IP: There is No Revolution Without Revolutionaries

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

I must strongly disagree with Mark's characterization that
EFF was in anyway supporting PFF or Newt. Esther and John
were there NOT as EFF Board members no more than if I
showed up at a PFF meeting, Penn would be supporting them.
I will leave it to Esther and John to go any further


Dave




Date: Mon, 11 Sep 1995 13:56:48
From: MARK STAHLMAN <newmedia () beta delphi com>
Subject: There is No Revolution Without Revolutionaries


Folks:


I'm back at work after a two-week breather and this is the
boldest of my various takes on PFF's Aspen coronation, it's
context and some of it's wider implications.  I've been more
explicit about names and relationships than I have been
otherplaces because I didn't feel like being polite.  I urge you
to not be polite in your replies, either (just don't repeat the
whole dang thing, OK?).


There is No Revolution Without Revolutionaries


After being identified in the Wall Street Journal as the
"gadfly" who asserted "there is no revolution" at the recent
Progress and Freedom Foundation's (PFF) "Cyberspace and the
American Dream" event in Aspen, I thought I'd take advantage of
the fact that I own a printing press (the Net) and detail what I
actually said in Aspen (mostly off the "record" due to my being
muzzled by PFF's moderator Vlahos) and some of the implications
of this discussion for future action.


PFF had a very practical goal in Aspen.  Coronate Newt as
digital king. Combined with the Dyson-on-Newt "Friend and Foe"
cover-interview in WIRED magazine and the current attempt at
reviving the moribund Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by
replanting it in more forgiving San Francisco soil, there was a
fix in the works. The "left" had embraced the "right."  EFF
board members Esther Dyson, John Barlow (also EFF co- chairs)
and Stewart Brand and WIRED's exec. editor Kevin Kelly did the
honors under the tutelage of Newt's think-tank, the expansive
PFF. By acceding that we are indeed in a "digital revolution"
(WIRED's vacuous editorial stance and EFF's cynical rallying
call) and that Newt "get's it", the political reality of Newt
Gingrich and his "revolution" was acknowledged and the scepter
was passed.  Gore was out (for now) and Gingrich was in (for
now).


Next, you should be looking for a WIRED feature article (or is
it going into the Economist?) about how Newt and Al Gore were
actually separated at birth -- but Newt's the much more
effective twin.   Information Age Solons.  Phooey.


Whatever else happened in Aspen, including some fabulous
grandstanding mini- speeches from other quarters, the conference
had achieved its only goal. The lack of action/policy
orientation which Business Week complained about in their
coverage and the unchallenged puffery of "future schlock" noted
by the Wall Street Journal were entirely on the mark -- if not
overly penetrating.  There was no need to discuss a conference
"document" such as last year's "Magna Carta for Cyberspace";
there was no attempt to reach agreement on any issues; there was
no requirement to debate any policy;  there was no effort to
honestly tackle any basic issues.  The event was staged. The
bizarre boot-in-the-throat applied to me only added to the
theater; it didn't alter the pattern.  Coronate Newt.


But, what about the others at the table?  While it's
understandable why WIRED and EFF are eager to be the condoms for
the Gingrich "digital" screw-job, why were the others there
lending their names to the event?  Well, as they say, there are
a million stories in the naked city.  Some were simply naive
and/or misled.  Some were insiders working the crowd.  Some were
outsiders clawing to get inside. Some even had something to say.
 But, for all the talk of "revolution", the only
honest-to-Babbage pretend- revolutionary in the pack, Al
Toffler, made only a cameo appearance.  And, in that appearance,
he was dull and occluded.  He really wished he knew "what to do"
-- the self-consciously Leninesque throw-away from PFF moderator
(and author of the soon-to- be-published viciously technocratic
screed "ByteCity") Michael Vlahos. Could Toffler have wanted to
avoid public debate too?


What is a revolution?  Is it replacing the Democrats with the
Republicans? No. Even if it is for 40 years?  Well, if you are a
Democrat or a Republican (or one of their thinktanks), it's
important to you but it's no revolution.  Is it shrinking the
size of government by 10- 20% a revolution?  No. Most people
would call that a long overdue downsizing but, if you're job is
on the line, it seems like a pretty big deal to you.  Is Newt
becoming Speaker or the Contract With America or Packwood
leaving the Senate a revolution -- or even the harbinger of one?


No, not-so-gentle reader, none of these things are either
revolutionary or the signal of one to come.  There is no
revolution without revolutionaries.  None of these people are
revolutionaries.  None of them are prepared to even think about
revolution, write about revolution, act upon revolution.  At
least not in public.


