Re: <nettime> DNA and computers

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

Ongjen Strpic wrote:

>"visionary" (see http://www.foresight.org/EOC) nanoscience is
>increasingly abandoned and seems to be thought of as a dead end:
nanobusiness is what's going on now.

Eduardo Navas, writing about a nanotech researcher:

Banks were very interested in this particular project, and he was 
"negotiating" with one or two.  He admitted that the banks would 
never be able to use the full potential of what the card could offer, 
but that was not his problem...  later on he mentioned commodities 
that he could buy with his deal.

******

Ognjen, my friend-

Can you even imagine what a million dollars will buy?

The mere fact of saying that poisons one's existence through the 
irreversibility of this "thought experiment" (i.e. fantasy - and 
we're talking "id est," for real).

The possibility of "curing" people of this fantasy is practically 
nul. Only those who do not have even the most distant reason to 
imagine what a million dollars can buy are capable of turning their 
attention away from such sirens.

The upshot of this is that pretty much all people who let their 
excellence develop in a way and in a place where it can be recognized 
by the socially dominant powers become totally subservient to their 
magnetic attraction.

The few exceptions (for instance, the current "stars" of the various 
political resistance movements) are constantly balanced on a knife 
edge where their omnipresent reflection in the media screen is the 
only barrier that keeps them from falling to the temptation to simply 
and immediately profit from a personal capital which, they know, is 
in constant danger of suddenly deteriorating and becoming nothing.

I am afraid that "visionaries," technological and otherwise, become 
extremely rare under these conditions.

This is a way of explaining why one might become interested in what 
Foucault once called "la vie des hommes infames" (it means something 
rather stronger than "the lives of infamous people").

best, Brian

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