Re: <nettime> Re: NOTHING WORSE

["Saul Albert" <saul.albert@virgin.net>]

Dear Mark,

> Yup, Chomsky (or at least his "sponsors") is (are) one of the original "MIND
> CONTROLLERS."  Yikes! <g>

Sorry,  I don't believe a word, after all, you can't listen to the
conspiracy theorists, they're all funded by the CIA.

You can turn yourself inside out as much as you want.

I'm sure Chomsky himself would be the first to advise you not to take him at
face value He doesn't demand that anyone to agree with him, he just
recommends that you keep your eyes and ears open and try to see who's
pulling the strings.

> "Perhaps all human problems are just engineering problems.  With the right
> engineering tools, we could potentially erase all these problems."

Does the fact that he might have been doing research in the area make him
complicit?

When it was being sold in the high street,"Deep Grammar" may have made a few
megalomaniacs drool with anticipation, but have you ever tried reading
'Syntactic Structures' for tips on how to actually *do* anything?

I quote:

"In the following system of rules, S stands for Sentence, NP for  Noun
Phrase, VP for  Verb Phrase, Det for Determiner, Aux for Auxiliary (verb), N
for Noun, and V for Verb stem.

NP(1) - Aux - V - NP (2) --> NP(2) - Aux + be + en - V - by NP (1)

This is a simple phrase-structure grammar. It generates and thereby defines
as grammatical such sentences as "The man will hit the ball," and it assigns
to each sentence that it generates a structural description. The kind of
structural description assigned by a phrase-structure grammar is, in fact, a
constituent structure analysis of the sentence."

I can just see The Man sitting at his desk, stroking a fluffy white cat and
trying to figure out how to rule the world with transformative-generative
grammar.

Actually, do any nettimers have a clue as to what the above means or is that
only privy to those in CONTROL?

What I was trying to get at with my ref to Chomsky was that certain
technologies will always leave you feeling just as Tom describes. Listen to
your voicemail....

"hello _ _ _ _ _ _ _ /

please/ enter/ your/ pin...beep beep beep....click, whirr....

you/ have/ no / new/ messages/ in/ your/ mailbox.

you / have / no / friends

no / one / gives / a / monkeys.

thank / you /goodbye/.... (click)."


.....check your e-mail,

"no new messages on server"... (that horrible dull "bong" sound in Outlook
4.)


The software has its own language of isolation, as Tom poetically points
out.

The more little voices you have telling you you have no friends, no life, no
escape....the better. It gets you hooked on hits of contact, a little stab
of joy when "You've got Mail"... who knows, your Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan might
be oozing through the phone line into your life.

Actually that's why high traffic mailing lists are so appealing. When you're
subscribed to nettime you can always guarantee at least 30 little hits of
hope every day.


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