Competitive theorizing seems necessary for tribes of humans to in fact check their ideas. However, it is physically possible to eschew it, as long as the ideas get checked. The point is to care more about what Reality thinks than what other humans think; it’s just that this seems impossible for most, so we have to have a proxy that amounts to caring about Reality.

And here’s the thing: to check Cathedral ideas, you don’t need to run experiments. Simply analyzing the arguments is sufficient. For anyone who cares about Reality, figuring out they’re wrong is trivial. Being convinced by them is slam-dunk evidence against epistemic competence: their opinions are worthless.

(Indeed, part of what’s wrong is that the opinions of the incompetent are held in high esteem. “Everyone should have a say.” Oddly, academics think this about government but not about academics.)

Science is modern, not accidentally, but essentially. Modernity is no mere bet, but a venture, through which everything is hazarded, including itself. The widest horizons arise from ‘within’ it (but its ‘inside’ is not, in reality, inside).

That’s Kapital!

“”“Science is just knowing” — this is too general, surely. ”

Well, perhaps, but I would rather say it is etymologically specifying. That is, it acts as a literally radical anchor of sorts for any semantic history that might be subsequently foisted upon the word. So from this more general case of ‘knowing’, “natural science” emerges as a particular ‘narrowing of scope’ – the ‘knowings of nature’, as it were.
If you don’t do this, if you hive off the general background into the more particular uses internal to the subsequent institutionalisations you valorise, you’re eliding those other, ‘radical’ origins – you lose a perspective perhaps ‘external’ to this valorisation of the logic of the ‘natural, one that could be useful.
It doesn’t mean you have to choose ‘one’ or the ‘other’. but having access to both, theoretically, enables you to see both at play. You’re not going to get stuck.
The obligations of ‘choice’ are more pertinent to the problems of specific implementation that arise when systematic commitments have already been made – in which case, you’re only extending those ‘commitments’, that ‘system’. The elision of even the possibility of extra-systemic perspectives brings the dangers of insularity: you’re in a ‘bubble’ of unawareness, vulnerable to all that that you exclude.
That’s okay, if you’re just doing a limited task. It isn’t, if you imagine your system is possessed of any vitality or real ‘growth’. If there is no ‘growth of understanding’, you’re locked in your own regime, condemned to repeat metaphors of a particular form of ‘ignorance’. Even if you’re building stuff at the ‘end of the universe’, keeping it in ‘existence’, lol, you’re in a ‘holding pattern’, of fear?
Yes, the argument could be made about ‘fear’ having a function in some holistic conception of ‘evolution’, etc., but all of that would be using images of ‘data’, ‘neutral description’?, as a form of sanction for ‘closure’ of possibilities, not to speak of the interpretative ghettos that tend to afflict such speculative enterprises, these days (“All observational technology is, within limits, the concretization of a speculation.” Sol Yuric). It neglects, too, the much vaunted phenomenon of spontaneous ‘self-emergence’ that is said to characterise the novel forms enabled by conditions of anomalous extremity (‘chaos theory’, ‘catastrophe theory'; Prigogine, Thom, etc.)

~~~~~~~~

“nothing can be truly scientific unless it functions as a (capitalist) enterprise, selectively honed by competition, which is in turn anchored technologically in extra-cultural reality. ”

You’re going from ‘science’ (all the forms of ‘knowing’) to “truly scientific”.
You don’t qualify it (science) with “natural” here, you use “truly”, but you’re still referring to it in the same classical, institutional sense; veridical extensions of statements accepted as foundational by the institutions of “natural science”. So it’s a standardised form of ‘truth’, as dispensed by institutional production, for the purposes of those allied to the institution. A form of truth, wherein, the neutrality of uncontentious ‘factual’ statements (your “extra-cultural reality”) , disappears in the reconfigurative interpretations and deployments of “(capitalist) enterprises” whose ruling ethos is a rigged “competition”, with all the casuistical horrors that the self-reflexive play of driven manipulations can produce.

~~~~~~~~~~~

“Much better to say that businesses are kinds of (very concrete) ‘scientific’ theory, than to generalize science beyond the capitalist horizon.”

“What was done in the mind must now be done through computers … programs begin to become quasi-solidified thought.” (Sol Yurick)
“Even the simplest of conversations are separated, reconfigured, sent and priced.” (Sol Yurick)

Businesses are experiments in profit production.
It is ‘investors’ who profit.
Investors are those who have kapital to invest.
Those investors who have most kapital, have the most to invest, can take more chances, can produce the most kapital, all other factors being equal.
Kapital is not only money, but power to control networks, too.
Thus, you enjoin us not to entertain ‘ways of knowing’ (science) that are beyond the horizon of this ‘profit production’.

Could such censorship imply that the culture of business is ‘endangered’? The arts of profit, in need of the prophetic charismas of religion, perhaps?
Or is it a religion itself? One that follows the uncertain gods of “Chance” and “beingBetterOff”? A devotional game in which its adherents no longer are able to envisage anything else, condemned to perpetually gamble, even though all bets have been, for some time now, off?

“Even the simplest of tions are seperated, reconfigured, sent and priced.”

should read:

“Even the simplest of conversations are seperated, reconfigured, sent and priced.”

The spelling mistakes here and in the rest of the text, are in the original. I only corrected a few.

