In the spring of 1986, Back to the Future, the Michael J Fox blockbuster featuring a time-traveling DeLorean car, was less than a year old. The Apple Macintosh, launched via a single, iconic ad directed by Ridley Blade Runner Scott, was less than two years old. Ronald Reagan, immortalized by Gore Vidal as “the acting president”, was hailing the mujahideen in Afghanistan as “freedom fighters”.
A network is a plurality of organic and artificial beings of humans and machines who perform continuous actions thanks to procedures that make possible their interconnection and interpretation. If you do not adapt to these procedures, if you don’t follow the technical rules of the games, you are not playing the game. If you don’t react to certain stimuli in the programmed way you don’t form part of the network. The behavior of persons in a network is not aleatory because the network implies and predisposes pathways for the networked.
Last month the Guardian reported that a team of scientists studying early Homo sapiens in Europe had extracted DNA from the tooth of a male hunter-gatherer who’d lived in what is now the Asturias region of northern Spain around 7000 years ago. They drew some surprising conclusions from the analysis. The man was dark-skinned but blue-eyed. His nearest DNA matches with contemporary ethnicities are with Swedes and Finns, among the palest of peoples.
“The premise of democracy, if it’s to be taken seriously, has to focus on youth, which become the ultimate symbol of the future.” H. Giroux
Recently I have rediscovered the Stone page of the New York Times editorial section where guests philosophers are invited to write on important issues of our time. That a philosopher’s opinion today would actually have importance for the public at large is somewhat of a mystery, largely because the role of the philosopher as cultural critic or “public intellectual” has largely been usurped by the technological class: individuals whose inventions have largely transformed the way in which we interact as social beings.
Climate change news is mostly negative, in fact, downright depressing, as glaciers melt away, torrential storms hit coastlines, and embedded droughts scorch countrysides.
But, behind all of the gloom and doom, an upsurge of solar energy is quietly flourishing from California to Queensland to Pretoria. Here’s why: Solar energy is experiencing remarkable technological breakthroughs that will likely lead to a world powered by solar energy at the expense of fossil fuels. And, it could be happening sooner rather than later.
Seven of Canada’s most prized scientific libraries are being shut down and some of their contents have already been burned, thrown away or carted off by fossil fuel consultancy firms.
It shows a distinct lack of imagination. Therein lies a paradox of technology, and its specific application to human needs or wants: the more sophisticated it becomes, the less sophisticated it assumes humans are. If Google Glass is anything to go by, we are not merely a few sandwiches short of a picnic, but short of the picnic altogether.
It’s been a bit of a gap week or two, since pining in with this sort of catharsis, but some of us schmucks have to make some really lousy money and attend to some really rotten job hunting in a time of pure delusion, all the while that white noise buzzing, the white static noise of the mush of NPR and mainstream mindlessness and the BS of labor stats and economists who deserve what the SEALs and Obama said what happened to Osama (right, US punk prez, directs US amped-up murder incorporated to shoot to kill, ask no questions later, I don’t need no stinking badge, and then burial at sea, hea
You’ve heard the refrain “we live in the information age.” We have fingertip access to the Internet, providing us with massive amounts of information. There are no longer any excuses for us to say we don’t have the information; it is there, but up to us to act on the information.
