Ned Blog

2003-05-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

Underbrush

Bush signed a bill yesterday extending the national debt. The press and cameras were not invited. Today he is set to sign the tax cut bill. The press and cameras are invited to note and celebrate the event. Maybe if we didn't have chickenshit fawning news organizations drinking the Bush administration Kool Aid, we'd have a better informed populace...

2003-05-19T20:16:00.000-07:00

451 is 50

Fahrenheit 451 is 50 years old this year.

2003-05-06T04:02:00.000-07:00

Pynchon on Orwell

New introduction to 1984.

Doublethink also lies behind the names of the superministries which run things in Oceania - the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and eventually kills anybody whom it deems a threat. If this seems unreasonably perverse, recall that in the present-day United States, few have any problem with a war-making apparatus named "the department of defence," any more than we have saying "department of justice" with a straight face, despite well-documented abuses of human and constitutional rights by its most formidable arm, the FBI. Our nominally free news media are required to present "balanced" coverage, in which every "truth" is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed "spin," as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time - it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. Needless to say, this is of inestimable use to those in power who wish to remain there, preferably forever.

2003-04-29T06:47:00.000-07:00

Ludderati Weblog

Langdon Winner, a genuine member of the Ludderati, now has a weblog: Technopolis.

Described as:

Technopolis, a weblog by Langdon Winner, offers occasional reflections on historical,
philosophical, and contemporary questions that involve the perplexing intersection of
human ends and means. Not a minute-to-minute news blog, it includes stories, poems,
personal observations, and scholarly references posted every now and then, but at least
every two weeks.

2003-04-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

Oversway The World

Here's a poem by Wendell Berry (from "A Timbered Choir") written during our
previous Gulf War, but timely and true also for today... - Ned)

1991 - I

The year begins with war.
Our bombs fall day and night,
Hour after hour, by death
Abroad appeasing wrath,
Folly, and greed at home.
Upon our giddy tower
We'd oversway the world.
Our hate comes down to kill
Those whom we do not see.
For we have given up
Our sight to those in power
And to machines, and now
Are blind to all the world.
This is a nation where
No lovely thing can last.
We trample, gouge, and blast;
The people leave the land;
The land flows to the sea.
Fine men and women die,
The fine old houses fall,
The fine old trees come down:
Highway and shopping mall
Still guarantee the right
And liberty to be
A peaceful murderer,
A murderous worshipper,
A slender glutton, or
A healthy whore. Forgiving
No enemy, forgiven
By none, we live the death
Of liberty, become
What we have feared to be.

2003-04-15T05:09:00.000-07:00

Early Days of a Better Nation

Ken MacLeod's blog.

My views on the war:

I opposed it before it started and will continue to do so even if WMD are found and/or the
US and UK troops are welcomed into Baghdad by cheering crowds. WMD and the iniquitous and
unpopular nature of the Ba'athist regime (which I've opposed as long as I've been
politically active, i.e. since 1976) are not the real issues in the war. The real issues
are the attempt to set up a regime which is compliant with the US; that is, to secure US
control over the second largest oil reserves in the world, and to have forces in place for
when the welcome day when the House of Saud is in Switzerland or on the lamp-posts of
Riyadh. Control of oil, and strategic interest: that's what it's about, and that's
imperialism.

2003-04-02T14:52:00.000-08:00

Wartime Luddite

TECHSPLOITATION: Wartime Luddite
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet
March 25, 2003

Children of Dune made me wish we had no thinking machines in our battles.
If we have to make war, it would be better for us to fight like Luddites. It's too easy to
unplug our ethics when machines target our enemies for us. Having to see the enemy,
to realize that he or she is human, is profoundly important. It reminds us that every war
is a battle against ourselves: a struggle against human horrors. Placing our bodies in
combat reminds us -- soldiers and comrades of soldiers alike -- that war is a sacrifice.

2003-03-14T05:30:00.000-08:00

Irony

It's what's hot.

Extreme ironing.

2003-03-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

Pass/Fail America

Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash
March 8, 2003
By Luciana Bohne

An opinon piece about those giant engines of orthodoxy, higher education in America...

...Let me put it succinctly: I don't think serious education is possible in America. Anything
you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run
amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as
happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status
quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier
university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-echelon
jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations
are communications, criminal justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and
control the masses...

But do the Keebler elves rise up?

