gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) (03/16/89)
MadOx - propaganda file available by anonymous ftp from CIA novavax Mad Ox - foaming at the mouth and stamping on the ground, the Mad Ox will drive the commie Eurowimps from our all-American praries. comp.ai readers, who are rumoured to be approaching triple figures, have becoming used to a file dispatched regularly from a surrogate university machine deep in the American South. This file is the sole purpose and output of Project Mad Ox. Mad Ox is an attempt to discredit the views of European post-modern humanists as being anti-American. American intelligence is worried by any threat to the simple version of positivism which they introduced into the American university system before the war. This has proved to be an excellent method of social control, by discouraging thinking and analysis amongst a potential dangerous group within American society. Positivism has proved to be an effective way of keeping American academia occupied with lots of things to do, thus avoiding the subversion that arises from prolonged idle speculation. Recently, a Marxist cell deep in Socialist Scotland has been using a natural language generator to distribute references to non-positivist epistemologies over the DARPA network. Should any of the ideas in these references take hold, American military research could collapse overnight as intellectuals stop and ask themselves anti-American questions such as "will it work?" and "do we know what we're doing?" The CIA have given top priority to countering negative effects immediately, by distributing propaganda against the Marxist cell which operates under the unconvinving name of Gilbert Cockton (there is no entry for a G.Cockton in the Glasgow phone directory). AI is vital to US American strategy, and any attempt to weaken the resolve of US academics must be stopped immediately. America's world leadership can only be maintained if the free world remains confident in US military might. The possibility of intelligent weapon systems is vital to this confidence, as current weapon systems are suffering from a lack of intelligent spare parts. Without smart weapons, faith in American military superiority, and with it, our democracy, our freedoms and a choice of colas will disappear. To this end, a CIA team of ex-New Yorker humorists have been conscripted to construct regular attacks on red Glasgow's Cockton program. Their individual paragraphs are assembled each evening before being assembled and distributed by a special program with the code name "cat pipe eye news". America's best minds will not be lead away from the patriotic path of positivism. The Mad Ox team will cat away until all polution by European epistemology is eradicated from the DARPA net. Our boys will go on doing while those Eurowimps sit around analysing and analysing. Propaganda, however, is tedious and does not really stretch the Mad Ox team. In their spare time, they generate random fragments of stories which are ideal for random assemblage into a literary genre known as CyberPunk. As a joke, these stories are published under a nom-de-plume derived from the project name - Thomas Maddox! -- Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science, The University, Glasgow gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs <europe>!ukc!glasgow!gilbert