What if you threw a Giant Conspiracy and nobody came?

What we have is not a Giant Conpiracy but it acts like one because everybody in it thinks just alike. They all repeat what Mommy Professor told them.

Peas in a pod do not need to conspire.

Now I watch “National Journalists” sit on television and bitch to each other about how “Professional Journalists” no longer control things the way they did in the Good Old Days.

Their conpiracy is a great success. They have iron control of all the Modern Means of Communication of the 1960s. But less and less people are coming to their party.

And the people that matter, the giant middle class with money, the group that votes, were the first ones to bail out and go cable and internet.

“Instead of one national voice, people are becoming split into littler and littler groups that just reenforce each others’ opinions” say “professional journalists” bemoaning the days when their little group reenforced each others’ opinions.

This is the Voice of Official Diversity, of the single world-wide Multiculture planned by Mommy Professor. There is no room in Diversity for any diversity.

Most of the Great Inevitables on which Political Correctness is based require a future based on bigness.

They took over the electronic media and its three networks. They took over publishing. They took over the University Industry, the largest monopoly in human history.

The guerrilla war of the internet caught them completely unprepared in their world of unquestioned Giant Inevitabilities.

Even satellites allowed a diversity that upset them terribly.

One decade a few Jews in New York controlled every means of communication and were making their control ever tighter. Then people found whole new methods of reaching each other.

Communications satellites took the place of the moon program. The moon program had been a planned national effort of the sort that the Inevitable Future required. But in a decade or two it was replaced by smaller and smaller programs of shooting satellites into space as technology got better.

It is true that 3-D movies failed. But things are no longer done on the scale they had to be done when 3-D came in. Back then you needed a fundamenteal change inthe whole movie industry for 3-D to succeed.

More and more, as things like improved satellite technology and the internet divide things up, the Great Big Planned World of Political Correctness is falling apart.

So there is room for the developement of Virtual Reality when the time comes and for SOME people to make a go of it. It will not require a National Effort.

And some will choose to live there, and some will not. If it is good, more people will choose to live there.

We no longer have to decide beteween One Great Big Planned Multiculture and Anarchy.

Which leads us to a fundamental point. We have had it driven deeply into our psyche that there will be a SINGLE World of the Future.

Meanwhile the real world is advancing in the exact opposite direction.

And we are still debating the Old Giant Inevitability.

The debate is, in other words, entirely in the wrong world.

When 3-D movies came in we all assumed it was the way of the future. But they died out.

Yet 3-D sound is the only kind you have had in a modern theatre for decades.

Virtual Reality was the cyberspace equivalent of 3-D in the movies. It looked like the beginning of a cyberspace we could actually LIVE in.

First we would see it in 2-D. Then we would smell it. Then we would taste and feel it. It would be our world.

Of course it will require a lot of advances in computers before such things are practical. But the failure of 3-D makes me wonder if we really WANT it.

When I say “We” I am not referring to the wild cries of the Politically Correct Amish. I mean the real people who buy things. They not only didn’t WANT 3-D, but many more black-and-white movies were made and BOUGHT in the last decades than 3-D movies.

When we do get the technology, will enoguh people want to live in cyberspace to make it economically viable?

As I said below, I find ther real future hard to talk about, because what I am saying will only make sense to those who are not worrying themselves silly over a Frankenstein Complex.

It is not there is anything “unnatural” about living in cyberspace that bothers me. What everybody, including the Amiish, consider “natural” today is exactly as “natural” as cyberspace.

So I will approve the comments that express horror at this but I’ve heard them before.

Cyberspace is all the space we ever wanted without bothering any thing else.

Cyberspace holds potential not just for uisng our five senses, but for extending them and keeping us protected while doing it.

But that failure of 3-D haunts me.

Next I will return to the question of a future of bigness or smallness and see if it make it possible for those who wish to live in a cyberspace.

Will the future be built on hugeness or smallness?

When I was young, the future was all big. We would go to the stars in huge ships.

In the 1950s we dreamed of it. In the 1960s and 1970s it began to come true. A titanic program costing over twenty billion dollars put men on the moon.

In the 1970s the Supersonic transport began to fly the ocean at speeds of up to half a mile a second.

And there the Age of Bigness died. The astronauts of 1969 are old men now. As one of them said, “I always thought it was possible I would be the first man on the moon. I never imagined I would be the LAST man on the moon.”

The last SST flight took place. It’s all back to subsonic.

The moon landing was what science fiction had assumed the future would be. Giant projects would send men to explore new worlds, and on earth we would wait breathlessly for them to report back what they found.

What they found in the moon landing was stuff that they brought back to earth for analysis. They didn’t discover a thing on the moon that we didn’t already know about.

So we realized that what we needed to send into space was not men to bring back samples, but machines that could do the sampling there. The romance died.

Meanwhile, in physics, the Einsteinian Universe of hugeness was being replaced y the quantum universe of smallness. Drexler wrote his book on nanotechnology. While everybody was concentrating on the scifi-come-true ideas of men into space, Drexler talked about manipulating and building from molecules up.

Then cyberspace was invented.

We could live in cyberspace. But we probably won’t.

See next article.