2003-03-05T12:39:00.000-08:00

We'll have none of that here...

Man arrested for 'peace' T-shirt

And the man is a lawyer.

From CNN.com.

2003-03-03T20:20:00.000-08:00

WENDELL BERRY

A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America

...The idea of a government acting alone in preemptive war is inherently undemocratic,
for it does not require or even permit the president to obtain the consent of the governed.
As a policy, this new strategy depends on the acquiescence of a public kept fearful and
ignorant, subject to manipulation by the executive power, and on the compliance of an
intimidated and office dependent legislature. To the extent that a government is secret,
it cannot be democratic or its people free...

2003-02-26T09:31:00.000-08:00

The Last American Man

A great book by Elizabeth Gilbert about a Thoreau-like, Davy-fucking Crockett man, Eustace Conway, whose dogma eats his karma...

A Conway quote from the book (from a presentation to high schoolers):

I live ... in nature, where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular.
The planet is circular, and so is its passage around the sun. The course of water over the
earth is circular, coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life
and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular teepee and I build my fire in a circle,
and when my loved ones visit me, we sit in a circle and talk. The life cycles of plants and
animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. The ancient people understood
that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost sight of that. I don't live
inside buildings, because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn't
flow, and where life stops. I don't want to live in a dead place. People say that I don't
live in the real world, but it's modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they have
stepped outside the natural circle of life...
...Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes. They wake up every morning in
the box of their bedroom because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them
it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box
away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get inot a box with wheels
and drive to work, which is just another big box broken up into lots of little cubicle boxes
where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front
of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to
their house boxes and spends the evening staring at their television boxes for entertainment.
They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, and they keep their clothing
in a box, they live their lives in a box! Does that sound like anyone you know?..
[By now the kids are laughing and applauding.]
...Break out of the box! ...You don't have to live like this because people tell you it's the
only way. You're not handcuffed to your culture! This is not the way humanity lived
for thousands and thousands of years and it is not the only way you can live today!

More information on Conway from the Turtle Island web site.

2003-02-25T09:08:00.000-08:00

Robota Trailer

"Robota", kind of a "Night of the Living Dead" movie,
but with never-dead machines in place of the zombie folk...

Pesky bots.

2003-02-25T08:38:00.000-08:00

Lost Labor

LOST LABOR: Images of Vanished American Workers 1900-1980 is a selection of 155 photographs
excerpted from a collection of more than 1100 company histories, pamphlets, and technical
brochures documenting America's business and corporate industrial history This collection
has been assembled over the last 20 years and many of the titles are rare and difficult to
find. Since the images document factories, machinery, and jobs that no longer exist, LOST
LABOR provides an unusual visual and historical record of work in 20th century America.
The term "lost labor" can derive from the effects of mechanization, computer automation,
technological advances, or through the consequences of corporate takeovers, downsizing and
globalization. In many cases, these meanings can and do overlap.

Found via the always amazing Wood_s_lot.

2003-02-04T05:31:00.000-08:00

Rage Against the De-Machinist

What is suprising about reviews of Nicol Fox's new book is the contempt it provokes in reviewers....

2003-01-30T12:48:00.000-08:00

Them

They are out there...

2003-01-30T05:50:00.000-08:00

From TLR

From 1999 to 2002, I was the editor/publisher of an online publication called "The Luddite Reader," a site that reviewed luddite
(or luddish) books, movies, and music. Here is a book review from that collection.

The Telling by Ursula K. Leguin.

Globalism is destructive of indigenous cultures. The dominant monoculture (us) supplants all cultures we encounter. An older example
would be how the aborigines have been treated (and continue to be treated) in Australia, or how we have marginalized our own Native
American population. In this, Le Guin's most recent (and final?) novel of her Hainish series, this problem is presented in the form of a
planetary parable, where a new technoculture, Aka, a tightly-controlled capitalist government know as the Corporation, considers all
citizens to be pure "producer-consumers."

The Aka is systematically destroying all vestiges of the ancient ways: "The Time of Cleansing" is the phrase (with obvious parallels
to China's Cultural Revolution) used to describe this era. Libraries and books are destroyed, the old language and calligraphy are
outlawed, and natives caught trying to keep any part of the past alive are punished and then re-educated.

