(1) Violence is like a pool of poison water threatening
the river of life. Gazing out over the whole, one sees
that answering violence with more violence never stops
the corruption of the water, but rather becomes
the source of the pollution itself;
Violence is like a fire raging in the house of love
and good intentions. Never putting out the flames,
answering violence with more violence is the fuel that
burns the house to the ground;
Violence is like a noise drowning out the symphony
of all peoples. Answering violence with more violence,
noise replaces the music, soon becoming the only
sound we know.
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| go to the Picture/Poem Poster, Way of Violence shown at the right (prints 81/2 x 11" (A4)) Also available as .pdf download (170k) | |
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A two-part meditation on both the bright and darker
sides of computers and computer networks
(2) Computers Up
make it dramatically easier to . . .
—transcend arbitrary borders or limitations of any kind, thereby bringing
people and new meaning together in unexpected and creative ways;
—develop new, both quantitative and qualitative, descriptive languages
of especially movement, which may be modelled and displayed freely
across networks in both the more traditional numerical, visual and auditory
ways, as well as via other modalities yet to be discovered;
—greatly diminish the corrupting influences of both outward material
wealth,
as well as outmoded and extremely divisive religious beliefs, as the
primary
determining factors of culture, creative tradition and shared worldview;
—introduce a new appropriateness and simplicity of design, made
possible
by more co-operative and democratic work processes which more easily
call attention to inconsistencies, contradictions and unnecessary
difficulties of every kind;
—break the cycles of violence presently conditioning human interaction
on all levels by replacing dominance and aggression with more sustained
and serious efforts of communication and understanding;
—make explicit and real the already implicit interconnectedness of not
just one isolated group or nation of people, but rather the whole web
of humanity.
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| go to Picture/Poem Poster of Computers Up shown at the right (prints 81/2 x 11" (A4)) Also available as .pdf download (170k) | |
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A two-part meditation on both the bright and darker
sides of computers and computer networks
(3) Computers Down
make it dramatically easier to . . .
—clandestinely monitor all aspects of our intellectual and personal
lives, both past and present, and thereby grossly and in the most
insidious of ways violate our right to privacy and other basic civil
liberties;
—create vast informational networks for ever-more centralized runaway
economies, which, because they are virtually invisible, are shielded
from the negative human and environmental consequences of their
own internal contradictions;
—generate increasingly complicated stores of what is perceived to
be strategically vital information, which, because they are vulnerable
to attack, must be protected by ever-greater covert measures,
leading in turn to a general and all-pervasive ambience of fear
and mistrust;
—break apart the Universal Somatic Constant, or the necessary unity
of body and mind, in all human creative activity, leading to a danger-
ously illusory culture of disembodied artifacts and relationships;
—drive Art and Science away from the guidance of spiritual and
philosophical insight into the highly fragmented realm of theories
based solely on inferences from other theories and datasets
derived from a narrowly specialized instrumentarium;
—replace our sense of natural Time and Space, as well as our more
general sense of Earth, with a highly seductive yet largely unreal
reality which speaks only to a very limited portion of the entire
spectrum of human intelligence, thereby creating unawares a cycle
of corruption in our perception of the world around us.
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| go to Picture/Poem Poster of Computers Down shown at the right (prints 81/2 x 11" (A4)) Also available as .pdf download (170k) | |
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