Was Valerie Solanas The Genius Behind the Internet?
Today's Los Angeles Times features an op-ed by A.S. Hamrah about the 40th anniversary of Valerie Solanas' assassination attempt on Andy Warhol. (We stumbled upon this via The New York Times' Opinionator blog.)
Ms. Solanas, a playwright who formed a group called S.C.U.M. ("Society for Cutting Up Men") and wrote its manifesto (she is also widely credited as being the group's only member), shot Mr. Warhol in his office. After summarizing the details of the shooting, Mr. Hamrah describes Ms. Solanas' manifesto: "a mixture of social philosophy and fine shtick, her work has the rare virtue of seeming at the same time totally insane and totally right."
Here Mr. Hamrah speculates on how the late Ms. Solanas (she died in 1988) may have predicted our current wired age:
It was in 1968 that Warhol first noted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. But in 1967, Solanas had prefigured that with a warning of her own. In the future, she wrote in her characteristic mode of threat-laced irony, 'it will be electronically possible for [a man] to tune in to any specific female he wants to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this.' These twin predictions sum up the world we find ourselves in now, the world of reality TV, Facebook, Twitter, the entire free-range panopticon. Solanas made her prediction in a footnote to 'SCUM Manifesto,' but the whole essay is like that.
: This week's On The Media has tape from the speech Lyndon Johnson gave when he signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and here's the amazing part: Like a science-fiction author, he invented the internet long before it is what we know today. Listen:
I believe the time has come to stake another claim in the name of all the people, stake a claim based upon the combined resources of communications. I believe the time has come to enlist the computer and the satellite, as well as television and radio, and to enlist them in the cause of education....
So I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge-not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can rise.
Think of the lives that this would change:
--the student in a small college could tap the resources of a great university....
--the country doctor getting help from a distant laboratory or a teaching hospital;
--a scholar in Atlanta might draw instantly on a library in New York;
--a famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspirations into some far-off classroom, so that no child need be neglected. Eventually, I think this electronic knowledge bank could be as valuable as the Federal Reserve Bank.
And such a system could involve other nations, too--it could involve them in a partnership to share knowledge and to thus enrich all mankind.
A wild and visionary idea? Not at all. Yesterday's strangest dreams are today's headlines and change is getting swifter every moment.
I have already asked my advisers to begin to explore the possibility of a network for knowledge--and then to draw up a suggested blueprint for it.