A revolution is a cataclysm.  It's such a sharp break with the
past that no one would argue its severity.  A revolution is a
battle.  The old system falls; a new system is erected.  A
revolution isn't fought from inside the old system. Coup-d'etats
are. Insiders and insider-wantabes like the Aspen crowd aren't
revolutionaries. They are coup-plotters at their best and, more
commonly, merely pathetic sycophants.


Toffler is somewhat different.  He's written about revolution.
He's also admitted (following my prompting during a keynote
speech and a dinner for which I paid him) that the "paradox" of
his life is that while he talks about "revolution" he spends all
his time in the halls of power.  He's Newt's 20-year-long
revolutionary buddy, though. Labor Secretary Reich has also
claimed him in an Op-Ed in the NYTimes as Gore's revolutionary
muse.  Everyone loves to use the Tofflerian Third Wave
"metaphor" to describe the "Information" revolution.  Nevermind
that the Third Wave "metaphor" is largely empty of specifics
despite an entire book on the topic.  All the better, if there
is no meaning then what's there to argue about, right?


But, Toffler has been specific about a few things -- although
not in that book. Try finding Toffler's long out-of-print
"Eco-Spasm Report" -- he's quite explicit there.  He wants to
destroy the American Constitution and this Republic.  You see,
these are "Second Wave" institutions.  Appropriate for the
mechanical and industrial age of the past.  We're in a New(t)
Age now.  Industrialism is on the wain. Information is taking
over.  So, out with the old institutions, in with the new
information age institutions.  Or, so the Tofflers say.


Al (and Heidi) Toffler have been clear about this for 20-30
years.  Both ex-socialists (they both went to work in factories
to experience working-class life) and both deeply involved with
anti-republican circles since the 1960's, the Tofflers have made
themselves very clear.  They want to be given the power that
they assert elected representatives cannot ever competently
exercise.  They want the power over the future.


Under the tutelage of Kenneth Boulding and the crowd around
Margaret Mead's Salzberg Seminar, Toffler began to lay out his
revolutionary thesis in the mid-1960's. That's when he started
to refer to "future shock" as a psycho-pathology. Scare-'em and
you can herd-'em.  Fear is great motivator in the Third Wave (or
presumably any Wave).  Daniel Bell had coined the term
"Post-Industrial Society" at Salzburg in 1959 (years before
Toffler was coopted onto their board) and the Ford Foundation
had launched it's viciously anti-republican "Triple Revolution."
 "Revolution" hung heavily in the fetid late 1960's air.


Boulding-protege, Toffler collaborator and Stanford Research
Institute futurist Willis Harman was taking Dept. of Education
(later Sloan-Kettering) grants to describe how an entirely new
"image of man" was needed now that we had left the "industrial
age of the past."  Homo-economic was sadly out of date.  The
Enlightment had run its course. Replace belief in the
individual, reason, science, progress and Christ with a new more
balanced-with-Nature "image" and we'll all be fine (or else
we'll have to brainwash you).  Harman, a Stanford electrical
engineer who helped launch the Association for Humanistic
Psychology and helped to provide cover for extensive British
Intelligence sponsored LSD experimentation on West Coast
"intellectuals", personally parallels the launching of the
Technocracy movement from Columbia University's EE Department in
the 1930's.


Take your pick.  Freud/Darwin said we are just fancy apes.  The
General-Systems-Boys say we are just fancy machines.  Aldous
Huxley says we should all just take Soma and let the experts run
the world.  It's the same theme as the OSS/Frankfurt-school
attack on Western culture outlined in "Authoritarian
Personality" -- belief in progress means you are (whether you
know it or not) anti-Semitic.  It was the theme behind the SRI-
sponsored launching of the New Age movement and its Aquarian
Conspiracy.  A new man for a new age.  And, it was to become
Toffler's "revolutionary" battle-cry.


In the 1970's, Toffler launched what he called the Anticipatory
Democracy Network (A/D) with the goal of replacing the Republic
with a technocratic state. Starting out at a dinner at their
Connecticut home on the eve of Nixon's 1972 election victory,
with the sponsorship of the Aspen Institute (Institute Pres.
Slater and wife were both there) and notorious British Labor Pol
Tony Wedgewood-Benn, the Tofflers started to build what he
called his "invisible college."  Fueled by the success of his
1970 best-seller "Future Shock" and riding high on his speeches
to the World Future Society, Toffler laid out his revolutionary
thesis.


Elected representatives can't anticipate the future.  At best
they make short-term decisions which tend to only postpone
disaster while making real solutions even more difficult.  What
is to be done?  Cede major trading and security issues to a
global "commission", break up nation-states into smaller
regional groupings and put the futurists in charge of
interpreting public opinion polls.  Ask all those terrified,
future- shocked (but receptive to a new age "image") commoners
what they want.  And, as only a trained futurist can, by asking
the right questions and an expert reading of the "popular will"
tea leaves, then tell those elected representatives how they
should legislate.


