Video Conférence sur MBONE
De la préhistoire à la post-histoire,
émergence d'une transculture
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional,
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne,
l'Institut National de l'Audiovisuel,
Berkeley University
© ASA Art and Technology, UK, 1996

From Pre-History to Post-History,
the emergence of a transculture
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
© ASA Art and Technology, UK, 1996

	History, as the fundamental technology for understanding the West, certainly had its first sign of disintegration with Karl Popper, when he published the classic "The Poverty of Historicism" in 1957.
	"Packed" as a furious criticism of his teleological partners, scientists of aristocratic form and character, the text unveiled the impact that the first wave of thermodynamics caused - principally with the ideas by Heisenberg and his Theory of Incertitude. But, it also unveiled what would emerge as the second wave of thermodynamics, a little later.
	In general, because they are "wrapped" in the illusion of contiguity - produced by the intensive use of vision, a use that was well represented in the phonetic alphabet and the Gutemberg press - people did not understand what really had happened and, including Popper, they let themselves be deluded by the idea of a political challenge.
	In that year, the Sputnik was launched - the first telecommunications satellite. Only five years later Licklider would constitute for the American Army what would be the basis of what would be called the Internet.
	Popper asked himself about the real reason for scientific investigation: the desire for knowledge or the fight for survival, that is to say: systematic knowledge or natural selection?
	Ten years later, Gerald Edelman established the model according to which our immunological, and also probably our cognitive system, do not work through instructionist functions, but by self-regulation, selection and chance.
	The majority of historians, like Georges Duby, consider that the most important indicator that distinguishes the West is what we call history: a chain of discrete elements, polar, and diachronically interconnected. Not a hiearchy, because there are different histories, but the structure of the auditive universe.
	It seems that when we greatly intensify the sense of vision, in the auditive complex we reclaim an efficient model for understanding the very last structure of things.
	Napoleon affirmed that «the politics of a State» was «in its geography».
	But, certainly, it will be an essencial link between politics, in the sense of polis, history and geography!
	The institution of the polis in Greece coincides with the idea of isonomy, with the appearance of the book - as an accumulator of the ideas of a single person -, with the intensification of vision through reading, with the start of history by Herodotus - as a species of religion - and with a less tribal idea of territory.
	The Greek miracle!
	The end of history is no longer the excess of information through the huge development of resources for data storage.
	That is to say: if Pre-History was characterised by the lack of the necessary for the minimum storage of long term information, Post-History will be the greatest in terms of real time informational stock.
	So, taking the enormous contingent of information nothing could remain "history", because there would be a priori a great variety of "truth".
	But, taking as an example the model established by cyberspatial navigation, the end of history also coincides with the end of the classical idea of territory, and with the start of a new geography.
	This image of the end of history has almost nothing to do with Professor Fukuyama's who, still a prisioner of old technologies, considered that the post-historical world would remain divided into nation-states.
	Quickly, the frontiers disintegrate: to the horror of controlling authorities, which still need to contain migratory fluxes of everything that means capital, including people.
	To the panic of politicians - still familiar with the old idea of territory but, in general, not familiar with the enterprise environment, as if they still had their feet in the pre-industrial era - the old rule of state starts to be quickly discolated to multinational enterprises, which must adopt the term "transnationals".
	Otherwise, one of the only and strongest links that still make the relationship between politicians and enterprises specify seems to be taxes, generators - in last instance - of benefits for the enterprises themselves, as if we definitively had inverted the rules.
	Cultures turn mixed with each other, producing an interesting and turbulent bricolage - to the despair of nationalists, who still believe in the idea of the nation, and to the confusion of artists, who still believe in and defend an art "literally" uniform.
	The old, local ethos transforms itself into a planetary and global one, projecting a new type of ethics, turbulent and non linear, which we still are not familiar with.
	The same system of overcommunication and overpopulation produces the phenomenon of megacities, that will soon number over 50! - huge social colonies with more than ten million inhabitants that work as true City-States.
	Without the telecommunications networks of networks, megacities would be simply impossible.
	Neither would a megacomplex of nanodecisions be possible.
	Megacities unveil an interesting process of organisation without order, in the sense of literary order. Because of this, practically all the megacities that start in the next ten years will be located in so-called Third World countries, that is to say, countries with a low degree of literacy.
	But, those same nets produce mafias in all their colours, borrowing the name used by Southern Italian families which created networks of power through the control of information dedicated to criminal activities. Curiously, the word "crime" has its most distant etymological root in the Indo European krei, which meant "judgement".
	But, there is no judgement without ethos!
	There certainly, will be a key to the question of why our planet seems to be permanently plunged into waves of crime and corruption, principally when we consider the case of megacities: free of a standard ethos, precise and uniform, all the "order" of values became questionable.
	Nets also make possible - and inside this universe of a deep metamorphosis of ethics - the instant generation of non formal groups of people.
	Interest groups which constitute practically all the institutions of this end of the millenium. Because of this, in several languages and in different countries people refer to these "defense of privileges" groups - for the mainly part closed groups - as "mafias" or small "churches".
	The fact is that only in this century is agriculture no longer the principal planetary activity, that the Middle Ages lasted for practically 75% of the last two thousand years and that the "white world" seems to have lost very quickly the privileged position which it held from the 15th century, at least.
	Today, January 18, 1996, in the Worl Wide Web more than two million sites will be active, which represents almost three thousand people per site of the almost thirty three million InterNet "inhabitants".
	Predictions say that, in the year 2000 - that is to say, in only five years - there will be more than a billion users Internet, meaning almost 17% of the world population.
	This new virtual geography reveals two human characters that seem to exist in permanent conflict: the ignorance and the wise. The latter, in the image of teleanthropos - an idea brilliantly created by Rene Berger: the human being constituted at a distance, made by enchainments of different cultures, open and nomad, a species of contemporary Frankenstein, certainly horrible to the mediocre eye.
	And the former, the ignorance, that appears powerful in the image of secondary illiterate people: who, however with school and university diploms, have lost the habit and pleasure of books, music, theatre, art in general. People who despise education, ofter looking their own offsprings, defending a world of "the smart" and of the "advantage" on the other.
	As Plato shows in Theaetetus, they are both characters that were present at the time of Socrates. Characters that dominated the "scene" of the Greek miracle and that seem to be being resurrected in the middle of a new metamorphosis.