In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialist and feminist principles of design. The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination:
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Representation

Simulation

Bourgeois novel,

realism

Science fiction,

postmodernism

Organism Biotic

Component Depth,

integrity

Surface,

boundary

Heat

Noise

Biology as clinical practice Biology as inscription

Physiology

Communications

engineering

Small group

Subsystem

Perfection

Optimization

Eugenics

Population Control

Decadence,

Magic Mountain

Obsolescence,

Future Shock

Hygiene

Stress Management

Microbiology,

tuberculosis

Immunology,

AIDS

Organic division of labour

Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour

Functional specialization

Modular construction

Reproduction

Replication

Organic sex role specialization

Optimal genetic strategies

Bioogical determinism

Evolutionary inertia,

constraints

Community ecology

Ecosystem

Racial chain of being Neo-imperialism,

United Nations

humanism

Scientific management in home/factory

Global factory/

Electronid cottage Family

/Market/

Factory

Women in the Integrated Circuit

Family wage

Comparable worth

Public/

Private

Cyborg citizenship

Nature

/Culture

fields of difference

Co-operation Communicatins

enhancemenet

Freud

Lacan

Sex

Genetic engineering

labour

Robotics

Mind

Artificial Intelligence

Second World War

Star Wars

White Capitalist

Patriarchy

Informatics of Domination
