Out of their conflict with the First Wave fantasizers and the Second Wave advocates of technology uber alles will come sensible technologies matched to the new, sustainable energy system toward which we are beginning to reach. Plug-ging the new technologies into this new energy base will raise to a wholly new level our entire civilization. At its heart we will find a fusion of sophisticated, science-based “high stream” industries, operating within much tightened ecological and social controls, with equally sophisticated, “low-stream” industries that operate on a smaller, more human scale, both based on principles radically different from those which governed the Second Wave techno-sphere. Together, these two layers of industry will form tomorrow’s “commanding heights.”
But this is only a detail of a much vaster picture. For at the same time that we are transforming the techno-sphere we are also revolutionizing the info-sphere.
DE-MASSIYFING THE MEDIA
The espionage agent is one of the most powerful metaphors of our time. No other figure has so successfully captured the contemporary imagination. Films by the hundred glorify 007 and his brash fictional counterparts. Television and paperbacks churn out endless images of the spy as daring, romantic, amoral, larger (or smaller) than life. Governments, meanwhile, spend billions on espionage. Agents of the KGB, the CIA, and a score of other intelligence agencies trip over one another from Berlin to Beirut, from Macao to Mexico City.
In Moscow, western correspondents are accused of spying. In Bonn, chancellors fall because spies infest their ministries. In Washington, congressional investigators simultaneously expose the misdeeds of secret agents, American and Korean, while above, the sky itself is rilled with spy satellites apparently photographing every inch of the earth.
The spy is hardly new to history. It is worth asking, therefore, why at this particular moment the theme of espionage has come to dominate the popular imagination, throwing even private eyes, cops, andcowboys into the shadow. When we do ask, we immediately notice one important difference between the spy and these other culture heroes: While fictional policemen and cowboys rely on mere pistols or their bare fists, the fictional spy comes equipped with the latest, most exotic technology—electronic bugs, banks of computers, infrared cameras, cars that fly or swim, helicopters, one-man submarines, death rays, and the like.
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