est: The Steersman Handbook, by L Clark Stevens

(I'm borrowing it right now)

https://archive.org/details/eststeersmanhand00stev/page/8/mode/1up?view=theater

Guy might have been crazy, but he wasn't necessarily *wrong*

<< Electronic information can now cope with vast ranges of data in extreme detail. This flow of information "softens" apparently rigid forms into changing patterns. The overall field of observation is now the planet earth. Social processes covering the planet are no more fixed than are cloud-cover systems observed by satellites. >>

Aha! And another thing just clicked into place.

Now I understand why New Age literature is full of references to "transformation".

Stevens deliberately pitches "Transformation" here as a cybernetic alternative to the Marxist concept of "Revolution".

Oddly enough I hadn't picked up on that until now. But the Evangelical Christian anti-New Age literature certainly did (except they wrongly assumed New Agers were just Marxists and also Fascists, because to conservatives those are the same thing)

<< Transformation differs from revolution qualitatively. Transformation does not arrive at a fixed, rigid, linear entity. Transformation transforms and continues to transform. It does not stop. It is the on-going transformative process of change itself, ever changing. >>

Reads like a manifesto for a capitalist reimagining of Leftist ideas through a cybernetic-ecological framework...

...which is exactly the Silicon Valley doctrine, isn't it? Can almost hear "you weary giants of flesh and steel"

But the accumulation of wealth generated by Silicon Valley hypercapitalism is gonna stop all this transformation.

How can anything transform when the 0.00000001% are the only ones owning all the extremely literal property, ie, the houses people can't live in because they now cost a million dollars that people don't have because wages got all Uber-ized? (massively accelerated by COVID)

Something's gonna give and if not Revolution, then capital is gonna get Transformed in a way it won't like.

Lol ok Boomer. How's that Youth Revolution going fifty years later? Still absolutely separate from The Establishment?

That was a fun weekend. and then they stopped cosplaying and cut their hair and got back to work.

Some parts of it did stick. Just not the "not doing capitalism" part because they figured the USSR was scarier, and, frankly, they weren't entirely wrong on that point.

But now capitalism is getting back to USSR-scary levels again, like it was in the 1920s.

Some things, like the imminent ecological crisis about to destroy all life on Earth unless we ACT NOW, haven't changed in 50 years.

Again: maybe crazy, certainly way over-optimistic about Boomers; not necessarily wrong.

But having heard this message repeated for literally my entire life while the planet's population has doubled, I'm not sure how effective it actually is.

The 1970s: that decade when even Richard Freaking Nixon was a longhair hippie environmentalist.

It's all those darned screens what's doing it to our kids

(and to our grandparents, now)

Facebook used Algorithms against World-Wide Consensus. It's super effective!

World-Wide Fragmentation: Achievement Unlocked

<< Today, when we have extended all parts of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for an outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus. When we have achieved a world-wide fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a world-wide integration.... Marshall McLuhan >>

In some ways this very optimistic reading of the situation in 1970 is even more true now that we have Youtube and Tiktok

and in a lot of ways it also turns out that the hairy patchwork grab-bag of uncivilization can also have downsides to it, like literal apocalyptic cults eating people's brains

also I shouldn't type in all that text so someone who's blind can read it, because text is a limited, linear mode of perception and conception, imposed by the Establishment to keep the Movement down.

<< Design-systems, controlled-environments, climate control, geodesics, bionics, recycling systems, cybernetics, synergetics; all are achievements of the electronic era and cannot be attributed to the Industrial Age when hardware ruled supreme. >>

I mean maybe, sorta, but also, no, the age of "hardware" was just as disruptive and innovative as software. Though software is *faster* at it.

Also it's sad to be reminded that "synergy" once meant something more than "increasing shareholder value".

But I love being reminded just how freaky far-out science-fictional 1970 was. Compared to, say, the 1990s, or even the 1980s.

I mean humans were landing on THE FREAKING MOON. The impossible had just become possible. Rewiring the human sensorium with electronic media, compared to that? Child's play.

But it's taken 50 years for what was imagined then - constant always-on contact in our pockets to the whole globe - to become something we just

(ping!)

deal with

(ping!)

every

(buzzz!)

day.

teh

What in heck spelling this is I don't know. I *think* by "teh" he probably means 德de as in "virtue". Even in Wade-Giles, that's "te", not "teh".

Petty, I know. But this sort of thing just annoys me. Still, this was 1970, and Americans knew less about China than they did about the Moon, because they'd at least landed people on the Moon.