It was called "Futures Lib" in the fashion of the day (and the
futurist-full-employment-act by some others) and it had its
supporters in Washington as well as in many statehouses. The A/D
Network cataloged dozens of state-level projects.  The one in
Hawaii helped shape the state constitution. The one in
Washington state took advantage of the deep commitment to the
older Technocracy movement in that state.  The one in Georgia
was run by the not-yet-governor Jimmy Carter and then by Sam
Nunn when Jimmy took the statehouse.


And, it's as an A/D Network insider that the Tofflers first met
the pre-politician Newt Gingrich.  Newt even wrote a chapter
about the Georgia experience in "futures lib" in the book titled
Anticipatory Democracy; Toffler wrote the introduction. When
Newt came to Washington he helped out with the Tofflerian
Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future and, for a brief
instant, it actually looked like Washington was swallowing the
bait.  Rules changes were even proposed (and adopted piecemeal)
to require Congress to put a "futures impact" statement in all
significant bills.


But, Anticipatory Democracy ran out of steam in the late 1970's.
 Like the broader "post- industrial" and "futurist" movements,
A/D was more like Chicken-Little screaming that the sky was
failing than a credible harbinger of change.  Only the
"post-modern" version of this hysteria survived -- largely in
humanities departments run by bitter, emasculated,
"post-Marxists" with no place else to go.  Toffler's hysterical
"Eco-Spasm Report" which predicted massive economic collapse,
terrible armed conflicts and Mother Nature rising up against
mankind wasn't reprinted.  This whole mad, experts-
controlling-the-world, doomsday scenario never got off the
runway in the West (despite its iron grip around the world) --
until now.


Now, we have the digital revolution.  And, now, it's all coming
out of the woodwork again.  All the same people with all the
same agendas and all the same anti-Reason, anti-human
social-engineering zeal are coming back at us.  Now, they have
the Internet.  Now, they have the technology for their
technocratic coup -- they hope.


When Gingrich gets up and describes himself as merely the
hand-maiden of the "intellectuals", these futurists are the
intellectuals that he's referring to. When he says that the
"intellectuals figured it all out decades ago", he means that
they figured out that they should rule the earth in an
information age. When he gets specific, he starts out by citing
his debt to the perhaps not well known but seminal
Oxford-economist and Michigan-based social-engineer, Kenneth
Boulding.  Besides having much to do with establishing the
fields of "conflict resolution" and "general systems theory" as
cornerstones of mass-manipulation, Boulding and his wife
pioneered the intensely manipulative field of new human "images"
(i.e. new religions).  It was in a review of Boulding's obscure
social-engineering tract "The Meaning of the Twentieth Century"
that Toffler began his public career as futurist popularizer and
anti-Enlightenment new age crusader.


Of course, Gingrich "gets it."  He's been part of this
"revolutionary" milieu for close to 30 years.  Newt's West
Georgia College was the East Coast version of the West Coast's
Esalen Institute -- hot tubs and all.  The academic departments
of psychology in the Ivy-covered halls of the East weren't
excited about this new fangled "humanistic psychology" despite
its OSS/CIA/Princeton pedigree.  West Georgia was the best they
could do on the right-coast.  Newt has acknowledged in print how
much he learned from these water-logged shrinks.  Earlier
references also cite Newt teaching courses in "futurism" and
"environmentalism" although today, he's simply identified as a
"historian." Conservative?  Libertarian? What's a label.
Anyway, it helped to get him elected, didn't it?


Don't be fooled by these modern labels.  They are merely
instrumentalities of history in the hands of a "historian."
Newt needs the Republicans and the Republicans need Newt.  The
Democrats have lost their chance.  Al Gore and Teddy Kennedy
might have done the deed in another political era but not now --
as EFF/WIRED have already informed us.  Technocrats like Perot
can snap around at the edges.  Threats can be launched to build
a new even more democratic (i.e. technocratic) "third party."
But, Newt's got 'em by the short hairs, now. Newt's their boy --
for now.


But, what's the plan?  It has to seem to be ultra-democratic.
The "people" have to speak.  Town-meetings are great but we need
something much bigger.  We need a way to organize "public
opinion" and then to sample it.  We need a massive,
statistically unchallengeable sampling of people's deepest
fears, guilts and hatreds. We need to harness the
psycho-pathology called "future shock" in order to get people to
march into the ovens they have built for themselves.  We need a
network that let's us talk with all the "people."   Talk radio
has it's strong points (and Toffler may have helped to launch it
with his publicity campaign for "The Eco-Spasm Report") but it's
not "official" enough.  Hey, they say, how about the Internet?