Le Guin's protagonist, Sutty, is an ethnographer sent from earth by the Ekumen to study the culture of the planet, but during her
60 year space journey the "cleansing" takes place and she is left to study an illicit remnanct of the culture that is known among
the people as "the Telling." The Telling appears to be a blending of religion and knowledge-keeping, a faith in narrative and respect
for what has been known and the passing along of wisdom. The Aka culture is a faith in the new and in technology.

Sutty observes the change thusly:

   From a great consensual social patter within which each individual sought physical and spiritual satisfaction, they
   had made it a great hierarch in which each individual served the indefinite growth of the society's material wealth and
   complexity. From an active homeostatic balance they had turned it to an active forward-thrusting imbalance... The
   difference...was between somebody sitting thinking after a good meal and somebody running furiously to catch the bus.
   (a wonderfully luddish observation.)

The Telling is more of a thought-problem than a story. Some readers may find its ending unsatisfying. In some ways, it's the obverse of
Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," river journey and all. Also, if you have ever wondered what it would be like to live among the Book People
of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, this is it.

2003-01-30T04:58:00.000-08:00

Off

Go.

2003-01-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

Mr. Kurt, He Said:

Interesting Kurt Vonnegut interview:

   Well, technology has fucked us up in many ways. What I’ve said about the computer
   revolution is that it’s allowed white collar criminals to do what the Mob would have
   loved to do -- put a pawn shop and a loan shark in every home!

2003-01-14T08:40:00.000-08:00

Word Watch: Inforamus

    The new breed of digital illiterati exhibit a complete misunderstanding or indifference to
   the distinction between subscription and free online information as well as a chilling
   aversion to reading books. These "scholars" waste untold hours fruitlessly but insistently
   looking through thousands of Alta Vista search results, vainly hoping against hope that
   somehow all the right answers will tumble forth.

   The research for a typical undergrad paper nowadays seems to consist of two hours of
   fruitless WWW browsing followed by a reluctant visit to the library. During this visit, one
   poorly formatted query is submitted to a full-text periodical database, the first five
   full-text articles on the results list of 800 hits are downloaded, and then it's Miller
   time.

   While we may deplore such practices, or smirk at them, the dangerous reality is that a new
   class of information consumer has arisen ... The inforamus is someone doing bad searches
   with an inadequate search engine in a morass of disorganized, incomplete, and sometimes
   inaccurate information, and who is perfectly happy with the results. If, as the library
   literature suggests, trained reference librarians answer questions correctly only half the
   time, how do you think the inforamus is doing?

            -- David Majka, American Libraries, June/July 2001

Found via Wood_s_lot pointer to David Bratman's site.

2002-12-31T09:57:00.000-08:00

Ellen Ullman in Harpers

Harpers magazine has been very good lately. If you missed the October 2002
issue, you missed an excellent article on "post human" programming by the
wonderfully lucid Ellen Ullman:

   Over the years, as I listened to the engineering give-and-take over the question of
   artificial life forms, I kept coming up against something obdurate inside myself, some
   stubborn resistance to the definition of "life" that was being promulgated, It
   seemed to me too reductive of what we are, too mechanistic. Even if I count not quite
   get myself to believe in God or the soul or the Tao or some other metaphor for the
   ineffable spark of life, still, as I sat there high in the balcony of the Stanford
   lecture hall, listening to the cyberneticists' claims to be on the path toward the
   creation of a sentient being, I found myself muttering, No, that's not right, we're
   not just mechanisms, you're missing something. There's something more, something
   more. But then I had to ask myself: What else could there be?

Netfuture commentary on the article.

2002-12-31T09:55:00.000-08:00

Noted: Epicurian Simplicity

A thoughtful, if indulgent work by a genuine member of the Ludderati:

Epicurian Simplicity by Stephanie Mills

   Although my aim in this book is to advocate material simplicity more by attraction
   than by exhortation, through sharing the mingled pleasures of this kind of living,
   I'd be remiss in not saying that in and of itself, simple living won't solve the
   dreadful problems besetting the biosphere. There's something dangerously oxymoronic
   when simple living becomes a theme of slick magazines. Simple living needs to affect
   more than the household's discretionary budget.

   ...Simplicity and freedom are much allied. The pleasure freely derived from food
   and water, from companionship and countryside or city life, from good work and lives
   well lived, has been severed, privatized, tarted up, and sold back to us through
   mass media whose business is to advertize affluence. and whose vocabulary consists
   of vulgar sensationalism and cheap sentiment. Now we are slaves to the cash economy
   and buy our enjoyment.