On the other hand, I only know enough to be petty because of Wikipedia. Which again: electronic social transformation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching

A quick status check on where we're at, 51 years later, in terms of achieving Leslie Clark Stevens' requirements for "est people":

* capable of handling technologies necessary to the whole earth: LOL NOPE ZERO COMPETENCE WE'RE ACCELERATING THIS BIG MACHINE TOTALLY BLIND DRUNK

* not specialists: um maybe? Still plagued by silos, but a LITTLE more cross-communication

* dedicated to construction not destruction: LOL NOPE NOT YET

* willing to give love and care: not significantly more, no

A glimpse into how labour unions lost the hearts and minds of the Baby Boomers, which is why 10 years after this manifesto the "Movement Generation" had become Reagan-voting capitalists, and 50 years later, Silicon Valley VCs who grew up on this kind of rhetoric could cheer Amazon and Uber and promise "disrupting" the entire world into a Gig Economy hellscape without once asking "did we become the actual baddies?"

I guess the unions did it to themselves, but, this is how the USA's Left died.

The influence of Stewart Brand and the Back-to-the-Land movement still strong in 1970. I guess everyone was expecting civilization, and especially cities, to implode overnight, which wasn't that unreasonable a thing to expect.

Growing up as a child of the 70s, I guess I'm still haunted by this; it's just been my default expectation all my life that there'll one day be The Big Crash where centralised tech just stops working.

This is why the Cloud scares me.

Oh you sweet summer child, you thought it would all be happening by 1980

Well, the mass arrests didn't really come as expected because "The Movement" just fell apart in the 1970s due to its own internal incoherencies and increasing disillusionment with the crime and drugs that came with it. Instead of intensifying as Clark expected, it faded away and they all went into business.

But the crime and drugs, then, did become the excuse for a massively expanded prison system.

So sort of one out of two for prediction, here?

1976 as year zero. Lol. Complete miss. As we all know, it was 1977 - the release of Star Wars and the TRS-80 - that shattered America and changed everything. That's why Radio Shack jetpack stormtroopers patrol the superhighways even today.

But! A lot of US conservatives sure were worried also that the election of Carter would end the world.

(It probably didn't help here that longstanding spooky Theosophical tradition held that 1975 would be some kind of massive change point)

I reckon probably if Nixon had served out his second term, he could have succeeded in uniting the hippies for a thousand years.

But he didn't, and Jimmy Carter happened instead, and the rivers of blood didn't flow. Except in Afghanistan, and nothing bad ever resulted from that.

It remains absolutely wild to me that this kind of rhetoric pivoted *immediately* into extremely corporate-friendly training seminars via Werner Erhard becoming inspired by the word "est" and making his own thing.

And in fact that it didn't even have anything to pivot *from* because Stewart Brand and Buckminster Fuller were both happily doing extremely capitalism (Fuller never saw a patent/copyright he didn't love) even while raging at "money" and "corporations".

And yet there's still something deeply inspiring about this passage, I guess probably the closest to the kernel of a manifesto - why "Electronic" Social Transformation.

OMG "Flash Mobs" in 1970!

Nothing is new in the last 50 years is it.

(looks at Apple Computer)

Empathize With and Take on the Vibrational Frequency of the Establishment: Achievement Unlocked!

New Achievement begun!

Gradually Destroy the Establishment (0/999999)

$5 trillion more in iPhone sales required before you can progress this Achievement to 1/999999

The libertarian-hippie coalition capture of California worked out great and certainly didn't just end up giving vast tax breaks to insanely wealthy computer corporations while homeless set up tent cities next to unaffordable houses. And definitely at 62 in 1974, California Governor Ronald Reagan was WAY too ancient to ever participate in US politics again so whew, dodged two bullets there.

I mean seriously, if California is America's "Left" then... uh...

... what, actually, does a "capitalist" run state look like?????

one where there are playboy pentillionaires? actual hereditary aristocrats? Every city is run by a King?

I suppose my mistake is to start by assuming that the American "Left" in 2021 even has any aspirations of defining itself in opposition to Capital rather than as Capital's HR Department.

Truly an inspiring vision, and absolutely the opposite of what happened when Stewart Brand's flavour of Movement gained control of California.

I suppose tougher environmental protection laws (started by Nixon!) did happen. But reining in corporate money power? Lol.

Would sure have been nice if it had happened, though.