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Reality Check

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Reality Check
By Paul Garrin (New York, USA)
For the Memesis Net Discussion, Ars Electronica 96

Get offline for a moment....if you can bear it for any extended period of time.
If you were in the western part of the US on July 2, you would have been forced
offline when the power went out--from the Canadian border to Texas....
A reality check....and certainly not a virtual one.

Get outside and take a _walk_ down the streets of Compton during the blackout
or through the favellas of Rio de Janiero where people always
"live without power"...
or in the streets of Mogadishu or New York where you'll pass
shoeless people with open sores on their feet walking down the filthy streets
in the swealtering sunlight....smell the garbage rotting....
hear the flies buzzing--around the decomposing corpses rotting in shallow
graves in Srebreniza....

Will you be concerned about which virus will infect your hard drive?
What good will your computer do when the power is off and your ups
wears down just in time for a friendly shutdown...when the phones
don't work...even that groovy new cellular...when the network cells
are dead to your transmissions....when the cholera is in the water supply
because the sewage plant failed....When Biology rules?

Check reality that the network is dependent on physicality--in spite
of the fact that it carries immateriality, for only as long as the network
functions.  So-called "a-life" or so-called "autonomous" agents,
are not so much as "living" entities, but are parasites in the body of
a host, "the net". When the host dies, so then do the parasites within.

Where did this "body" come from and how did these entities "evolve"?
Several myths of creation could be formulated in order to explain this
phenomenon just as those used to explain humanity--never to reach a
consensus....

The discussion of determinism, under the guise of
"pure" science or "pure" art and under the control of its creators who
make incredible claims of theoretical breakthroughs is a convenient
way to escape the realities of the physical world and dabble with
dilettantish delight and academic conviction in realms which would be
criminal if exercised in (sic) "meatspace".

The de facto existance of digital apartheid through
the creation of cybereugenics is in itself a denial of the flesh and
typical of the self-loathing and authoritarianism manifested
throughout "Western" religious culture.  Perhaps these poisonous memes which
have infected the minds of millions like a virus over the centuries....for which
there has _never_ been a "cure"....although civilizations have concentrated
most of their energies into "medicating" it through mass rapes or excising
foreign bodies with "surgical" strikes and "bio attacks".....should be
"evolved" through info-warfare in the same way as they were spawned?  What
would be the appropriate methodology?

Where would this end up?  Would there ultimately be a "dominant" meme
which would be the "cure" or  would it  be merely another point along
the diminishing spiral of entropy where there will eventually be a
total disappearance of all memes?


Paul Garrin
NYC 7/3/96

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