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Subject: Technethics and Human Ecological Recovery - Design or De-Design?

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Unedited Interactive 1st DRAFT for E-mail Reply to Peter Jones (p~j~)

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Today we are going to talk about the point system of designing with dialogue in its used in the designing with dialogue study forum the idea is linked to the historical construct of the Agora - the public square, forum, or marketplace of the ancient Greeks

..that idea of the Agoura was a that group of citizens would get together in Greece and have a debate on the issues of the day and have a democratic decision as to what needed to be done about these things so it's a system of history democracy that's been used in the school systems to describe the roots of our democratic system. That it was based on this Greek idea of democracy that is the way we were taught in don't you remember, basically that they had a Democratic "democracy" and that our system of democracy is based on on the Greek system. This Greek system, it is implied in the process of the system of "" in our designing with dialogue forum... It is based on on this tradition of the Agoura's, to de discussed on September 8th at the DWD at OCAD. We are going to be talking about this system as it were a deterant to the of global bullying of design, where everybody in the group will be filling out a form and putting their opinions on a scale of of one to 10 as to what their feelings about whatever particular issue and then those points will be all gathered together and then, from that statistical data, there will be able to be a pie chart, a graphical diagram created to indicate what the group conscience is, so to speak, on any particular issue.

I wrote previously about this idea, that in primitive societies or not primitive but in and in pre-antediluvian high-tech societies they had this system of a pyramid above the cube, that what was the higher arcana and the cube iteslf, was the lower arcana. The cube represents you could say the base or mass conglomorate of the wage slaves, the proletariat in other words mass of society, the world so to speak and above it was the were the gods and the emperors and the demigods in the courtesans and the designers and the priests and scientists who what ever you want to call them. I have written that in spite of all of this, the populations, overpopulated themselves and the end result was the deluge, wether this was one that was ordained by the gods, or against the people, or designed by the Agoras I have no idea exactly, but I'm sure that there was probably some sort of a human folly involved with this this flood in the first place and now the system is still pretty well and affect because it lends itself to system of a pyramid you know with Pharaoh or the Furrer at the top lends itself to this Imperial industrial agendas and it makes it more "efficient" in terms of what it Ellul talks about in terms of the impunity of mechanical efficiency of technology, to have this organization at the top basically designing and by way of design exploiting this cube at the bottom and of course when you have huge artificially induced populations the larger the populations, the division between the top and the bottom becomes more impenetrable, inside the firewall so that the people who are consumers and wage slaves and so on do not have any way of interacting with, or voting on directly what's coming down the pike from the top, because those at the top of the pyramid, or the vortex or if you remember was talking about the film Zardoz in which had this idea of the vortex and the people living in there very lovely communities, while on the outside, in the hinterlands, horsemen soldiers were out there exterminating everybody and these people inside of the vortex were living in these beautiful pristine, provincial calm communities and and living basically eternally. So this isolation and devision of vampire and host communities is also portrayed by HG Wells, "The Time Machine", also has a very similar image, where he talks about people or t worm like mutations living under the ground who basically use the people living above the ground as has hosts, their food source to be able to feed themselves. Did you get the picture? So that basically is a critigue of the possibility of the corruption and abuse of the Agoura process.

On the other hand I would say that I don't support a mob rule system as per the critique that others have put forward, this idea of a tyranny of majority, where you have a whole society, the cube, that is to say the lower arcana, basically making the decisions and if these people have been now turned into idiots and morons with chemical addicitions and nutritional deprivation and mediated into stupidity,without any understanding or awareness of even the central concepts of any platform, of basically creating a tyranny of mob rule, which is the other extreme.