One honest writer who has been struggling for a decade to
formulate the way that a post-industrial, New Age government
might actually take shape recently wrote me after hearing that I
was thrown off the top of a building in Aspen.  He told me that
he has given up trying to fight the technocrats.  He said that
he was now engaged in trying to outwit them.  After all, he
said, they'll work for the "people" won't they? He's even come
up with an elaborate scheme of checks and balances to make sure
that the hired-gun experts who make policy won't feel too cocky.
 He's the first one to spout drivel about cultural-relativism
and natural states of tribal governance, also.  I sometimes
wonder how he keeps from going totally insane.


As long as we're talking about Newt, let's talk some history.  A
quick history of revolution and a history of ideas.  The
Renaissance was a revolution -- against the Church.  The
Enlightenment was a revolution -- against the King.  By the 17th
century in the West (and no where else on earth), it was
occurring to people that they might actually be in a position to
run their own lives.  Not only was God in his heavens but his
representative here on earth, the monarch, seemed out of touch.
Human rationality and the inalienable rights associated with
Free Will were beginning to be taken seriously.  The American
Republic (yes, our Republic) was very self-consciously formed on
these anti-oligarchy, Enlightment-era, Free Will and rationality
premises.


Now when the human prophylactic John Perry Barlow proudly
proclaims that we are post-Reason in his upcoming piece for SPIN
on the "Future of Governance", you don't need a copy of "Atlas
Shrugged" to know which way the wind blows.  Like in those
futurist nightmares called cyberpunk fiction, Barlow is talking
about a new dark ages. Before the Renaissance, before the
Enlightenment, before the Republic; a medieval mindscape of
hierarchies, secret societies, oaths and blood-sport. Barlow is
an advanced scout for the technocratic apocalypse -- whether he
knows it or not.


Glibly rhapsodizing (like his mindless Grateful Dead lyrics)
about meaningless hyperbole, Barlow was naturally the star of
the PFF's Aspen coronation.  He came in a close second to my
feeble attempt to disrupt the event when he began to violently
agree with what little Toffler could barely bring himself to
say.  And, I was merely trying to say something unpleasant.  The
end-of-meaning, end-of-reason "notion" is one we will
undoubtedly hear much more of.  And, BTW, even if you don't need
an antidote, Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is a wonderful tonic
when dealing with this aspect of humanity in all of it's
splendid variety.


The only trouble is that the Net won't go along with the plan.
That's why Barlow doesn't hang out on the Net anymore.  That's
why the PFF's Aspen coronation attracted only one other
pre-event poster from the "invited guests" besides my own.  The
Net is two way.  It's conversational.  It's confrontational. It
doesn't tolerate stupidity or duplicity or scamming.   Hidden
agendas have a way of being exposed.  Lack of clarity or
inaccurate data will be ferreted out. If it's important enough
(and most Net chatter isn't, of course) then the Net will get to
the bottom of things.  Like in the cyberporn case which knocked
the stuffing out of TIME.  Or, in the
EFF-gave-us-the-FBI-Digital-Wiretap-Bill case which knocked the
stuffing out of a Washington-based EFF.


Hyper-democracy in support of a technocratic coup will fail on
the Internet. That doesn't mean it won't be tried.  That doesn't
mean we'll be spared endless assertions about the digital
"revolution."  That doesn't mean that there isn't a battle for
cyberspace.  There is.  And, it's a revolutionary one.  And,
it's one that I intend to write about.


The battle to place human Free Will at the center of the stage
is not yet over. After the revolution which established this
Republic, there was another far more messy and ultimately
degenerate revolution in France.  And, then hundreds of
additional battles were fought on hundreds of additional
battlefields around the globe.  For the past century, we have
been in the throws of a powerful counter-revolution against the
human mind.  Socialism -- the name of the anti-mind,
counter-revolution -- and all it's spawn (like sociology and
social-engineering, to name a few) have attempted to crush human
consciousness. Socialism (and all it's spawn) has failed -- but
that doesn't mean that there wasn't a battle.  And, it doesn't
mean that the vast majority of humanity isn't still trapped
under its bootheel.


When I was walking to the PFF dinner in Aspen, I bumped into Al
Toffler. After greeting him I told him that I'd been pouring
over his private papers which he had thoughtfully contributed to
a local rare books collection.  After telling me that I
shouldn't mention those because his wife Heidi would just start
yelling at him again about how bad a decision it had been, I
told him that I had been looking at the A/D material
particularly closely.  What was going on with A/D now, I asked?
Oh, it's still my hope and plan, he said.  If only we could
figure out how to make it work.  Then he walked away.


In the name of humanity and its right to be free, I'm going to
help make sure that it never does.


Mark Stahlman New Media Associates New York City
stahlman () radiomail net