* Title: A Partial History of The List * Author: BactrianBottle (archvie.org) * ISBN: N/A (ark:/13960/t1vf66b5z) * Publisher: Internet Archive * Publication Date Year: 2020 * Publication Date Month: 09 * Publication Date Day: 23 * Page Count: 240 * Format: ebook * Description: In the only piece of Foucault I've ever read (and I swear to you it was under duress) he speaks in a manner reminiscent as you prefer of either Karl Marx or renowned polish-american mathmatician Theodor Kascinzski of the inexorable progress of the industrial revolution exerting ever finer and more invisible control over humanity. He calls the productive behaviors this force can extract from humanity "Biopower." His conceit is that once upon a time a society's only levarage on its atomic political unit the citizen was the brute prospect of death. You could do what the sovereign body asks of you, or its figurehead reserves the right to separate your figure's head from its sovereign body. From the invention of teeth until nearly living memory the only improvements to this system were basically matters of degree and not of kind.
When we speak in the english language of someone who laughs at a grim situation we invoke this system- we call it gallows humor. The type of joke a person might make as they face the prospect of the final argument of kings. Bittersweet, disassociative, and at bottom horribly true.
The most characteristic piece of american gallows humor in the post-ARPANET world is the hysterical realization "I'm on a list now." The synthesis of the nervous laughter of the man under a foot with the current highest stage of Biopower. It only joined the lexicon at obsolescence- today the concept of being or not being on a list is outdated, we are all on a list, the only question is the list's estimation of us. Whether we've accumulated sufficient points for the apotheosis of the Disposition Matrix (almost certainly a legal abstraction applied retroactively to anyone who winds up painted in the near-infrared of a hellfire missile or a SEAL.)
Until recently though there was a difference between those on a list and those not. It was a single big difference, because as it turns out it was a single big list. If you found yourself in the bad graces of the Reagan administration- maybe you had attended a campus rally against the war in central america, maybe you had signed a pledge to the effect that "AZT is not enough, give us all the other stuff," there's a distinct chance you shared a spot in a file cabinet alphabetically next to a wobbly, a known jew, or a narodnik. It was one big list, all the way back to the early 1900s at least, and it was a business. The names on it were a commodity- valuable in the moment of their production and traded back and forth on an exchange. There was every incentive to boast the biggest list, the most comprehensive index of every conceivable threat a businessman or politician might face, be it a factory salt, a suspected homosexual, a marxist, or someone who had written in support of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
There are a few broad historical scenes at work here- world war one and the immediate post-war years saw the formation of civilian deputy groups and their transformation from homeffont war auxiliaries into anti-labor fronts. During the depression an alliance of Chicago industrial financiers and german-american groups (newly freed from their own surveillance as potential subversives) popularized the european political tactic of eliding the difference between "communist" and "jew." The heyday of tent-revivals brought evangelical Christian groups into the field of professional anti-communism. Immediately after world war two anti-subversion came into its own commercially, with private businesses lead by former government men offering access to dossiers on a subscription basis, and running political background checks on employees and clients for a fee.
The industry saw its own cycle of primitive accumulation and monopolization, and after the 1960s a lightning series of mergers left a few well-connected giants.
This is a partial chart of the history of this exchange of names, presented chronologically. It doesn't include every participating arm, in cases where an organization's relationship to the exchange is unclear, or where the transfer of names was mediated by public organs like the congressional subversives bodies or police organizations, the group is omitted. The trade in human names was so vast that some arbitrary lines were necessary to draw. For this reason certain groups are left out. Doubtless their work was inextricable from the others in the field, but to show their involvement visually would mean fully including the public half of this partnership. The government of the united states is abstracted in this chart- it exists as a single timeless blob. I take for granted that whatever the mechanisms involved, names entering the custody of one governmental organelle usually have a way of making it to the others. There are famous exceptions, but they are famous for being exceptions. Relationships to the nazi government, which become important, are also abstracted. The reich's interactions with the american half of this world are usually mediated through the AntiKomlntem, so for simplicity's sake we go the whole way and use it as a synecdoche for the nazi government.
There are certain other abstractions made, and I hope they won't be percieved as attempts to decieve. For example immediate family members are abstracted together- my assumption is that if we take for granted that people working together in one organization have access to each other's work, by the same standards we can assume a married couple, or a parent and child, are fair to abstract into a single node on the chart. Additionally in cases where a single person founds an organization, and then that organization and the person in their private capacity both participate in this blacklist exchange, they are treated as a single unit. Finally, wholly controlled subsidiaries are treated as a part of their parent organization. In one particular case an important player in this history spawned an ink-cloud of child organizations with constantly changing names and corporate reorganizations. We have made no attempt to show this wheel of corporate restructurings, as in the end they officially coalesce back into a single organization anyway.
