. The bombing targets are major airline executives and scientists at select universities. FBI investigators assume the attacks are the work of a single, intelligent person whom they code-name the Unabomber, a computer abbreviation of the words 'universities' and 'airlines'. In 1995, the New York Times and the Washington Post receive letters in which a previously unknown terror group, FC (Freedom Club), claims it will discontinue the attacks when its demand for the publication of a Manifesto are met. On August 2, 1995, the FBI sanctions the pre-printing of the 56-page Manifesto, which leads to the arrest of mathematician Ted Kaczynski. On reading the text, David Kaczynski recognizes quotes from his brother Ted, and at his wife's insistence contacts the FBI. In 1996, the FBI arrests Ted Kaczynski in the wilds of Montana where he has been living for 25 years in a self-built cabin."

                                                        Two things, here. First, I find it difficult to believe that Dammbeck wasn't aware of the Unabomber's Manifesto - also known as Industrial Society and its Future - before beginning work on his documentary. Second, we see him executing a Google search that pulls up a page with the headline: "How sane is Ted Kaczynski?" I feel that this is a not-so-subtle attempt by Dammbeck to get us, the viewer, to ponder that very question.

                                                        Dammbeck: "My next interview is with Brockman's friend and client, Stewart Brand. We meet in Sausalito, a former fishing village close to San Francisco. During the 60's, Stewart Brand belongs to the scene of hippies and artists who live in houseboats at the edge of Sausalito."
                                                         
                                                        "The author  Ken Kesey is a central figure in this scene. In 1960, Kesey is one of the student 'guinea pigs' employed to test  LSD in a project commissioned by the American government. Then he goes on tour with musicians and the  Merry Pranksters theater group in order to conduct so-called 'acid tests' promoting LSD and other drugs that turn consciousness into an open system... an alternative form of cybernetics." 

                                                        "Stewart Brand was one of those 'alternative cyberneticists' and today he still maintains a small office and studio in Sausalito. Brand coined the term  personal computer and during the 60's he published the  Whole Earth Catalog, a mail-order catalog for the counter-cultural lifestyle. In the 80's, on a houseboat in Sausalito, he sets up the first ever alternative computer network:  The Well. In the 90's, he works as a consultant for the California computer industry. What brings computers, LSD and hippies together?" 

                                                        One of the first things we find out about Brand is that, like so many movers and shakers in the booming 60’s counterculture, he was military. While based at Fort Dix, New Jersey, Brand would spend his weekends in New York City’s East Village, hanging out with an artistic crowd that included painter Steve Durkee and the aforementioned John Brockman and USCO. 

                                                        After moving West, Brand encountered Ken Kesey through his work as a government photographer at an Indian reservation in Oregon. He read Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with the character Chief Broom, who was portrayed as having come from the very reservation where Brand was working as a photographer. Brand contacted Kesey, who invited him to join the bus. 

                                                         Brand discusses his time on the bus with Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, going "from acid test to acid test”. Part of their entourage was an improvisational rock group called The Warlocks, who would eventually become The Grateful Dead. Brand describes his participation with the early movement thusly: "Scientists do research. We were doing search. If you don't boil the rocks and drink the water, how do you know it won't make you drunk?" He describes some of the experiments they conducted, including one interesting bit of play with a chopped up garden hose. They would take a bunch of ten foot lengths of hose and talk into one end while listening into another, so they knew who they were listening to, but not to whom they were speaking.

                                                         The Whole Earth Catalog project “specifically came out of an LSD afternoon”. Brand had dropped 200 micro-grams and was meditating on a series of lectures given by Buckminster Fuller. The original audience for the publication was communes – people who were trying to re-invent civilization. That fell to the wayside – another dead-end, like drug culture, according to Brand – while some of the technologies really took off, such as alternative energy and personal computers.  The main legacy of the 60's, according to Brand, is the "open-system approach" to doing things.

                                                         Dammbeck brings up the fact that the early Whole Earth Catalogs presented a conflicted worldview, featuring books and products that were both anti-technology and pro-technology. Brand agrees, and admits that they eventually came down on the pro-technology side. He explains that there are benefits to the proliferation of and easy access to technology. "Grab it, run with it and do what you want with it. If the tech becomes democratized, then everything will work out OK. If you fail to do that, then they have complete freedom to as evil as they can be." Then again, who ended up in Thoreau's cabin? The Unabomber! Brand quotes computer scientist Bill Joy as saying Ted Kaczynski is correct about some things. For instance, what if Weapons of Mass Destruction were democratized? Brand says that these are fair questions, but believes the situation will eventually sort itself out.

                                                        [An Excerpt from "Industrial Society and Its Future" by FC :
                                                        The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. Continuing scientific and technical progress will destroy the freedom of the individual. Soon, there will be no place left where an individual can hide from mind control and surveillance by super computers. It would be hopeless to attack the system without employing modern technology ourselves. We must use all forms of media in order to spread our message. Nature makes a perfect counter-ideal to the technological system. The sooner this system collapses, the better it will be for mankind.]

                                                        As Dammbeck heads to Boston to further investigate the philosophical roots of the cybernetics revolution, it is revealed that he has struck up a correspondence with Ted Kaczynski, who is being held in a Florence, Colorado maximum security penitentiary.

