Into the Mystic: Capitalism and the Structuralization of Spirituality

Edmund Berger gives us a secret history of our information processing era and how the corporatocracy has at each stage been able to reincorporate the negative and opposing shifts of the Left into its ongoing initiatives. His knowledge of this era is unique and details out in this one post a part of his ongoing project. A must read for those who want to know the secret history of capitalism during the twentieth century…

synthetic zerØ

In his fantastic book The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Paul N. Edwards forwards a quasi-literary reading of the way power and subjectivity operate in the age of the computer, focusing primarily on the lineage running from the Vannevar Bush’s  Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) to the birth of cybernetics and their proliferation during the Macy Conferences to the electronic battlefields of Vietnam, and, finally, to the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative – the “Star Wars” program that propelled the growth of Silicon Valley and its corollary Californian Ideology, as well as the globalization of information technology across the 1990s. For Edwards the collision of massive government subsidies and steering of computer research and the geopolitical imperatives of the Cold War – dressed in the rhetoric of “containment” – produced the metaphoric construct for which the book is titled: the…

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