“We are in the middle of that Great Transformation into what is called the Information Age, or Post-Industrial Society. As in all Grand Transitions, fin du siecle’s and climacterics, perceptions of reality are again being redistorted by the insertion of a vast new mediational system into an already multiplexed, historically accreted maze of mediations. In the context of this forced march, the relationship of information to society and nature has to be rethought.
Call information capital-intensive knowledge, a mechanelectronistic metaphor made to dominate more and more of life. All knowledge is in the process of being converted to computer-compatibility. The old philosopher’s stone could convert base metals into gold. Now humans, real estate, social relations … are converted into electronic signs carried in an electronic plasma. This would merely be an amusing game if people (in fact only a small subset of the world’s population: 90% of all information processing is controlled by a small part of the “developed” world) weren’t being forced to use and live through information processing and communications technology. Call it Informatics; call it telematics.
The components of telematics are mainframes, minis and personal computers, cathode ray tubes, printers, copiers, automated bankteller machines, point-of-sale sensors, antennae, copper and fiber optic wire, copiers, remote-sensing devices, robots (remotely run or otherwise), calculators, integrated chips, software, mass-data-storages, tapes, discs, diagnostic equipment, a babble of “appropriate” languages, telephones, modems, telexes, terminals, microwave relays, radio, cable, satellites, switching and routing systems… Alongside of this, one has to consider the social communication systems and all the transcieving and routing operations there. Even the simplest of tions are seperated, reconfigured, sent and priced. And those who live in this new world are losing their grip on an older reality. As for those who have no access to, no participation in, this newly imposed world, they are out of the world’s new information economy, doomed to obsolescence and death.
A glorious, transcendant and radiant future is promised us. Efficiency will increase, productivity will rise, the office and factory of the future will be automated, we will be able to work at home, teleconference, we will have hoards of instantly retrievable knowledge at our disposal, record-keeping will be easier, we will be freed from work and the burdens of memory. That, or an enormous disaster is in the making as parts of the world become metaphysical. For it’s time for Demiurge II. The Year 2000 is coming. Apocalypse and creation in one.
Whole nations, their economies, their peoples, their resources, their land, can be simulated and displayed on some input/output device. But worse, taken for the real thing. National boundaries become porous and erode.

America is no more as transnational data-flows penetrate borders. Nations become illusions as foreign enterprises buy pieces of many lands. The informational process has concrete results. True, this is nothing new. International cartels, merchants in past ages accomplished the thing. But as long as any enterprise becomes translated more and more into its essences—money and near-money, an all-purpose information, the blood and hormones of business—those essences cannot be held in containers called nations any longer.
The technology can be likened to a nervous system, one external to humans yet connected to their internal nervous systems by a variety of devices, becoming more fused, joined. For example, with the onset of medical data-bases, monitoring, diagnostic and treatment machines, ancient dreams of being directly connected, the world “wired” to the brain-nerve complex, leads to the hope that thought alone will move reality.
With the invention of new sensing devices, new perceptual systems come on line. All beings are some function of their information intake, no matter how indirectly the information is received. What was done in the mind must now be done through computers … programs begin to become quasi-solidified thought. New procedures for action and behavior take the form of a ritual, requiring the playing of an excruciating game called programming. People resist? The languages are too hard, the steps too long and complicated? Money is now poured into developing computers that “talk English,” are touch-responsive or voice-activated. Computers for dummies.
But above all, price is attached to these mediational meditations. Price is a seasonally adjusted, value-added medium in this invented medium, a carrier of values standing for the signs of things sent along a carrier wave. The computer, and its languages, represent a frozen and hard-wired habituation of thought. The programs are a way of trying to introduce flexibility, variety and reference into the relative intractability of the machine. However, by itself, and with its operators, and its languages, it is impossible to truly metaphorize—an essence of human brain activity and thought—that is to say, fuse into one homgeneity any two or more disparate sensation-terms.
Each “new age” rewrites the history of past (while thinking it has discarded the obsolescent past). The last great age of reinvention and rationalization of past and future took place, more or less, from the 15th to the 19th centuries. New world views were created. But does the process of rethinking and reorganizing the past really free any age that past? Has modern rationalization a secret rider, an incubus along in its intellectual and institutional baggage?
New institutions advertise themselves, use the old images of domination to promote the transition. They draw their sales-imagery out of a central bank of symbolic forms. Knowledge of the past is simplified. Epochs are erased (perhaps there was too much that embarrassing in the past). New pasts,
whole aeons are invented. Complex existence is simplified, and then recomplexified in another way. Forgetfullness follows. Scramble and resequence; but, in the process of borrowing symbolic energy from the past, new simultaneities and odd juxtapositions, like dreams, emerge.

To look up, to see the stars, the galaxies (in their past and glowing glories) with new kinds of lenses is to have recourse to addresses in data banks where long runs (projected in a short time) of computer-modeled, cosmological statistics are stored (with certain assumptions built in). Look closely at these computer-simulated, eons-long histories of distant stellar objects projected on the cathode-ray tube. Watch them appear to recede. What are we “seeing”? Are the simulations guided by an underlying compulsion to aesthetics, and does this become the ultimate gravitational lens? And those great galactic streamers of stars, and the great gouts of gas jetting off into the blackness… how like the monetary jet-streams that banks draw off into the black holes of their balance-sheets from once luminous nations, entropizing and then rematerializing as investments elsewhere. Transubstantiation? Is that what underlies the very concept of the preservation of matter and energy?
Celestial bookkeeping? But see the flaw; the images are seen in squared-off pixels, reconstructions based on a relatively few observations, structured by certain recurring theories. All observational technology is, within limits, the concretization of a speculation. And what we see is all based on some initialising, mythic event: The Beginning.
Troubles in paradise. While trumpeting the imminent emergence of the grand, unifying theory, the unifying theories fall apart. Fundamental forces and particles proliferate. The original central dogma of genetics is riddled with heresies. And even forms of credit go off and multiply. They become desperate to unify and simplify (an ancient compulsion).” etc

This is just the beginning, he goes through everything. It’s best read quickly.