----- Original Message -----
From: "K.M. Sutherland" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "brish" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 19 April 2000 15:40
Subject: "mass" suicide
|it
| often seems to me (I like things often to seem) that the closer we get to
| a discourse of validation which has been purged of reactionary and
| antidemocratic impulse, and which identifies least restrictedly the
| sovereign -individual- as a regulative concept, the closer we also get to
| total disregard for the third world. I don't accuse you of this cris, of
| course. But there are stages of industrial development for whose people
| these discourses would be too blatantly insubstantial to believe. I don't
| suggest for a moment that we revert to 19thC Marxtalk, a kind of
| telecommunications era throwback to the ponderous clapper and tocsin; but
| any responsive and circumspect discourse ought dialectically to recognize
| how its most progressive elements are simultaneously those most likely to
| be irrelevant to most of the world's population, "mass" or no "mass".
well said, Keston. I don't think your take on the masses was what was
intended in the earlier use of this term; but I think you are right.
we do well, I think, before we become too entranced by converging (like
snatch squads) technologies, too remember how many people in the world have
never yet used a telephone
and we do well not to forget that the internet is a military product in
origin
we should take ourselves less (and more) seriously - I doubt that anything I
am making is going to be of much use to those contemplating mass suicide
L
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