All right, now first of all I think it's important to address this whole business of what we understand as democracy, or what is or is not a democracy and where we get our ideas from about democracy and this is business of democracy and Western civilization started with the Greeks. First of all it is not really true, our American society and the French Revolution, I think were historically inspired by the democracies of Iriquois nations and I think also that Iriquois nations inspired movements like the Puritans with their abandonment of the Churchism Fetishes and all these outward trappings, the stained-glass windows and so on, so forth and getting back to into spiritual basics, simple launch and sitting in a circle like twelve step programs and having the elders discuss what's needed to be discussed and then you are coming to a in terms of the pure democracy. If there is some golden mean or solution to the problem, I like the idea of the pre British flexible cast system in India and of course the British enforced the polarization of this caste system which was prior to the British rule not totally void of upward mobility or downward mobility, but they created this iron grid cast system for the purpose of exploitation, out of the concept of what is called the Purusha and concept of the Purusha is that the society is basically like a human body, at the top you have the head the Brahmins and below the shoulders and arms of the Kshatria and below you have read the feet which are the working people and so on so forth. Now the very simple principle there is that if the society has governance in this way, the feet are just as important as the head and if you don't take care of the feet, if you have your own problems with your feet you know that they're going to infect and affect the whole body. Right? Just as sure that they will have an affect on the whole body, is as much that they are just as important as the eyes and ears and the brain itself. Everything has to be holistically integrated end-and working functionally for everything to work functionally, otherwise the body breaks down, it is in disease mode and neither does the brain work properly, nor the feet worked on nor the heart work, nor anything else works and so I think that we need to start looking at the society of designers, and what their position is and where their priorities lie, in this question of the Agoura and apply some of these other ancient traditions. Also I like to think of other exemplary systems we can study here, and on a small tangent here, of the recovery of the Perusha principle in the Servadya land reform movements in India and the numerous other victories of the Simon Weil's Liberation Theology and of the progress of the Anarco Syndicalists in Spain, who basically were able to organize without imperial agendas and the pure democracies that are found working very well in the 12 Step programs of today as being exemplary of democracies that work, that are functional, that have been very successful without any governmental or industrial Imperial agendas and I would like to see also the ancient traditions of designing with dialogue examine for the wealth that can be gained, from these different models, as a maybe applied to design with dialogue.

Historically In terms of the design and the problem with the Agoras was at the time where Socrates was being interrogated and had to commit suicide and basically "the poets" of that day, not like the egoistic drivelllers of today, were actually the thinkers of that day, the creative architects of the future... People, the people are right now put on meds because they are labeled attention deficit, because they are like creative psychopaths, they move from one idea to the next, to the next, they're divergent thinkers. These are the people that are the threats to the staus guo of the tyranny. So they needed to have a series of Plato's "write it down" ...the impregnable lexicon of what Ellul calls "orthopraxy".

And on this note I'd like to mention also that I did this writing on the pathology of power addicition and domination and submission,recently about JR Saul's term the "dictatorship of reason" or rather more appropriately the "dictatorship of rationalization" and the rationalization in our society, that governs, seems to govern everything, is this business of the corporate bottom line. Are you still following me? In other words there is a scientism, that is employed to all science, all technology has to conform to the agendas of the corporate sector, all think tanks and so on, have to basically be organized in such a way so that they deliver profits to the to the shareholders. There is no question about whether or not a patient's health is the most important thing, the question is only whether or not a Medicare system can be re-vamped in order for there, not to be preventative healing, or so that there would be actual healing in society rather than increase profit margins for pharmaceutical companies and so on. There's no questions asked about, to know how we can improve our health by getting rid of the anti-nutrients and toxins out of our diets, that are at the cause of 80% of our societys trauma and disease. so these are pyramids the top of the cubes, lend themselves to a fascist or a despotic system of efficient design, which is very efficient and this is the word that Jaques Ellul, in the book "The Technological Society" and "Propaganda". He uses the term "efficiency" as in this manner... The technologies become more and more efficient because they're actually serving the corporate sector, the bottom line, but that doesn't mean they're becoming efficient in terms of design in the sense of being more usable or more health giving, or more sane. They become efficient in the sense only that they conform to the Imperial, or industrial agenda, by making sense to the stock holder. I propose that in terms of design with dialogue, this forum, that these alternative methods of analysis be incorporated into the points system of . Into these grafts and so that they are more representative of the actual issues and that the priorities be on humanistic ones, rather than materialistic wants and this is a very long question. So I needed to submit this in terms of e-mail, or some other form because, I will wouldn't be able to articulate it there at this length, in the actual forum itself. Which is another problem, as Postman points our in "Entertaining Ourselves to Death" of our democracies today are not based on long dialogues and the people expressing their opinions were also lumped together and we have to Twitter each other in order to be able to express ideas and so on so forth and of course of our ideas are rough and unhuned ...missing a posting? An agricola is not a senator and so forth, ideas that are not manicured with rhetorical flourishes, get bumped off the the "professional" blog pages, an prime example of this "marginalization...". That is is a good example.

