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>http://www.baumgart.org/computer_bums_lite.pdf
drat, I didn't even check to confirm that the Bateson story was included in this pdf, but it's just Brand's article on video games / the internet circa 1974, not the Bateson interview. Still an amazing article; I'm old enough to remember my dad talking about how someday everyone was going to have a Dynabook
― Milton Parker, Thursday, 13 June 2013 19:42 (eleven years ago) link
I'm old enough to remember my dad taking community college classes to learn Fortran. He did not talk about it much. He talked more about how the tank game that came with the Atari was really boring. When we set our tanks to be invisible, the action or lack thereof was reminiscent of a Batesonian double bind.
― You must be very cold in the sack. (sarahell), Thursday, 13 June 2013 19:50 (eleven years ago) link
[From Brand's Cybernetic Frontiers:]
The classic Bind. "Tell me you love me." "I love you." "Why do you only say that when I ask you?" The bouquet is elicited and then destroyed.
Gregory: "Then there is the more subtle case in which the rug is not switched. Shall we say a loving action is insisted upon by the recipient. The case in which A makes a spontaneous affectionate move towards B, and B grabs it. Which remarkably quickly destroys the relationship. Because the message is delivered into the frame in which it had to be delivered, it becomes a meaningless message. It doesn't mean any more than the smile of the porpoise, which smiles because he can't change his face."
I can hear it. "Tell me you love me." "I love you." "Thankyou." The bouquet, by being elicited, dismisses itself.
― Milton Parker, Thursday, 13 June 2013 23:52 (eleven years ago) link
one year passes...
one month passes...
Long ago, in 1949, when psychiatrists still believed in lobotomy, I was a new member of the staff of the Veterans Administration Mental Hospital at Palo Alto. One day one of the residents called me aside to see the blackboard in our largest classroom. A lobotomy meeting had been held there that afternoon and the board was still unerased.
This was thirty years ago, of course, and nothing of the sort could happen today, but in those days lobotomy meetings were great social occasions. Everybody who had had anything to do with case turned up -- doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and so on. Perhaps thirty or forty people were there, including the five-man "Lobotomy Committee," under the chairmanship of an outside examiner, a distinguished psychiatrist from another hospital.
When all the tests and reports had been presented, the patient was brought in to be interviewed by the outside commissioner.
The examiner gave the patient a piece of chalk and told him, "Draw the figure of a man." The patient went obediently to the blackboard and wrote: DRAW THE FIGURE OF A MAN
The examiner said, "Don't write it. Draw it." And again the patient wrote: DON'T WRITE IT DRAW IT
The examiner said, "Oh, I give up." This time the patient revised the definition of the context, which he had already used to assert a kind of freedom, and wrote in large capital letters all across the blackboard:
VICTORY
― Milton Parker, Thursday, 30 October 2014 21:48 (nine years ago) link
six months pass...