2002-12-31T04:39:00.000-08:00

Okay, but who's going to tell Superman?

Requiem for the Pay Phone

2002-12-19T10:02:00.000-08:00

The Rise of The Machines

Terminator 3 trailer.

She's a bad blonde and she's after John Conner.

Woo.

2002-12-12T13:04:00.000-08:00

Healthy Opinion

Start spreading the news:

Please, when you give this European letter to Democrats all over, remember that I helped
give America finally that obvious goal of universal health care!

Link via BookNotes.

2002-12-11T20:00:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Carter

Nobel Acceptance Speech

   Ladies and gentlemen:

   War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil,
   never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's
   children.

   The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and
   prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We
   can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes - and we must.

   Thank you.

From Salon.

2002-12-06T08:21:00.000-08:00

Big Money Is Not Free Speech

From a 12/6 Commentary in the Christian Science Monitor:

   The new law is like a city noise ordinance. It will help all to be heard in Washington,
   and not just those who can pay to make a very loud noise to needy politicians. Money
   corrupts, and absolute freedom to buy favors corrupts absolutely.

Hear, hear.

2002-12-05T04:34:00.000-08:00

Visualizing Ideology

Labor vs. Capital in the Age of Silent Film

Found via Wood_s_lot.

2002-12-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

A continuation of Reflections on Sustainability...

   The term "Sustainable Growth" is an oxymoron...

   ...Twelfth Law: ( Eric Sevareid's Law ); The chief cause of problems is solutions. ( Sevareid 1970 )

      This law should be a central part of higher education, especially in engineering...

Albert Bartlett on the "Marginalization of Malthus"

2002-12-02T18:06:00.000-08:00

Luddite Christmas Gift Idea

Looking for that special something for the luddite on your Christmas
list? Look no further...

The Luddites of Detroit, a folk/acoustic band has a new CD:

"Cafe Believe" (2002)

Large, loud, and Ludd.

2002-11-30T19:18:00.000-08:00

Word Watch Alert

"Immobot" from MIT Technology Review

My early car ownership included an immobile, a car that ran infrequently and
also not very well. In fact, it was a dirt colored '63 Pontiac Bonnimmobile,
with a 454 cubic inch anchor...

Later in life, I think I worked for an immobot or two, or were they idibots?

2002-11-26T10:17:00.000-08:00

Walk (and drive) the talk...

From the Christian Science Monitor: Proud, patriotic & green

   As war with Iraq edges closer, conserving oil and resources has become the new mantra of
   flag-waving Americans, who argue that true security will come only when the US stanches
   the flow of foreign oil.

2002-11-21T18:28:00.000-08:00

Ice 9

From the Christian Science Monitor:
Promise and pitfalls in quest to create new life-form
Scientists announce a federally funded bid to create a new living organism.
By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The life forms we already have need tending, but let's endanger the whole world instead.

2002-11-21T18:15:00.000-08:00

Orwell, by George

LA Times COMMENTARY: George Bush's Big Brother
Orwell would recognize the plan to monitor citizens using databases.
By Jonathan Turley

   In some ways, Poindexter is the perfect Orwellian figure for the perfect Orwellian project.
   As a man convicted of falsifying and destroying information, he will now be put in charge
   of gathering information on every citizen. To add insult to injury, the citizens will fund the
   very system that will reduce their lives to a transparent fishbowl.

   What is most astonishing is the utter lack of public debate over this project.

   Over the last year, the public has yielded large tracts of constitutional territory that
   had been jealously guarded for generations. Now we face the ultimate act of acquiescence
   in the face of government demands.

The new Information economy.

Found via Boing-Boing.

2002-11-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

Footsoldier in the ideology wars

Kranky Katherine Kersten

Response to a Kersten column on the lack of diversity (conservatism) on university campuses...

   Do you think Katherine Kersten, with the power and security her party now feels, will ever
   object to following a president who deserted from the armed forces in time of war, and who
   pretends to be a patriot today?

So, let me get this straight: overwhelmingly democratic liberal arts faculty members are
dangerous in the cookie factory of vocational training frenzy that constitutes the modern
American university? What are they doing? Spinning Plato left?

Hmn.