On this project so I think in terms of this is a design with dialogue again and it needs to be a matter of designing a way in which peoples ideas can be more interactive not integrated, that is to say submits queries and letters and opinions and so on to each other and to be open to discuss and debate these things. Before coming to a conclusion, as to what their opinions are, they need to be informed of the information on any subject and not to on the other hand to have to succumb to information overload. But at least to have the key issues presented in any argument. Case in point the knub of my argument about population control and how the populations are artificially escalated by enforced procreation for increased explotation, by way of artificial ignorance about the use of herbal birth control that was the universal practice of indigenous cultures world wide, is a very good example of this. Where neither pro-choice, pro-life is informed of the priciples of natures own procreation hygeine and neither one of these camps have the critical information about herbal birth control at their disposal so that they can't make a clear decision about anything, because they are not informed of all the points. Whereas there is a dross of information about all kinds of old other things that are part of the consummer fetish profiteering agenda, there's virtually none about emmenagogues.

So I think there is a danger of the corruption of the agoras by tyrants. I'm not saying that this particular forum "designing with dialogue" is in some sort of conspiracy of tecnocratic elite top-down hierarchical organization that's posturing to be represented as a democracy. Only that we need to be vigilant, becaues we are all in fact dependent on the matrix of Galbraith's "New Industrial State" so much so that for the sake of our own economic survival we may be more inclined to bias our values in terms of "efficiency" and in favour of the professional peer pressure and lose contact with our own ethical sensibilites.

Not posturing anyway, not a hierarchical but I think basically when I look at the Internet and I see this a hierarchical structure of the way educators are being corralled into into agendas and fit into the corporate sellout society.In fact over all I fail to see how our addictive society at larg is not a hierarchical structure that is basically just posturing as a democracy. In terms of de-schooling i am arguing that if the corporations actually are in the business of creating these wage slave, in debted consumer clones, on the education assembly line, then they should be prepared to pay these people a minimum wage to take their courses and there should be at the very minimum free education and a guaranteed livable income based on the taxation of the technology that displaces them. so on so forth...

My intent here, is not to act like the augusti circus clown disrupting the show, but basically to opening up this question for consideration ...t this time i need not take it any further...but to conclude:

This study is not uploaded as an MP3 or iPodCast because ...like the grass roots we have to live with dial-up access right now and so you know which media is not happening because of the lower sectors of the society cannot present their arguments because of economic sanctions, or socioeconomic restrictions and so on and they have a difficult time articulating, so what happens is they become "...marginalized, quarantined homogenized and then cloned..." and the end result is that they're basically not being represented. This i think is the opportunity and primary mandate of the designer to represnt and articulate for his community and not to dictate meaning to it. In this, like the people who were walking around with holes in their genes in the 60s to protest materialism and by the 90s these "holes in the genes" were being sold by Gap for $800.a pair. So that their method of the message, the teeth of the argument are removed and the concept is just basically the outer shell, the symbolism of the New Age religiosity is turned into metaphysical kitasch. Whatever Is there about but the content and the difficult quintessential essence, has been removed.

I can see this "process" happening very clearly with this business of taking statistical information of a very select group inside of a vortex of its administrators, as I can see this happening within demographics where particular elites in the society make decisions based on demographic surveys, based in turn on statistics that are provided by electoral roll of members when they show, they demonstrate populations in their society is to yonge or too old. There's nobody that's has actually anywhere near zero population growth. By what they were arguing these demographer, demographic scholars were arguing, was that there was a lowering of the population in Europe during the 20th century and they are also arguing that this is the result of "education" (indoctrination) and this is the result of all kinds of other issues the are the result of "progress in technology" like the public use of soap, so now we look at these graphs of population decline in Europe and we see however only a very small slice of the big picture, because the big picture is the global picture of "the demographic J" and all though the populations may appear to be lowering in Europe, they are certainly doing the exact opposite in the rest of the world. As if Europe is somehow a apart from the rest of the planet inside of this vortex the populations are going down, but the reality is that on the outside of the vortex there is an ocean rising and a tsumnami of population and that is the problem with the system of having the pyramid and the Agoura living in isolation or segregated from the rest of the cube which is the world and such was the problem in the high tech societies that existed befor our last ice age. The question is, can we learn anything from our pre-histories especially from the histories that were not written with the imperial agenda in mind?

g~k~

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