Pursued and censured everywhere, death springs up everywhere again. No longer as apocalyptic folklore, such as might have haunted the living imagination in certain epochs; but voided precisely of any imaginary substance, it passes into the most banal reality, and for us takes on the mask of the very principle of rationality that dominates our lives. Death is when everything functions and serves something else, it is the absolute, signing, cybernetic functionality of the urban environment as in Jacques Tati's film Play-Time. Man is absolutely indexed on his function, as in Kafka: the age of the civil servant is the age of a culture of death. This is the phantasm of total programming, increased predictability and accuracy, finality not only in material things but in fulfilling desires. In a word, death is confused with the law of value - and strangely with the structural law of value by which everything is arrested as a coded difference in a universal nexus of relations. This is the true face of ultra-modern death, made up of the faultless, objective, ultra-rapid connection of all the terms in a system. Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries, hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is no longer even murder: our societies' true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank spaces from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the world's sterilized memories are frozen. Only the dead remember everything...computers are the transistorized death to which we submit...
-J. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death
There is a mathematical economist in Zurich, connected to
systems hacks and sociologists, who sees the success of the economy based on
its human emotional output. In other
words, divorce rates go up when certain people are marginalized. And there is a computer manufactured by IBM
that not only prints the output of this emotional turmoil via economics, in
color, but has mapped things decades in advance, which I have written about in
a story, so it is real, to create in real pictures and vistas what not only the
forests will look like in fifteen years, but your street, your yard, your house
and those living inside it. Right down
to the overall look on people's faces, to their emotions by the minute. And Microsoft was going to name their new
operating system Longhorn but they chose the word Vista, because if you can
be that dirty pretending to anything
romantic you will take yourself as a magician...these ghouls have long term
derisions...And I received that algorithm of a voice message a while back
reminding me that I hadn't voted because I wanted to be anonymous. And it wasn't any party reminding me I had
not voted, and it wasn't even a computer voice pretending to be human
interaction that was reminding me, but it was the logic reminding me that I had
insulted the algorithm that dates to the year 1000 that was insulted. Because we could create a new calendar
tomorrow, or they could...
-Essays on a Dollar by A. Telhirim