2002-11-19T09:27:00.000-08:00

Excess Tech

Why marketers push excess tech

Look what the '90s tech boom hath wrought: Ovens that act like refrigerators, phones that
turn into televisions, and lawnmowers designed to move at your speed.

By Noel C. Paul | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

   ...come face-to-face with what has quickly become a key trait of consumer products in America:
   excess tech. From big household appliances to handheld devices, manufacturers are cramming
   common products with new technologies that most consumers will never tap.

   "A lot of it has to do with competition," says Stephen Gates, spokesman for the Consumer Electronics
   Association. "That's why you see things like a sofa that's also a breadmaker."

Bet you didn't know about the washy talkey...

2002-11-17T18:03:00.000-08:00

Is That For Me?

Why the polls got the pols wrong...

Arianna Huffington puffs in Salon: Down with polls, up with democracy!

   In truth, the problem isn't with us, dear voters -- or even with you, dear nonvoters. The
   problem is with the pollsters' inability to account for an increasingly uncooperative public.
   Thanks to cell phones, answering machines, caller I.D., a surfeit of polls, and a growing
   distaste for telephonic intrusions into our homes, it's getting harder and harder for pollsters
   to find Americans willing to answer their questions. Twenty years ago, polling response
   rates were over 60 percent; now they are closer to 30 percent -- and in some cases even lower.
   It's pretty tough to get an accurate reading of the public's opinion when the most frequent
   response you receive is a "click" followed by a dial tone.

We're not in now...

2002-11-15T19:34:00.000-08:00

Whoa! (Technology Acceleration)

from the Stanford Business Review:

Who's In Control Here?

   Organizations, especially for-profit organizations, now play a curiously
   dual role in promoting the unfettered acceleration of technology. They
   are technology’s most powerful driver and also its hogtied prisoner. That
   combination generates more and more acceleration, with potentially disastrous
   downside effects.

2002-11-06T09:01:00.000-08:00

Be Afraid

Science News from the Independent (UK):

'Only technology revolution can save the Earth'

Idiots.

2002-10-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Six Degrees of Bacon

From Salon: Pigs Created That Carry Human Genes

   By manipulating swine sperm, Italian researchers have made a strain of pigs that carry
   human genes in their hearts, livers and kidneys, an advance that could lead to creating
   herds of pigs that could provide organs for transplanting into humans.

Now we can genetically re-manufacture Congress.

2002-10-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

The Law of Artificial Selection

From "Artificial Selection" in Cleopatra's Nose by Daniel Boorstin:

   Inventions are increasingly intrusive. The advance of technology in our time attests
   our increasing inability to exclude novelties or their consequences from our lives...

   What the GNP does not measure is the expanding output of wants. The United States,
   imperfectly identified as a land of unprecedented wealth, could equally be called the land of
   unprecedented wants. Our nation has grown by its need for the unnecessary -- another
   name for human progress. Perhaps we might better measure our advance not by some quantitative
   index of "productivity," -- of gross national product -- but by some qualitative index of
   proliferating "needs."

   The viability of a machine depends on its capacity to create its own need and to bring forth
   the environment that makes it necessary: the law of artificial selection.

Chia life.

Is it any wonder that a large part of the rest of the world hates us for expending our (and their)
resources in making and selling unnecessary things to each other (and expecting them to rise up
and want them, too)?

It is silly to look forward to buying the same intellectual property three or four times in a lifetime on smaller
and more techologically advanced media...that is guaranteed to become obsolete each more rapidly than
the last. Would lemmings do this?

2002-10-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

What's Wrong With Libertarianism

Libertarians are people who drive on roads libertarians wouldn't build...

Apparently someone's curse worked: we live in interesting times, and among
other consequences, for no good reason we have a surplus of libertarians.

Found via Virulent Memes.

2002-10-03T04:44:00.000-07:00

Arundhati Roy reading and
Ms. Roy and Howard Zinn

Reading and Interview

What the Free Market undermines is not national sovereignty, but democracy. As the disparity between the rich and poor grows, the hidden fist has its work cut out for it. Multinational corporations on the prowl for "sweetheart deals" that yield enormous profits cannot push through those deals and administer those projects in developing countries without the active connivance of State machinery - the police, the courts, sometimes even the army. Today Corporate Globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. It needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice. It needs nuclear bombs, standing armies, sterner immigration laws, and watchful coastal patrols to make sure that it's only money, goods, patents, and services that are being globalized - not the free movement of people, not a respect for human rights, not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons, or greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, or god forbid, justice. It's as though even a gesture towards international accountability would wreck the whole enterprise.