                                                        Kaczynski writes: "Dear Mr Dammbeck, thank you very much for your letter and your questions, which I shall endeavour to answer. I use this opportunity to improve my knowledge of the German language. I am not a scientist. Thirty years ago, I was a mathematician, but I have now forgotten most of what I knew about mathematics. I believe that utopias are crazy and dangerous, especially the utopia of a technological society. Technology is a totally willful and extremely dangerous force that will lead us where it must inevitably lead us. This will not be determined by chance, nor by the despotism of arrogant bureaucrats, politicians or scientists. The technological system need merely adapt human behaviour to its own demands. This is necessary in order that it can function and continue to expand itself. You asked me some things about the Manifesto. All the published versions of the Manifesto are incorrect. They contain serious errors. If you would like a correct version of the Manifesto, I could send you one. You may continue writing to me in German."

                                                        Dammbeck: "How does a utopia emerge? Does it come into being by chance, are there one or more inventors ... or is there a plan? It is at MIT that an American and international science and engineering elite are educated. MIT also leads the way in the close partnership between the military and the University system. This collaboration begins in WWI and continues during WWII, when technology becomes a deciding factor in warfare. On August 13, 1940, the German Luftwaffe begins the Battle of Britain."

                                                        “Shortly after the start of the German bombings, mathematician and physicist Norbert Wiener, born in Chicago in 1886, offered his knowledge and expertise in the fight against fascism. Wiener is professor of maths at MIT and had already dealt with questions of ballistics and artillery during WWI. How do you build a machine that can calculate in advance the movement of fighter planes, so that you can shoot them down? Wiener must take into account the nature of technological warfare, in which people, ships and planes are just abstract blips on the radar screen. The pilot becomes one with his plane. The boundary between man and machine becomes blurred, and what emerges is a mechanized anonymous opponent whose actions can be modeled in war labs."

                                                        “Although Wiener's machines are not operational until after the end of the war, he develops from this starting point the model for a new science, known as cybernetics. Cybernetics is concerned with how the transfer of information functions in machines and living beings. The basis of cybernetics is the assumption that the human nervous system does not reproduce reality, but calculates it. Man now appears to be no more than an information-processing system... thought is data processing, and the brain is a machine made of flesh."
                                                         
                                                        "The brain is no longer the place where "ego" and "identity" are mysteriously created through memory and consciousness. It is a machine consisting of switching and controlling circuits, feedback loops and communication nodes. A black box where cause is effect and effect is cause within an infinite cycle... a closed feedback system with input and output that can be controlled and calculated, no longer, as previously, starting out from the contemplation of nature, but from indisputable mathematics and logic. " 

                                                        "Wiener's vision of a future cybernetic society now provides the scientific legitimacy for the new political-military status of the United States as a superpower. Cybernetics becomes the leading new science worldwide, and from that point on continues to develop under diverse labels. A theory becomes worldwide practice."

                                                        Another letter from Kaczynski: "As I now have a little more time, I'll continue with my answer to your letter. You ask: What will a post-technological society look like? Well, if all modern technology were abolished, we only know there'd be no more bio-technology, computers, atomic bombs, etc. Let's stick to the practical and the concrete: Would you like it if people lived in a virtual world? If machines were smarter than people? If, in the future, people, animals and plants were products of technology? If you don't like these ideas, then for you the computer and biological sciences clearly are dangerous. This is very simple, and bears no relation to morality or to Godel's incompleteness theorems or other abstract philosophical issues. You offered to send a gift that would please me. I would like to take you up on that offer. My German dictionary is small, not very good and falling apart. I'd really like to receive a good German-English dictionary. But you are not allowed to send one with a hard cover."
                                                        The Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley, CA 

                                                        Dammbeck pays a visit to the curiously low-tech-seeming Computer History Museum and interviews one of the curators. While the camera roves across rack after rack of dusty, antiquated electronics, the curator tells us: "In the Cold War, with World War II over now, us turning our attentions to the Russians, we needed various ways to, one, literally protect our skies, and two, to give the people of the US a feeling of security. And that's where SAGE came in."

                                                        He continues: "SAGE is the largest computer ever made. ... We have less than 10 percent of one SAGE machine. The first wide-scale use of modems was on this machine. And how it worked was, you'd actually see a blip on the screen that was moving, and you would access that blip with a light gun by actually clicking on it. And if there was any information on air traffic control, it would show up in one area. And if not, then the intercept technician would have to have it shot down. And you can see the large screen here. ... It was a decentralized network, so if a bomb was to take out one of them, you could still control the output and the inputs from another station. So it was very influential in the early days of the ARPANET with a lot of the whole concept of, you know, being able to keep the network running if you lose one of the nodes. ... A very, very advanced system. ... You also had a cigarette lighter and ashtray so that if you were smoking, you could keep from going insane." 

                                                        We return to the diagram. Dammbeck adds the Vietnam War and Berkeley to it while a voice-over narrates: "To go back to Ted Kaczynski, in 1958, the 16 year old with an IQ of 170 begins his studies in mathematics at Harvard University. In 1967, he becomes a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. Why does Ted end up among those opposed to technology, rather than become a fervent computer-hippie like Brand or Brockman? Where does his later fear of computers and psychological control techniques, like those being developed at the time in secret US labs, actually derive from?"

                                                        We are treated to some disturbing archival footage of a lab technician nonchalantly tossing a little white mouse into a clear perspex box with a calico cat. The cat pounces on the mouse. Then the cat is injected with a heroic dose of LSD and the mouse game is repeated. Now, the cat is mortally terrified of the mouse. The scientists watch, cool and dispassionate, then carefully take note of the data for potential future application on all tomorrow's battlefields.

