Control and the stages to postmodernism. 1) "In Moby Dick. . everybody's working, doing their job too. But the captain goes insane, the ship snaps in two, the crew drowns and the captain gets dragged to the bottom of the sea." 2) "In Star Trek, every story is the same. There they are, the crew, working, working, working. Then somebody says, 'Captain! I've lost control of the ship.' The rest of the episode is about gaining control of the ship." Laurie Anderson
Lost control and post-post modernism .To use John Von Neumann's phrase, is technology rapidly pushing us toward "some essential singularity"? Are we accelerating toward a post-biological intelligence? Are we reaching a Prediction Wall?-- which manifests as "a growing inability of human minds to credibly imagine our onrushing future, a future that must apparently include greater-than-human technological sophistication and intelligence. At the same time, we now admit to . . . increasingly interconnected technological systems that no one human being understands. The Millenial generation assumes the normality of living in a world of . . . technological systems, erected like vast beehives or termite mounds, systems maintained and incrementally improved by large swarms of partially-aware human beings, each of which has only a very limited conceptualization of the full potentialities and inherent developmental trajectory of the new technological environment that is emerging." (from Singularity Watch web site, now gone.)
Postmodernism as such is really fashionable nonsense. Read about the misconceptions of science by post-modernists in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. More
