dan diamond vintage thesis material

dan diamond sent me this recently.  he found it and set to retype up the old work.

i never feature other authors on braingarbage, but perhaps it is time to give up the podium, as my own mind and obsessions  . . .

dan diamond and i met at telefund, in our days of innocent fundraising for corrupt non-profits.
i have even helped workers for telefund seek legal counsel for labor law violations and racist promotion policies.
it is quite ironic that amnesty international, ACLU, sierra club, greenpeace, oxfam, and PETA contract fundraising with an company which relies on poverty wages and abusive office policies.

telefund inc runs fundraising sweatshops for the nonprofit industry.
beware of working for them or giving to their callers.
very little money goes to the organization and the workers are so impoverished that the company provides ramen noodles in the staff kitchen and advice about how to get food stamps on the office kitchen bulletin board.
several employees are homeless, due to the low wage.
lunch break & ten minute break policies violate california labor law.
workers are often sent home after an hour or two of work, without state minimum compensation (four hours pay). this also is illegal.

introducing
new archived material from dan diamond, who continues to advise me on matters of surrealism, education, and finance:


"TECHNOPRAXIS ...if any one age attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them... there is therefore no question of a vested power in the race as a whole steadily growing as the race survives ...The last men, far from being heirs of power, will be the most subject to the dead hand of the great plannners and conditioners, and will themselves exercise the least power.

C. S. Lewis 


 I have chosen to study the literature of child care because it is the technophobe's nightmare; it represents the most basic conflict of human values and those of the technological superstructure. In this study, I will evaluate child care using the works of Ellul, Marcuse , and Stanley. Each of these authors dissects and defines the grey area between "the dead hand" of the manufacturers of social policy and the human heart in a different manner and each ultimately arrives at a different vision of technology in the public sector.  Each is basically technist in temperament. Technist describes a philosophy that fails to distinguish between the human world and other worlds that are also objects of scientific research. The real crises is that without a defense of human values and 'human ways of knowing' a vacuum is created which is filled by the empiricist and the imperial scientific method.
 

The underlying feeling of this view as in
 1984
 and
 Brave New World
  is that humans are passive objects rather than the agents or subjects of science. These 'fictions' are technist in that they theorize in the grey area that exists between science and society where human institutions are dependent and manipulated by technicism: politics, law enforcement, labor, etc. When these institutions become captured, are there any norms and values aside from technique? In these areas, the hammer might  pose a better tool than the heart could ever hope to become.

    Science is the cornerstone of modern civilization and we do indeed depend on its miraculous results that have created undreamed of ease and pleasure for the majority. It seems impossible and quite ridiculous to deny that technology might hold answers to age old human problems like hunger, disease, poverty, etc. In the face of these gifts and promises, it seems absurd to denigrate something which ameliorates the human condition. However, the greatest treasure we have is (which was the birthplace of science itself) in jeopardy-- Reason. If we did not discriminate as the age old argument goes, we would not be human . Rhetorically, should we forfeit our humanity for the wealth and ease that science offers by following blindly? Just as science subverts Reason and limits and confines our boundaries of reason it has a similar effect on other processes inherent in our society and culture ....."

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