                                                        Dammbeck: "How do individual computers develop into world-wide computer networks? This is the task that former NASA engineer Robert Taylor is working on at the end of the 60s. Taylor is one of the young engineers and scientists who are so enthusiastic about Wiener's cybernetics and the first computers. The rocket specialist from NASA soon transfers to the Pentagon where he becomes a scientific manager. There he makes decisions on Defense Department funding for research projects for University laboratories, companies or individual scientists. He decides who is going to get in on the action and who isn't. The ARPANET, which was developed under his direction during the 70s, is the original form of today's Internet and of all communication networks on today's fully electronic battlefield."

                                                        Taylor: "ARPA was founded in 1957 or 58 as a result of SPUTNIK, which occurred in October of 57 and it greatly surprised the USA. We had no idea. In 58, very soon after Sputnik, Eisenhower asked the Department of Defense to set up a special agency called ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to look for research projects that had a longer-term expectation associated with it in the hopes that we would not get surprised again. So the initial ARPA programs were all space-related, not computer research, by and large. Then, in 1960, NASA was formed by Kennedy. And the ARPA space programs were all transferred to NASA. By 61, 62, that left ARPA the opportunity to do other things. And one of the things they decided to get into was computer research. For my office and some of the other offices, however, the policy was: 'Go find people with really big ideas that you think might work, and if they do work, the payoff will be very large.'"
                                                        Robert Taylor Dammbeck asks Taylor to draw a diagram of the network, which he does. As he does so, Taylor debunks the idea that ARPANET was designed with the intent to create a network of computers without a central command node in case a nuclear bomb took out one important area, so that the network could keep running. Taylor says it was created simply to connect people from different areas to share common interests and work together on them. "The Internet is simply an evolution of the ARPANET, both in philosophy and in technology. ... The first Internet was up and running in 75/76 when we put the Ethernet and the ARPANET together. So those were good years. There was a lot to do and it was obvious what there was to do, and all these things had to work together. That was a lot of fun." 

                                                        As Taylor sketches out a network, a familiar image emerges...
                                                        Dammbeck replies: "For you it was a lot of fun, but other people saw it as a cancer, or a machine that could control. What do you think about such critics like Ted Kaczynski?"
                                                        Taylor provides another over-the-top reaction, mirroring that given earlier by John Brockman: "He's crazy. He's... we have people like that in our society."
                                                        Dammbeck continues: "But he was a mathematician, studied at Harvard."
                                                        Taylor responds: "Yep. Hitler was an artist. He studied in Vienna."
                                                        Dammbeck asks: "Have you read the Manifesto?"
                                                        Taylor responds: "You mean Mein Kampf? No. I didn't read it. I didn't read Mein Kampf, either."

                                                        Dammbeck then asks Taylor what he fears. Taylor says that he fears "Al Qaeda" and "cancer". When Dammbeck points out that cancer "is an illness of modern society, of civilization", Taylor responds: "But someday, I believe we will understand how to cure cancer or prohibit cancer. I believe that will happen long before we have an electronic battlefield or a machine that we can't control. ... It's a question of knowledge. Of eliminating ignorance: a state of no knowledge. Not stupidity. That's something else. Ignorance causes fear." 

                                                        With a decade's hindsight, I find that there is something almost touchingly naive about the techno-supremacist cyber-optimism Taylor displays. Today, cancer rates continue their meteoric rise, and the skies are filled with unmanned drones remote-controlled from bases half a world away. The electronic battlefield is already here. The cure for cancer? Perhaps it exists, but if so, the news certainly hasn't trickled down to us Useless Eaters. As for machines we can't control, we'll find out soon enough.

                                                        Partially a propos, I would like point out that the the creators of Ethernet chose that name specifically as an homage to the 19th century idea of a luminiferous aether, which was a kind of universal light-bearing medium posited to explain light's behavior. Check out this page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether] for a fascinating look at how history's greatest minds struggled with this problem, cobbling together a patchwork of best-guesstimates and "whatever fits" theories in order to form some kind of workable pseudo-consensus on the subject, back in the days before relativity and quantum physics. It is a bracing tonic against the intoxicating effects of mechanism, scientism and logical positivism.

                                                        Systems, systems, everywhere Manhattan, New York. Dammbeck pauses to take stock. "What do I have thus far? I have a former mathematician, but none of my interview partners want to talk about his criticism of the system. And I have engineers and artists who are obsessed with technology. All of this is obviously part of a 'system' whose outlines I am only just beginning to grasp. To all appearances, it's an ingenious feedback system that turns every attack and disruption into an energy source with which to protect itself. Who would need such a thing? Who would come up with something like this?"

                                                        I'll give you three guesses... "Between 1946 and 1953, at the invitation of the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation, leading scientists from various fields meet in New York. They include Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Kurt Lewin and John von Neumann. The aim of these secret meetings, later known as the Macy Conferences, and sporadically attended by CIA representatives, is to develop a science that makes it possible to predict and control human behavior. This is a weapon that America desperately needs in the Cold War, on the new battlefield of the subconscious. The Macy Group therefore registers particular interest in the 1950 study 'The Authoritarian Personality', released by the International Institute of Social Research, a new foundation of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, centered around Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno."