I've made these sacrifices in the hope of producing a usefully legible chart of this history, and I hope the evidence prevented alongside each step will suffice to show my abstractions are not made in error or malice.
The style these relationships are presented in is a fraught one. Organization charts as an illustrative format lead a double life, with respectable day jobs in the corporate and government worlds and a suspicious nightlife among cranks and theorists. Fear of being judged a paranoiac monger of some stripe or another leads people to present their information in other, less useful formats. This was a concession I was unwilling to make. Instead I have presented a citation with a visible excerpt for each step I draw, where possible traced back to primary sources. Clicking the excerpt will open a link to its source online. To the best of my ability I have restricted myself to sources which are available for free, though in a few cases the reader is left to the mercy of what pages a Google Books preview is willing to display, or how many monthly free jstor articles that have remaining. All of the books on archive.org are available with a free account. A few images are not intended as citations for any particular point, and do not function as links (mostly because they do not come from authoritative sources, and are often just from getty images or similar.)
As this document exists at this time solely online it suffers from none of the restrictions of physical publication. As such there are no footnotes, sources are merely reproduced on the page where relevent. Where a traditional citation might read "ibid," sources are occasionally repeated where they become informative a second time. I have made some effort to use varied sources where possible to minimize this.
The fog which clears as the chart grows is intended to remind the reader that this chart is incomplete. It provides only a partial view of this historical world, and at every step an interested reader can learn more about a given organization or personage just through the first page of a google search.
In the case of some links, for instance Georgia Power, the object is to show, for example, how this network extends. As far as I am aware the Georgia Power Co was not a particularly large player, their inclusion is an example of the further links a researcher can expect to find.
The chart should be thought of as existing in three dimensions- bold black links are horizontal, from one private american group to another. Blue links are upwards, to the american government. Red links are down to the german government. I have done my best to arrange the chart in such a way that this is easy to imagine.
* Author: BactrianBottle (archvie.org)
* ISBN: N/A (ark:/13960/t1vf66b5z)
* Publisher: Internet Archive
* Publication Date Year: 2020
* Publication Date Month: 09
* Publication Date Day: 23
* Page Count: 240
* Format: ebook
* Description: In the only piece of Foucault I've ever read (and I swear to you it was under duress) he speaks in a manner reminiscent as you prefer of either Karl Marx or renowned polish-american mathmatician Theodor Kascinzski of the inexorable progress of the industrial revolution exerting ever finer and more invisible control over humanity. He calls the productive behaviors this force can extract from humanity "Biopower." His conceit is that once upon a time a society's only levarage on its atomic political unit the citizen was the brute prospect of death. You could do what the sovereign body asks of you, or its figurehead reserves the right to separate your figure's head from its sovereign body. From the invention of teeth until nearly living memory the only improvements to this system were basically matters of degree and not of kind.
When we speak in the english language of someone who laughs at a grim situation we invoke this system- we call it gallows humor. The type of joke a person might make as they face the prospect of the final argument of kings. Bittersweet, disassociative, and at bottom horribly true.
The most characteristic piece of american gallows humor in the post-ARPANET world is the hysterical realization "I'm on a list now." The synthesis of the nervous laughter of the man under a foot with the current highest stage of Biopower. It only joined the lexicon at obsolescence- today the concept of being or not being on a list is outdated, we are all on a list, the only question is the list's estimation of us. Whether we've accumulated sufficient points for the apotheosis of the Disposition Matrix (almost certainly a legal abstraction applied retroactively to anyone who winds up painted in the near-infrared of a hellfire missile or a SEAL.)
