Scientific Third Wayism

[Brad Mayer]

Ah, this was choice.  An interview full of gems of wisdom for the
'futuristic' technogensia, alerting them to "bad influences" within their
home turf.  Think there's a connection with Mad Cow?:
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EDGE: I was just writing something myself: "Today the interesting and
important work in science is A. about computation, B. the result of
computation, or C. informed through the models of computation. The metaphor
of computation has emerged as the key unifying theme of what I call the
Third Culture. Software and computation is reshaping civilization; that's
the big story in intellectual life today. David Gelernter, a computer
scientist, says, 'It's the beginning of everything; everything's up for
grabs, everything will change - there is a magnificent sweep of intellectual
landscape right in front of us.'" Does that resonate?
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http://www.edge.org has worked up quite a sputtering lather over this
glorious new horizon.  At just this resonant moment giddens whispers a
dialetical tale into the digital linear computational ear:
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GIDDENS: Let me tell you a little parable. There was an older man, who, as
older men do, fell in love with a young woman.

---  hmm, this have anything to do with the wanker otaku stuff?  --

And even though he's terribly pressed at work, he sends her several messages
a day and eagerly awaits each message as it comes through to carry on this
romance. And you might think that's an e-technology, an e-mail romance.

--- but no, you're wrong, it's just the same old crap ---

But actually it's Prime Minister Asquith with a friend of his daughter's,
who he fell in love with in 1915. In 1915 there were eight mail deliveries
in London. You could interchange eight messages within a short period of
time and carry on a dialogue, which is now impossible because you're very
lucky if your letter gets there the next day. That's what I mean by the fact
that there's no such thing as unilinear technology. You can't say that
everything is changing, because this is a world where, although everything
changes, in a certain sense everything stays the same, and that's the kind
of accommodation we make to technological change.

--- more precisely, that's the kind of acommodation technological change
makes to Giddens' Imperial "We"  ---

-Brad Mayer
Oakland, CA
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Robert Dean" <qualiall_2 at yahoo.com>
To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 12:12 AM
Subject: Scientific Third Wayism


> The recent talk about scientific Marxism fell
> perfectly with this little doozy I found while surfing
> around the net.  This is a "Third Wayer" scientist,
> trying to give a "scientific" explanation of
> "Globalization"--his analysis of the social welfare
> state is quite strange in this regard...
>
> THE SECOND GLOBALIZATION DEBATE
> A Talk With Anthony Giddens
> One of the big debates at the moment concerns the
> theme of globalization. This is a completely amazing
> thing, because only about 10 to 12 years ago it was
> hard to get people to talk about it, to use the notion
> of globalization at all. And now only a decade later,
> everybody's using it. It's in the papers all the time.
> Politicians talk about it. Businessmen talk about it.
> The whole globalization debate has itself become
> globalized, and that shows you that this truly is a
> period of dramatic, intense change. When you get a
> notion which comes from nowhere and comes to be
> everywhere, it's obviously going to get debate about
> it, and there is a very intense debate, and there were
> two phases to that debate.
>
> Full article at:
> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/giddens/giddens_p2.html
>
>
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