This is from last October, just after the California recall election, but I just ran across it now: From Burning Man To Running Man by John Perry Barlow. He serves up analysis on the efficacy of today's creative, intellectual and progressive class against the harsh political realities of a anti-scientific government and non-skeptical citizen population.
Of course, my pal and Mondo 2000 editor R.U. Sirius made a solid point when he said, , "It stands to reason that self-righteous, inflexible, single-minded, authoritarian true believers are politically organized. Open-minded, flexible, complex, ambiguous, anti-authoritarian people would just as soon be left to mind their own fucking business."You bet we would, but can we afford to any longer? And, if not, how can we shake off the confusion, poverty, disarray, willed hallucination, paralysis, denial, and cultural isolation we've created over the last half century and run these overgrown hall monitors and out of office?
It's a sobering read. My own thoughts have run along similar lines lately, but to be honest I think I push them into the background as often as I can, to avoid despair.
How beautiful and clever. I ran across googlepoems at join-the-dots; here's mine:
It hurt me deep inside.sorrow of losing a loved one. I know that I have, and it hurt me deep
inside, far more than I could say. For myself I was fortunate.you told me i am no good you said things i never thought you would it hurt me deep
inside if i wasn't so proud i might have cried you can never take it backits a very powerful song, it's hurt me deep inside when i bought the cd, i cried
my eyes out....its was too close to the truth .....Thank youI felt like she was right. It hurt me deep inside to think somebody
wanted me to spend time in jail because of what I did.". Insteaddown the hall. But I got scared and still could not tell her. I wanted
to so badly that it hurt me deep inside. I couldn't look
This is fun.
Sean of cheesebikini and UC Berkeley posits three possible purposes for social networks that tickle my Howard-Bloom-readin' funny bone:
1. Assumed Purpose- Human social networks cultivate a rich meat, metal and asphalt topsoil along the Earth's surface that promotes the gestation of digital life. [...] 2. Assumed Purpose- Human social networks provide a food supply, a bloodstream, a nervous system and muscles needed by Earth's giant multinational corporations. [...] 3. Assumed Purpose- Human social networks constitute a habitable environment and a giant playground for memes.
Read on for more details: cheesebikini/208
A friend of mine once told me as we were taking our first shaky steps into adulthood "it doesn't matter how much money you make, you always spend it all and need more." I'm reminded of this reading Flemming's recent post at Future Hi: Where's our leisure society?
Flemming ponders the reasons why we haven't realized the world of plenty that all of our technical progress surely should have provided by now.
The reason that didn't happen might be in the same category as why a brand new 3GHz PC isn't any faster than a 4.77MHz IBM PC from 20 years ago. In principle it should be a thousand times faster, and it is, technically speaking. But it doesn't do anything more. It takes longer to start up Word on it than to start WordStar on that ancient relic. And there are many more things that can go wrong, and more one needs to learn in order to use it.
He hints at a system that could get us on the right track, and of course it involves free flow of information. I picture it also in the context of an interactive global belief system aggregrator, something I'd love to work on if I weren't stuck in Flemmings self-reinforcing loops diagram :)
Jim of Everything Burns alerted me that I was getting traffic from an article over at TheFeature.com. The article links to my main page, so this post is just for those of you clicking through from there. You're probably interesed in GPS tagged JPEG images, so this would be a better blog post to look at:
Gambatte, geonauts!
Hacking Matter by Wil McCarthy
This is a book I picked up from the author when he spoke at the 2004 Emerging Technology conference.
Non-Fiction:
Global Brain: The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century by Howard Bloom.
The prequel book, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, irrevocably changed my view on life.