Re: <nettime> Use of Computers in Preschools

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

A fair amount of this critique of computer use is applicable to business, 
government, education, religion and so on. The seniors, call them leaders,
see computers only as tools to maximize worker productivity and for open
and covert surveillance. They do not use them to set policy except to gather
data for justifying and enforcing will of the wisp phantasies of maintaining
control.

Teachers are not exception to the hypnotic appeal of empowerment by
subterfuge, whether by catatonizing television, authoritarian lecture notes 
and books (required listening, reading, testing, submitting, ass-licking
mentoring, grotesque letters of reference offering an obesequious
candidate, or fucker, or executor of diabolist schemes).

What transfixes computer users, especially those imagining empowerment
through the Internet, is what readies them for easy manipulation by way of
easily acquired, indeed subsidized, tools which appear to expand individual
prowess while enslaving -- the military pilot of weapons platforms is no
different than the blackest hat hacker, nor are those different from the
ideologists of machine dependency who gleefully encourage the malleable
to believe in their boxes and push-buttons liberating efficacy.

Give them medals and life-time achievement awards for preaching not what 
they do but what they want others to do innumerably.

A wireless globe,that's a gob of merchandising missionarianess fit for a new 
world subscription. Track every user and yank the threat-string of being 
excommunicated, silenced, unsubbed, game over, pornless, a la Saint
Augustine, at the first lost signal of trying to evade EM-pandemia.




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