Until recently though there was a difference between those on a list and those not. It was a single big difference, because as it turns out it was a single big list. If you found yourself in the bad graces of the Reagan administration- maybe you had attended a campus rally against the war in central america, maybe you had signed a pledge to the effect that "AZT is not enough, give us all the other stuff," there's a distinct chance you shared a spot in a file cabinet alphabetically next to a wobbly, a known jew, or a narodnik. It was one big list, all the way back to the early 1900s at least, and it was a business. The names on it were a commodity- valuable in the moment of their production and traded back and forth on an exchange. There was every incentive to boast the biggest list, the most comprehensive index of every conceivable threat a businessman or politician might face, be it a factory salt, a suspected homosexual, a marxist, or someone who had written in support of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
There are a few broad historical scenes at work here- world war one and the immediate post-war years saw the formation of civilian deputy groups and their transformation from homeffont war auxiliaries into anti-labor fronts. During the depression an alliance of Chicago industrial financiers and german-american groups (newly freed from their own surveillance as potential subversives) popularized the european political tactic of eliding the difference between "communist" and "jew." The heyday of tent-revivals brought evangelical Christian groups into the field of professional anti-communism. Immediately after world war two anti-subversion came into its own commercially, with private businesses lead by former government men offering access to dossiers on a subscription basis, and running political background checks on employees and clients for a fee.
The industry saw its own cycle of primitive accumulation and monopolization, and after the 1960s a lightning series of mergers left a few well-connected giants.
This is a partial chart of the history of this exchange of names, presented chronologically. It doesn't include every participating arm, in cases where an organization's relationship to the exchange is unclear, or where the transfer of names was mediated by public organs like the congressional subversives bodies or police organizations, the group is omitted. The trade in human names was so vast that some arbitrary lines were necessary to draw. For this reason certain groups are left out. Doubtless their work was inextricable from the others in the field, but to show their involvement visually would mean fully including the public half of this partnership. The government of the united states is abstracted in this chart- it exists as a single timeless blob. I take for granted that whatever the mechanisms involved, names entering the custody of one governmental organelle usually have a way of making it to the others. There are famous exceptions, but they are famous for being exceptions. Relationships to the nazi government, which become important, are also abstracted. The reich's interactions with the american half of this world are usually mediated through the AntiKomlntem, so for simplicity's sake we go the whole way and use it as a synecdoche for the nazi government.
There are certain other abstractions made, and I hope they won't be percieved as attempts to decieve. For example immediate family members are abstracted together- my assumption is that if we take for granted that people working together in one organization have access to each other's work, by the same standards we can assume a married couple, or a parent and child, are fair to abstract into a single node on the chart. Additionally in cases where a single person founds an organization, and then that organization and the person in their private capacity both participate in this blacklist exchange, they are treated as a single unit. Finally, wholly controlled subsidiaries are treated as a part of their parent organization. In one particular case an important player in this history spawned an ink-cloud of child organizations with constantly changing names and corporate reorganizations. We have made no attempt to show this wheel of corporate restructurings, as in the end they officially coalesce back into a single organization anyway.
I've made these sacrifices in the hope of producing a usefully legible chart of this history, and I hope the evidence prevented alongside each step will suffice to show my abstractions are not made in error or malice.
The style these relationships are presented in is a fraught one. Organization charts as an illustrative format lead a double life, with respectable day jobs in the corporate and government worlds and a suspicious nightlife among cranks and theorists. Fear of being judged a paranoiac monger of some stripe or another leads people to present their information in other, less useful formats. This was a concession I was unwilling to make. Instead I have presented a citation with a visible excerpt for each step I draw, where possible traced back to primary sources. Clicking the excerpt will open a link to its source online. To the best of my ability I have restricted myself to sources which are available for free, though in a few cases the reader is left to the mercy of what pages a Google Books preview is willing to display, or how many monthly free jstor articles that have remaining. All of the books on archive.org are available with a free account. A few images are not intended as citations for any particular point, and do not function as links (mostly because they do not come from authoritative sources, and are often just from getty images or similar.)
As this document exists at this time solely online it suffers from none of the restrictions of physical publication. As such there are no footnotes, sources are merely reproduced on the page where relevent. Where a traditional citation might read "ibid," sources are occasionally repeated where they become informative a second time. I have made some effort to use varied sources where possible to minimize this.
The fog which clears as the chart grows is intended to remind the reader that this chart is incomplete. It provides only a partial view of this historical world, and at every step an interested reader can learn more about a given organization or personage just through the first page of a google search.
In the case of some links, for instance Georgia Power, the object is to show, for example, how this network extends. As far as I am aware the Georgia Power Co was not a particularly large player, their inclusion is an example of the further links a researcher can expect to find.
The chart should be thought of as existing in three dimensions- bold black links are horizontal, from one private american group to another. Blue links are upwards, to the american government. Red links are down to the german government. I have done my best to arrange the chart in such a way that this is easy to imagine.
* Language: English
* Link: https://archive.org/details/Partial-H...