                                                        Horkheimer and Adorno "This study, then the most comprehensive social profile of a society, the USA, aimed to give a scientific explanation for religious and racial prejudice. Thousands of interviews lead to a huge collection of data, which are analyzed by the most up-to-date computers with the aim of answering one particular question: How does authoritarian behavior as a mass phenomenon develop? The authors see the explanation in man's 'authoritarian matrix', which offers the key to the psychology of fascism and totalitarian systems. This matrix is shaped through education and tradition, and it is apparently indissolubly linked to the metaphysical notion of 'supra-naturally created nature'. How could a tendency towards fascism and racism, especially against Jews, be tracked and explained? To this end, sociologists create, among other things, a scale to measure the fascist potential, the so-called F-scale."

                                                        The F Scale "In addition, previously concealed personality tendencies are to be tracked, using the latest psychological processes, for example, tests conceived by the American psychologist Henry A Murray, one of the fathers of today's assessment centers. In order to permanently obstruct fascism and anti-Semitism, it seems necessary to alter the nature of man and his underlying cultural patterns so that the authoritarian matrix would be eradicated forever."

                                                        Henry A Murray   "How is it possible, ruling out some bloody operation, to penetrate deep into a person's consciousness with the aim of changing it? First, according to Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, a member of the Macy Group, the old values and balances must be destroyed, in order to make conditions 'fluid'. Then it is possible to establish new balances and values. These, then, must be permanently fixed by means of self-regulation ... re-education will then develop into self-re-education. This would transform the world into a post-national, multi-ethnic global society, with no fixed borders."

                                                        Kurt Lewin "The Macy Group believes it can offer the tools and blueprints for this New World Order: New and faster computers, system theory and model cybernetic worlds with which it appears possible to control and direct all scientific, cultural and political spheres. This also promises the programming of new people, anti-authoritarian people, made to measure."

                                                        If you'd been wondering why so many military men and technocrats had taken a sudden interest in the arts and popular culture in the post-war years - even going so far as to spearhead the psychedelic drugs movement - the dark implications implicit in the above paragraphs represent a trembling finger pointing towards a direction that would be obvious if it weren't so utterly horrifying. I find it both strange and intriguing that Dammbeck never goes so far as to connect the panoply of dots that he presents, here, leaving most of the intellectual heavy lifting to the viewer. Perhaps he simply doesn't see what I'm seeing. Perhaps he felt the evidence he'd uncovered wasn't strong enough in and of itself to merit any kind of outright accusation.  Perhaps this is why I, too, will leave it at that for now as we move towards the next section of Dammbeck's doc.
                                                        Ludwig Wittgenstein Another note from Ted Kaczynski: "In your last letter, you asked me so many questions that I cannot possibly answer them all at once. When I wrote that the concept of utopia is crazy and dangerous, I didn't mean that all utopias are crazy and dangerous, but rather the utopia which makes possible the creation of a society according to a specific, ideal design. You yourself, I am sure, will have your own idea of utopia. Someone else will have a different idea, which may diverge considerably from yours. How would you like it if he forced his utopia on you? Do you have the right to force your utopia on him? I would like to write more to you in answer to these and other questions, but some serious problems have cropped up which are causing me a great deal of worry. So I will close this letter here. I'll write more to you later."

                                                        I note with interest that Kaczynski's concern over the critical flaws in the very concept of utopia is mirrored, more of less, by two of the most influential conservative movement philosophers of the 20th century: Leo Strauss and, more particularly, Eric Vogelin. They, of course, come to much different conclusions about how to deal with this problem in society.

                                                        Dammbeck shows us images of a New Age retreat, complete with hippie headbands and high-heeled trophy wives picking up their power crystals, and narrates: “At places like this in Esalen, a conference and esotericism center on the coast of California, artists meet with members of the Macy Conferences during the 70s. They are interested in a new spirituality brought about with the help of cybernetics and drugs and in the popularization of the Macy visions. Besides Brand and Brockman, the participants include gurus of the avant-garde, such as John Cage and Buckminster Fuller. As a result, the concept of cybernetics and system theory reach the international networks of the bohemian world, and so acquire a different, non-military aura. At one of the meetings in Esalen, Heinz von Foerster, the physicist and philosopher, also takes part." 

                                                        Remember me? "Born in Vienna in 1911, Foerster, already as a student, comes into contact with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the scientists of the Vienna Circle, the early prophets of cybernetics and system theory. In the US, in 1953, Foerster becomes the secretary of the Macy Conferences and so has access to the inner circles of America's scientific elite. Foerster is one of the pioneers of the theory of Constructivism, according to which we human beings construct our own reality. No objective reality exists independent of the observer. During the 60s, Heinz von Foerster is head of his own research laboratory, the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois. Here, commissioned by research departments of the US Navy and Air Force, he works on, among other projects, the merging of digital and biological systems. He has never owned a computer of his own because he apparently believes himself to be a more sophisticated machine."
                                                        Look at me now! Foerster cuts a very Strangelovian figure in his wheelchair, with his weird, gasping breathing as he sucks at his cup of coffee. He says: "When I read the (Wittgenstein's) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for the first time, I was really thrilled. Immediately, I could recite the whole Tractatus by heart, but I never found anyone with whom I could discuss it. ... What I see, and what I believe lies beneath your questioning, is that science, or 'sciencia' in Latin, has been amazingly successful in the 2000 years since Aristotle. And what does 'sciencia' derive from? The Indo-European word for 'sciencia' is the word 'scy', and that is found in 'science' and in 'schizophrenia', and in 'schism', that is the word meaning 'to separate', and so systemics is a parallel development, only it's the exact opposite of science, for it integrates. When you think about it today, all this system theory and systems research which crops up in both art and science, I wouldn't call that science any more. I would call it systemics. Today's science has moved on to an approach that sees things together: systemics. So I would see the steps taken today as being from science to systemics."

