August 5, 2007-- As noted in the message from Charles and Kathy, they have done important research, to which you should refer your own attention, into the role of James Martin and the James Martin Foundation in crafting the concept expressed in actor McGoohan's TV series, "The Prisoner." I shall recount now, a concise summary of the relevant features of a report already delivered to some members of the LYM, of my relevant involvement in outlining the work later done, on a CBS TV report, on the future impact of computers, and, after that summarize the concept which must be understood to grasp the significance of Orwellian brain-washing operations such as Rupert Murdoch's MySpace.

At the close of the 1950s, I was a guest for an evening party, attended by some of the most noted professional playwrights and other writers of the New York City community, during which the subject of a CBS TV report then being prepared was identified to me in respect to my professional status as a management consultant. The question was posed to me: How could a TV program of that sort present a layman's audience with a sense of what computers represent for the future of society? Attention of all at the party was, for much of the evening, focussed entirely on hearing and discussing my response.

I replied with the opening suggestion that, they, as writers should be able to recognize as the potential of the concept of "Plotto" for producing the kind of trash associated with "soap and horse operas" of that time. I emphasized that as long as we did not require any artistic or scientific creativity in crafting the work, a future TV entertainment program of such genres could be generated by aid of the kinds of computer technology of an implicitly foreseeable future. My host, who had been employed to write for the intended CBS-TV report, later informed me that he had left the program for another assignment, but indicated that an element containing his preparation of a presentation based on my outline which featured within such a CBS-TV program. I watched the program, in which what I had presented at that party was produced by joint efforts of MIT's Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky. The fact that both of these, and kindred entities at MIT's RLE and kindred places, have been enemies of everything for which I stand, is the point which I actually emphasized in my discussion with the writers at that Manhattan party.

So, taking the summary of facts presented by Charles and Kathy into account, the McGoohan TV series, "The Prisoner," is to be seen as a computer-age parody of the plot of George Orwell's "1984." "MySpace" is to be recognized as "Big Brother" Rupert Murdoch's electronic "empire."The object of the operation is to transform young-adult human beings into Orwellian zombies the type sufficiently self-degraded by this processing to become sincere devotees of what the Beaverbrook intelligence empire produced as the intellectual spawn Murdoch represents. The TV series, "The Prisoner" is an appropriate model of the effect of an essentially fascist Murdoch's ownership, not only of Fox-TV and what is now becoming "The Wall Street Urinal," but also as the flesh-and-blood (ugh!) "Big Brother" controlling the inhabitants of the Orwellian nightmare called "MySpace."

The essence of the matter, as I emphasized to the writers assembled at that referenced party, is that actual ideas can not be represented explicitly by means of a digital computer system, no matter how powerful that contraption might become. A society which thinks in any form of digital-computerese, is a society of zombies as the living dead strolling, dripping, onto the shore, from out of the sordid muck of a "black lagoon." The typical representative of the currently onrushing generation of babble-on's TV and radio announcers, is typical of this effect.

This leads us to the subject of the method of the Stephen Colbert who amused President George W. Bush, and also Justice Scalia, with such elegance, at a Washington Correspondent's event. I suspect that what Rupert Murdoch fears the most is what he suspects that Stephen Colbert knows what is gestating in Murdoch's stinking pouch. Think of MySpace as Murdoch's pouch.

John v. Neumann In Hell!

Literary history has notable precedents for pseudo-life in MySpace. The most compact of these is what I have reported, on several occasions, as my experience on one occasion, during the 1980s, sitting in a late afternoon, on the elevated river-back, looking across the Arno, into the streets of Florence. Suddenly, I was seized by the realization that I was seated in what might be the very spot, or a nearby location, where Boccacio had seated himself for the occasion of his authorship of his Decameron. The time of the telling of those tales was amid the New Dark age's Black Death pandemic, into which Florence, like nearby Lucca, and other cities of the Lombard League, had been plunged as the fruit of the evil which the League had enjoyed so lavishly in an immediately preceding part of history.

Boccacio told tales of the arts of Sophistry, like those cultivated by today's immediate post-war, white-collar generation, the so-called "68ers" of the Americas and western and central Europe, whose preference for "go along, to get along," has led our civilization, like that of Sophist Greece before us, to the verge of the yawning maw of self-inflicted doom. To read The Decameron as Boccaccio wrote it for the audience of the time he told it, you must read it with the relevant sense of historical irony, respecting the earlier, "better days," which had been the historical tree from which the fruit of the Black Death was spawned. We are in the grip of a prevalence of a kind of Sophistry which produced that Black Death pandemic, especially under Dick Cheney's puppet George W. Bush.

The crucial issue in the kind of syndrome which The Decameron presents, as I have just summarized that point here, is the crushing of the role of that creative principle which separates the culture implicitly portrayed by what Chomsky and Minsky did with my argument, on the CBS-TV piece, from a culture in which the creative (noetic) powers of the individual mind are the characteristic feature of the use of the medium of communication. In a medium such as Murdoch's lodging for dead souls, is precisely the quality of creativity which separates human beings, and rock entertainers, from beast- like entities.

For example, as I have said:

"In MySpace, the hotels are truly wonderful; everything is done for the guests automatically.

For example, every time Felix Rohatyn enters one of those rooms, the toilet flushes - - copiously."