''It's for security,'' explains J.C., who was asked by the mayor of his Mole community to explain their philosophy of life to Jenny Toth, a New York journalist who befriended the Mole People in 1990. "Society lives up in a dome and locks all its doors so it's safe from the outside. We're locked out down here. They ignore us. They've forgotten what it is to survive. They value money, we value survival. We take care of each other.'' Alienation, disorientation, and, most of all, necessity, form new bonds of community cooperation not experienced above ground.
A man who lives hundreds of feet under Grand Central Station explains: ''You go down there, play with some wires, and you got light. And before you know it, there are twelve to fifteen people down there with you. They become like neighborhoods; you're friends with everyone. You know the girls at the end and the family in the middle. When someone gets sick, we put our money together to get medicine. Most people team up. You can just about make it that way.''
This bottom-up networking is analogous to the formation of the Global Electronic Village, which also depends on bonds of mutual interest and like-minded politics. Each system is made up of people whose needs are not met or are even thwarted by established channels and each system exploits an existing network, using it for a purpose that was not intended. These kinds of communities make up an increasingly important component in the overall dynamical system of society. Programmer Marc de Groot compares this social landscape with the conclusions of systems math:
''The classic example of the feedback loop is the thermostat, which controls itself. I think we're becoming aware of the fact that the most common type of causality is feedback, and not linear or top-down. The effect goes back and effects the cause, and the cause effects the effect. We have a society where power becomes decentralized, we get feedback loops, where change can come from below. People in power will try to eliminate those threats.''
The fears about cyberian evolution may stem from a partial awareness of these new channels of feedback and iteration. Those who believe they are currently in power attempt to squash the iterators, but find that their efforts are ineffectual. Like mutating bacteria or even cockroaches, feedback loops will foster adaptive changes faster than new antibiotics or bug sprays can be developed to combat them. Meanwhile, the formerly powerless who now see themselves as vitally influencing the course of history through feedback and iteration become obsessed with their causes and addicted to their techniques. But however obsessed or addicted they get, and however fearfully or violently society reacts, feedback and iteration slowly and inevitably turn the wheel of revolution, anyway.
Negative Feedback Iteration
Feedback loops are mathematics' way of phrasing revolution and are as natural a part of existence as plankton, volcanoes, or thyroid glands. The negative feedback loops to a mechanistic, consumption-based culture are irate labor, ecoterrorists, and consciousness-expansion advocates, who conduct their iterations through cheap communications, printing, and video production.
Take Chris Carlsson, for example, editor of Processed World, a magazine that he says is ''about the underside of the information age and the misery of daily life in a perverse society based on the buying and selling of human time.'' Carlsson looks more like a college professor than an office worker; he's a brilliant, ex-sixties radical who dropped out of the rat race to make his living as an office temp data processor in San Francisco.
On a lazy Sunday morning, Carlsson explains the intricacies of his historical-philosophical perspective as he changes the screen in his pipe and the grounds in his espresso pot. He believes that we are currently living in a ''socially constructed perversion,'' an unnatural reality that will be forced to change. According to Carlsson, our society is addicted to consumption, and this addiction leads us to do things and support systems that benefit only the dollar, not the individual. The systems themselves are constructed, like Muzak, to squash the notion of personal power.
''It's hard to imagine how else it could be. The only questions you are asked in this society are, `What do you want to buy?' and, `What are you going to do for money?' You don't get to say, `What do I want out of life and how can I contribute to the totality?' There's no mechanism at all in our society that promotes some sort of role for the individual.''
The ''processed world'' is a place where the bottom line is all that matters. Workers are paid as little as possible to produce goods that break as quickly as possible, or serve no function whatsoever other than to turn a buck. For this final phase in the era of credit and GNP expansion, there can never be enough stuff – if there were, the corporations would go out of business. The motivation is to sell; the standard of living, the environment, cultural growth, and meaning to life do not enter into the equation.
Chemical companies who want to sell chemicals, for example, thrive on weak crops and cattle; they hope to create a chemically dependent agriculture. ''Thus, the first application of gene-splicing technology will be bovine growth hormone,'' Carlsson says. "Not that we need more milk in this country; we have a surplus!'' But the growth hormone will increase a cow's output of milk. Farmer Jones will need to keep up with Farmer Smith, so he, too, will buy the hormone. Unfortunately, the hormone also weakens the cows' knees, which requires that the farmers purchase more antibiotics as well as other drugs, bringing more dollars to the chemical companies. Another example: It is to the chemical company's advantage to lobby against sterile fruit flies as a way of combating the medfly crisis in California. By ''persuading'' the government to allow the use of pesticides, chemical companies weaken the plants they are "saving,'' and thus create further dependence on fertilizers and medications – more money, less effectiveness, greater pollution.
Carlsson does not blame the ''people in charge'' for our predicament. "The chairman of the board doesn't feel like he has any power. He's just as trapped in. Nothing matters to the stockholders but how the balance sheet looks.'' Further, as the work environment increasingly dehumanizes, the system loses precious feedback channels with which it can correct itself. The dollar oversimplifies the complexities of a working society (and its needs – as we'll see later in this chapter – have simplified the global ecology to disastrous levels). As the workplace gets more automated, workers become merely a part of the spreadsheet: their input and output are monitored, regulated, and controlled by computer. As jobs are replaced by machines (which do the work more efficiently), workers are demoted rather than promoted. Any special skills they developed over time now become obsolete.
The way out, according to Carlsson, is subversion and sabotage.
''When you sell your time, you are giving up your right to decide what's worth doing. The goal of the working class should be to abolish what they do! Not being against technology, but being against the way it's being used. Human beings can find subversive uses for things like computers and photocopy machines. They were not made to enhance our ability to communicate, and yet they do. They provide everybody with a chance to speak through the printed medium. The work experience tells the worker that he has no say, and that what he is doing is a complete waste of time. But this profound emptiness and discontent is not evident on TV. Everything in society erodes your self-esteem.''