                                                        Foerster then makes some startling assertions: "In the course of my life, the more I concerned myself with physics, I realized that I was actually a meta-physicist. And then I increasingly played with that idea. And if you asked me, my dear Heinz von Foerster, what is a meta-physicist? I would say the following: There are questions among those we ask about the world that it is possible to answer. How old are you? Well, you can look that up in a catalog. Born in 1911. That means he is 90. Or you can ask questions which cannot be answered, like for example, tell me what was the origin of the universe? Well, then I could give you one of the 35 different theories. Ask an astronomer and he says there was this Big Bang about 20 million years ago. Or ask a good Catholic and he says everyone knows that God created the world and after 7 days he was weary and took a break, and that was Sunday. So there are different, very interesting hypotheses about the origins of the universe. That is, there are so many different hypotheses because the question cannot be answered. So all that is relevant is how interesting the story is that someone invents to explain it."

                                                        Dammbeck replies: "Of course, we are very close to art there. If it's a matter of inventing a good story, a poetic story..."
                                                        Foerster agrees: "Exactly, exactly. That's what it is. There is a struggle between two or three or even ten different poets. Who can invent a funny, amusing or interesting story so that everyone immediately thinks that's what must have happened!"
                                                        Dammbeck: "But science, and your own research, those are not just inventions or good stories? Surely they're based on mathematics, on numbers, on provability, on indisputable scientific data?"
                                                        Foerster: "Well, yes, but these days there is already so much data that it is no longer possible to include all the different data in your story. And then artificial data is invented, for example, particles... Then particles are invented that do whatever it is we don't understand. So in my opinion, particles are always the solutions to problems that we can't solve any other way. That is, they are inventions that help to explain certain problems. Those are particles. ... I maintain that each particle we read about in today's physics is the answer to a question that we can't answer."
                                                        Dammbeck: "But that's terrible! How can we let a worldwide networked system of machines grow more or less into infinity if it is based on theories that apparently have holes or are only good stories, I mean on such shaky foundations? Isn't that dangerous?"
                                                        Foerster: "Well, in this worldwide functioning system of machines, all theories are correct. And of course that's what people want. And why are they correct? Because they can all be deduced from other theories and stories. ... It goes on deducing indefinitely. ... That's the good thing about it. You can go on forever."
                                                        Dammbeck asks: "In logic?"
                                                        Foerster answers: "Yes, precisely."
                                                        Dammbeck probes further: "But in reality?"
                                                        To which Foerster replies: "Where is reality? Can you show it to me?"

                                                        Reality, apparently After finishing up his interview with Foerster, Dammbeck returns to the subjects of the Unabomber, LSD and the CIA: "In 1971, Professor of Mathematics Ted Kaczynski resigns from his position at the University of Califorina, Berkeley and builds a cabin in the wilderness of Montana. Has he taken the vague offer in Stewart Brand's catalog too seriously, of a different, a simple life in harmony with nature? Is he seeking, in a strict, self-experiment, true experience and a reality that, within the infinite sphere of mathematics and logic, has dissolved into abstract mathematical structures and formulae? When does this experiment reach its limits and demand to be stepped up? When does it click, when does his flight from math and logic become a flight into paranoia, as the media later assume? Into paranoia like that of his fellow mathematician Kurt Godel, who, with his incompleteness theorem, posed one of the questions that cannot be answered, and also reached a limit beyond which there was only paranoia, or truth? On the Internet I find references of secret drug tests carried out by the CIA at Harvard University during the early 60s. One of the test participants was Ted Kaczynski. The director of the experiments was the psychologist Henry A Murray, co-founder of the Department for Social Relations at Harvard."

                                                        Kaczynski's ironic code name: "Lawful" A new note from Ted Kaczynski: "Your idea that the foundations of science and mathematics have been shaken by Godel's theorem is incorrect. All that Godel's theorem says is that certain problems in mathematics will never be solved. When I was young and naive, I was afraid that technology would create a completely ordered, regulated and totally perfect world. Today, I think that such an outcome is unlikely. But the reason for my change of mind was certainly not Godel's theorem. Rather, the incalculability of the behavior of complex and open systems. Do you want to live in a world where scientists and superhuman machines know and understand everything, and therefore can order and regulate everything? If you don't like the sound of that, why do you complain that science doesn't know everything, and that there are holes in theory? Instead, you should be worrying that science knows too much. I must stop here. Thank you very much for the dictionary."

                                                        Harvard, Cambridge Massachusetts. Dammbeck explains: "In 1953, Kaczynski, along with 20 other Harvard students, is selected as a test subject for studies on the personality structure of highly gifted male college students. All students are given a code name. Kaczynski's is LAWFUL. The experiments are directed by psychologist Henry A Murray, a highly decorated major of the US Army during World War II."
                                                         
                                                        Major Murray adds a decoration "Murray developed a system of tests to study the leadership qualities of officers for the Department of Psychological Warfare of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Service, a precursor to the CIA.
                                                        Picky, picky, picky The tests take place in the secret Station S, a villa near Washington DC, and are intended to show how elite groups behave under psychological pressure.

