[lbo-talk] Michael Perelman: a Technophile

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

> uvj at vsnl.com quoted:
>
> >One thing I will say, we must not become anti-science. It will  
> only put us
> >backward. So, you must have the power to discriminate, analyse to  
> find what
> >is good for us. We must not say, bio-technology is good or bio- 
> technology is
> >bad. There is nothing like that. Anything may be good or bad,  
> depending on
> >how you use it. That is when ethical considerations come in. I  
> always said,
> >you need three kinds of mechanisms -- bio-surveillance, bio-ethics  
> and
> >bio-safety. If you put all these mechanisms, you can use these  
> technologies
> >safely.
>
> This seems extremely sensible & persuasive. So what do the Michael  
> Perelman's of the world say?
>
> Doug

I believe that Michael Perelman is a technophile.  Over on PEN-l, he  
seemed delighted with two new pieces of software that raised his  
productively yet higher (!):

Michael Perelman wrote:


> I've mentioned before that I use it two wonderful software tools,  
> one of which is called DTSearch.  I have used it for a few years to  
> index my files, including articles that I download.  I can get an  
> almost instantaneous Boolean search result.
>
> Well, I just used it to index all of the history of thought books  
> on the McMaster site.  I guess I could use it on marxists.org.  It  
> allows me to search through the entire library with request, such  
> as find everywhere that the word, Smith, occurs within 10 words of  
> Ricardo, but not mentioning William Petty within a hundred words.

Michael is like Donna Haraway's cyborg (cf. <http://www.stanford.edu/ 
dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html>), his brains inextricably  
plugged into the latest versions of indexing software.

Besides, Michael's perennial complaint about capitalism is that  
capitalists often prefer maintenance of class power over investment  
into technology as well as workers' education that would raise  
productivity higher and make production more efficient and easier on  
workers' bodies.

Onward to a post-human socialism!

Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://montages.blogspot.com>
<http://monthlyreview.org>
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* Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- 
ahmadinejads-face.html>;  <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- 
congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 
2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>