                                                        The Stress Situation But Murray envisages more important tasks for psychology. Like the authors of the study on The Authoritarian Personality, who employ his testing methods, Murray sees psychology and the new social sciences as destined to make a contribution to a world that can live in peace and harmony. In a New World Order, with world laws, a world police force and world government, the USA, according to Murray, 'is the abstraction of ONE WORLD which we are on the verge of creating. The lot has fallen to the US to take over the direction of carrying out this last and difficult experiment: a global campaign of good against evil. By completely dedicating ourselves to the idea of a one world government, we will stir the hearts of all people on earth with the hope of a security that can counter any form of totalitarianism. The national citizen is obsolete, and must be transformed into a world citizen.'"

                                                        Conspiracy Theory or Conspiracy Fact? "To effect this transformation, scientists commissioned by the CIA also employ LSD 25, a new synthetic drug that has been developed by Sandoz, a Swiss company. How can a drug be used to break through a person's subconscious, in order to program it in a new way? Murray, at his institute at Harvard, is himself obsessed with the idea of developing a superego, that will immunize the proposed World Citizen against all forms of totalitarianism. He develops a system of tests that are designed to expose students to extreme psychological stress. The goal of these tests is a complete investigation into personality, so that desirable character patterns may then be created and controlled. At the same time, LSD shows up on the Harvard campus, distributed in the form of sugar cubes. With Murray's approval, Timothy Leary, a young psychology professor, has established an LSD research project at Harvard, co-directed by the CIA."

                                                        Turn on, tune in, drop dead "Together with Leary, Murray participates in drug trips himself. Is he continuing, as reported on the Internet, his earlier OSS experiments, though now for the CIA? These experiments, carried out between 1953 and 1964, under code names such as MK-Ultra and Artichoke, reputedly developed special psychological control techniques and involved scientists from most of America's elite universities. To what end does Murray plan to use the 'sacred Mexican mushroom', an hallucinogenic mushroom native to Mexico and the model for synthetic LSD? All of Murray's experiments are filmed. Those films, like all the test results on Ted Kaczynski, have disappeared." In context, it strikes one as doubly and sadly ironic when Dammbeck presents a montage of news clips attempting to portray Ted Kaczynski as being a schizophrenic with paranoid delusions and "unreasonable" fears that government agents and psychologists might be trying to control his mind in some fashion. The fact is... they were.

                                                        Smithsonian bound? Another letter from Ted Kaczynski: "In your last letter you asked me about the mathematician's imagination. You probably assume that mathematicians always imagine something mathematical. But that's not true. Experienced mathematicians seldom think of mathematics. Usually, they imagine flowers, sunshine and birds singing in spring. Perhaps now and then they think about women, but they don't do that very often, for they are pure in heart. How is it, you will ask, that mathematicians don't think of mathematics constantly? I must tell you that mathematicians are not scientists. They are artists. Do you remember that I wrote to you at the beginning that I was not a scientist? Apart from the most elementary mathematics, like arithmetic or high school algebra, the symbols, formulae and words of math have no meaning at all. The entire structure of pure math is a monstrous swindle, simply a game, a reckless prank. You may well ask: Are there no renegades to reveal the truth? Yes, of course. But the facts are so incredible, that no one takes them seriously. So the secret is in no danger."

                                                        Dammbeck: "In 1971, Ted Kaczynski becomes a resident of Lincoln, Montana. His neighbors are a sawmill owner, Butch Gehring, and Lincoln's piano teacher, Chris Waits. Butch and his friend Chris help FBI agents during the surveillance and arrest of their neighbor, Ted. On orders of the FBI, Chris searches for and finds a second cabin belonging to Ted: allegedly the secret workshop where he makes bombs. This is important evidence for the FBI's theory: Ted Kaczynski is the Unabomber."

                                                        Butch and Chris Seventy FBI agents hunker down at the 7-Up Ranch, working on computers, helping the dozens of agents disguised as truckers, geologists, etc. How did they get Ted? The locals told the FBI to go out on the road by his cabin and yell "Hey Ted!" until he came out, and he would walk right up to them. And that's exactly what they did, and that's exactly what Ted did.

                                                        Another note from Ted: "You asked me: How can a person defend himself against the pressure to contribute to the realization of any old utopia? Who gives him the right to use violence against them? In my opinion, the use of violence, e.g. against the realization of the utopia of a technological society, is mere self-defense. One can argue with that, of course. If you believe it unseemly or immoral, then you yourself must avoid the use of violence. But I have one question for you in that context: What kind of violence has caused more harm in the history of mankind: the violence that was sanctioned by the state, or the violence that was used, without sanction, by individuals? I'll go into the other questions you asked later. Until then I have other work to do."

                                                        Dammbeck: "In 1993, the computer scientist David Gelernter receives a letter bomb. He loses an eye and his right hand in the explosion. Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale University and leading scientist at Mirror Worlds, a company that produces software for e-commerce and for the new information technologies. Mirror Worlds is also the title of the book that made Gelernter famous, depicting the vision of a future virtual society based only on software. Gelernter is a sharp critic of the American media, which he accuses of destroying the country's moral value system with their lust for sex, blood and violence."
                                                         
                                                        Mirror Worlds Gelernter: "The idea of Mirror Worlds, the book, was that the institutions and the organizations that we deal with every day, that are becoming more complicated all the time, would be mirrored in software, so that if I wanted to know what was happening at the university, I could look at the software image of the university and find out what was being taught and who was saying what and what was happening today and so forth, if I wanted to, and if I needed to deal with a government agency, or with a company, or with a hospital, or with any organization, the organization would be reflected in software like a building reflected in water. And the software version of the organization would be easier for me to understand and to deal with. It seemed to me that with the rise of global computer networks, and more and more powerful desktop computers, that this would inevitably emerge."
                                                        David Gelertner Gelertner, again: "Nobody can control it, that's true. But it's not necessarily bad. It's an organic system, it's a distributed system. It's a system made of many tens of hundreds of millions of human beings, each one making his own decisions. And the uncontrolability is not necessarily bad. It makes things interesting. Certainly there are conflicting trends. For a long time, the quality of American journalism declined because we at Yale University and American universities were not training students. ... But on the other hand, we're now seeing new... it's easier to have a new TV station. It's easier to have a new newspaper. ... So technology helps to correct the errors that technology helped create in the first place."

                                                        Gelertner is not amused Dammbeck asks: "But, David, what's the outcome of more and more TV stations? When you got a letter bomb, that wasn't virtual. That was reality. And you the victim. And it was of course perpetrated, it was a real feast for the media. There were even portrayed together in a fictional dialogue. Why did you criticize the media for that?"

                                                        Gelernter: "It strikes me as always dangerous to approach human life as if there were no moral component. As if a murderer and a normal human being are comparable and interchangeable. That's a point of view with catastrophic implications: moral relativism, which I am implacably against and always will be."

                                                        Dammbeck: "As I prepared the film I had a talk also with Stewart Brand, you know him as a fellow digeratti, and he said to me this is a genuine counter-culture phenomenon that the Unabomber was doing. He was just saying culture is going in the wrong direction, I will fight it."

                                                        Gelernter: "I think that's a contemptible, that's a despicable thing to say. It's a despicable thing to say. We're talking about somebody who murdered human beings. If he'd met the widow and the children as I have, of men this criminal has murdered, he would be less eager to describe him as a mere counter-cultural phenomenon. That's the sort of thing that makes me angry. Once a man is a murderer, I don't give a damn what his opinions are. His opinions are of no interest to me. What I know about him is that he's a murderer, a creator of pain and suffering, and his opinions are disqualified from being of interest to any civilized human being."

                                                        One might excuse Gelernter his grandiose wallowing in a romanticized idealization of his status as a Unabomber Survivor. He is, after all, both a movement conservative and a public intellectual, and victimhood is their stock in trade. However, what is less forgivable is Gelernter's own willful moral relativism, implicit in his petulant refusal to be honest about the fact that most of the funding for the projects envisioned by he and his "digerati" cohort has historically come from the military/industrial/intelligence complex - a combine that has been the cause of suffering many orders of magnitude greater than that which Gelernter has had to endure - and that these projects, themselves, have more often than not been a source of suffering by wreaking economic havoc in the name of progress, helping to destroy the middle class and widening the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots in both the "developed" and "developing" worlds.

                                                        Florence, Colorado Last letter from Ted Kaczynski: "Dear Mr Dammbeck, I shall now continue my answer to your letters. You asked, who is entitled to establish the law? I maintain that no one is entitled to do so. In civilized societies, we usually say that the state establishes the laws. In non-civilized societies, customs and habits establish the laws. If people reject the standards of law laid down by the state and/or customs, and actively fight against it that is known as revolution. Of course, no one gives us the right to that. If you believe it is immoral, you must avoid participating in any revolution. But revolution is the only means by which people can resist the technological system. You asked me why I haven't sent you a copy of the authentic version of the Manifesto yet. But I don't have an authentic version. I have two photocopies of the original manuscript, but they are illegible in part. I have two very legible transcripts of the Manifesto, but both contain mistakes. I am in the process of producing an authentic version of the Manifesto by comparing the four versions I mentioned. But I don't have time to finish the job... because I have to answer so many letters! So I'd rather you didn't ask me so many questions. My biography is unimportant, and I don't want to talk about it. Let us talk about matters that are important. Respectfully yours, Ted Kaczynski." 

                                                        Dammbeck sums up his film thusly: "The mathematician Kurt Godel died in 1978 as a consequence of his paranoia. The mathematician Ted Kaczynski is sentenced to life imprisonment in 1998. Against his wishes, an agreement is made among the defense, the state prosecutor and the court before the trial even begins: no regular trial, no being committed to a psychiatric unit, no death sentence and no possibility of parole. Ted Kaczynski continues to this day to deny that he was the Unabomber."

                                                        THE END 

                                                        AFTERWORD / POST-SCRIPT

                                                        There exists a great deal of media to which one might refer to add further dimensions of contextual understanding as regards the many topics examined, broached and brushed against in Dammbeck's extraordinary film. For instance, it would make an excellent companion piece to two other documentaries: Fog of War, Errol Morris' documentary about Robert Macnamara, and the 3-part BBC documentary series by Adam Curtis entitled The Trap, which is also about cybernetics, the Frankfurt School, and covers many of the same concerns raised in The Net, only much more directly and with less of an air of mystery. All three

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                                                      • evola_as_he_is
                                                        As recalled in The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies , some of the cult male prostitutes devoted to the mother goddess are described
                                                        Message 27 of 29 , Dec 30, 2016

                                                          As recalled in 'The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies', some of the cult male prostitutes devoted to the mother goddess are described in ancient texts as being « neither male nor female », that is, as « eunuchs ». There are three words for « eunuchs » in Sumerian : kurgarra, girbadara, and sagursag. It would however appear that much has been lost in translation, as explained somehow clumsily here :


                                                          « There are many creatures mentioned in the Sumerian texts which obviously are not human. It is said that they are "neither male or female," that is, they are  sexless creatures. Most translations ignore the ramifications and prefer to skirt the issue by calling them "eunuchs." But this term is not satisfactory, for the text clearly says that they take no food or drink, have no emotions, and have no family life. Obviously these creatures possess no human qualities and have the passivity and traits of artificial machines. We will try to summarize available references to  these creatures which obviously are not human and have all the characteristics of mechanical devices. Five of them are mentioned in the list of MEs that Ishtar obtained from Enki. The robots are called the KURGARRA, GALATUR, SAGURSAG, GIRBADARA, AND GALLA. These are all Sumerian terms for which there is no English counterpart. They are not usually translated for the simple reason that no one knows what they are or how torender the terms into modern language. Other unknown terms also appear to represent artificial creatures — the LILIS, UB, MESI, and ALA have been called "demons". These demons were apparently quite numerous and harassed and oppressed the citizenry of Mesopotamia. 


                                                          The "Kurgarra" or Bright Mechanical Man 


                                                          The KURGARRA was one of the creatures created by Enki to enter the underworld and rescue Ishtar. Called "a creature neither male or female," it was designed to enter the underworld "through cracks in the gates" or, in other words, by surreptitious means. Not being human or godly and not subject to the strict rules imposed by the MEs on entering and leaving the underworld, it could apparently move about at will, unhampered by regulations. This behavior is more characteristic of an artificial creature. The KURGARRA or as it sometimes appear KURGURRA, is also listed as a ME in the list that Ishtar obtained from Enki. A study of the elements which make up the term KUR-GAR-RA or KUR-GUR-RA indicates that it can be translated to mean "bright metallic robot." KUR is often used to mean mighty and it also has a secondary meaning of the underworld; it is often applied to monsters. GUR means to be mobile or to travel about, for example MA-GUR is the runabout that Enki used to tour the canals of Mesopotamia. RA is the term for "bright" in the sense of metallic. It is also possible that GARRA is a form or corruption of GALLA which has been described as a mechanical man. Thus, the KURGARRA or KURGURRA would be a bright metallic-like mechanical creature programmed by Enki to rescue Ishtar from underworld. » (R. A. Boulay, Flying Serpents and Dragons: The Story of Mankind's Reptilian Past)


                                                          The chapter continues with an etymological examination of the term "Galatur", another artificial creature fashioned by Enki to rescue Ishtar from the underworld.. 


                                                          But why would R. A. Boulay be right about the etymology of these names, when that, or those, which are offered by scholars would be, if not wrong, superficial ?


                                                          Those who are not familiar wih Sumerian clay tablets might want to watch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DEAzA6TNR0 (for example,from 01:06.30 on) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzANU5iog0Q (33:05)


                                                          (The comments are not worthy listening to.)


                                                          « … many of the tablets unearthed at Ashurbanipal depict the Annunaki as they soar into the sky above Mesopotamia on plumes of fire and smke. Interestingly enough, the bulk of these tablets seem to focus around a period of a great Annunaki exodus – as if, for some reason, the gods had been emergently summoned back to their distant home… Other tablets depict the Annunaki wearing what appear to be prodigiously capable computer-devices on their faces and bodies, or advanced wristwatches on their arms. Some have … speculated that the Annunaki had successfully integrated their technology into the very fabric of their biology » (Tom Copper: Journey to Mulligan's Peak Raffi Bagdasarian)


                                                          Transhumanism is « The belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology », but also by means of hybridism, that is, in the case in point, the coupling, through DNA mixing, of human with animal. So racial mixing is not the end of the dysgenic process, it is a stage in it.


                                                          Sex, unsurprinsingly, seems to be key to the successfull integration of technology into the very fabric of people's biology.  « Ultra-realistic 'digital sex headsets' will allow you to enjoy a virtual reality romp with your favourite celebrity crush » (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ultra-realistic-digital-sex-headsets-9491515) « Sex will be more popular with ROBOTS than with humans by 2050, claims shocking report »( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11898241/By-2050-human-on-robot-sex-will-be-more-common-than-human-on-human-sex-says-report.html). As usual, Japanese are, in a manner of speaking, on top of things (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/virtual-reality-sex-suit-lets-7698685).

                                                          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APFUxvw_gQQ, courtesy of G. van den Heide, tends to show that the kind of scientidic knowledge exists that is capable of unleashing the kind of technology required to achieve trrans-species hybridism.


                                                          P.-.s. : some motifs in Toltec art  should be reassessed in the light of brand new monster machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-v-PEi5OaE


                                                        • rouesolaire
                                                          The essay Le Cinquième État was extensively expanded with very important considerations. It is strongly advised to read it. It is readable at
                                                          Message 28 of 29 , Jun 4
                                                            The essay "Le Cinquième État" was extensively expanded with very important considerations. It is strongly advised to read it. It is readable at https://elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/le-cinquieme-etat/.
                                                            Furthermore, a full annotated translation of Friedrich Jünger's "The Failure of Technology" has been published. It is readable at https://elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2016/04/17/le-zenith-de-la-technique/ and https://elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2017/03/31/le-zenith-de-la-technique-2/.
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                                                          • evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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                                                            Message 29 of 29 , Jul 12
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