Link via wood_s_lot.

2002-09-30T05:13:00.000-07:00

Metropolis Returns

The ur-text of Luddite films. See the trailer.

Movie website [Flash].

2002-09-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

Naturally occuring Orwell

Did anyone notice in the NYT Thursday article on Afghan roads, at the end of the piece,
a kid said they all refer to Bush as "Doublebush"?

Doubleplusgood.

2002-09-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

There Is No More Nature

NAQOYQATSI trailer

THERE IS NO MORE NATURE.
THERE IS ONLY TECHNOLOGY.
EVERYDAY LIFE IS WAR.

2002-09-11T09:23:00.000-07:00

Noted: New Luddite Book

Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature Art and Individual Lives
by Nicols Fox

Island Press link (with description, author bio, excerpt)

Nicols Fox is also the bookseller at Rue Cottage Books
(for luddites, greens, and like-minded readers) in Maine.

2002-08-27T14:43:00.000-07:00

Finally, some good news about piracy

One of my daughters is 6 and very very interested in Pirates. By chance I discovered
a really GREAT pop-up pirate ship book at Amazon.uk. If you do any gift buying
for young pirates or if you just like really wonderful books, I highly recommend it.

2002-08-22T04:59:00.000-07:00

Smile At The Trashcan-looking Thing, Honey

[BBC News 8/20] A robot wedding photographer.

"All right (beep!), look this way, look this way (beep!)..."

Funny.

Found via Techdirt.com.

2002-08-13T05:46:00.000-07:00

Homeland Insecurity

Don't feel too secure yet? A fine article in the September Atlantic Monthly:

"The trick is to remember that technology can't save you," Schneier says. We know this
in our own lives. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody
smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both
cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around
people."

People, not technology.

2002-07-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

Read Anything By

This month's Read Anything By recommendation: Howard Mansfield

   We have everywhere an absence of memory. Architects sometimes
   talk of building with context and continuity in mind, religious
   religious leaders call it tradition, social workers say it is a
   sense of community, but it is memory we have banished from our
   cities. We have speed and power, but no place. Travel, but no
   destination. Convenience, but no use.

               - from "In The Memory House"

2002-06-27T04:56:00.000-07:00

Railroaded

AMTRAK BASHING

   Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe (via Progressive Review) provides rebuttal
   to those riding on the Amtrak bashing bandwagon. Apparently some transportation
   subsidies are better than others.

Via the always interesting Ethel.

2002-06-23T20:56:00.000-07:00

I Got My Rights (Clink!)

Why would you want a metal copy of the bill of rights?

   The First Ten Amendments to the constitution of the United States printed on sturdy,
   pocket-sized, pieces of metal.

   The next time you travel by air, take the Security Edition of the Bill of Rights along
   with you. When asked to empty your pockets, proudly toss the Bill of Rights in the plastic
   bin.

   You need to get used to offering up the bill of rights for inspection and government
   workers need to get used to deciding if you'll be allowed to keep the Bill of Rights
   with you when you travel.

Too good. Of course, they will take it away from you, so you can't hit John
Ashcroft over the head with it... But wait! He's already taken it away from
you...

Found via Boing Boing.

2002-06-20T20:43:00.000-07:00

The One That Bot Away

Robot on the run
By Dave Higgens, London
June 20 2002

   Scientists running a pioneering experiment with "living robots" which
   think for themselves said they were amazed to find one escaping from the
   centre where it "lives".

   The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a "survival of
   the fittest" test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire,
   which has been running since March.

   Gaak made its bid for freedom yesterday after it had been taken out of the
   arena where hundreds of visitors watch the machines learning as they do
   daily battle for minor repairs.

   Professor Noel Sharkey said he turned his back on the drone and returned
   15 minutes later to find it had forced its way out of the small make-shift
   paddock it was being kept in.

   He later found it had travelled down an access slope, through the front
   door of the centre and was eventually discovered at the main entrance to
   the car park when a visitor nearly flattened it with his car.

Come back, 'chine! Gaak!

From The Age (Au) via Boing Boing.

2002-06-19T04:56:00.000-07:00

The God That Sucks

Thomas Frank, in the Baffler:

   The market is the reason our housing is so expensive. It is the reason our public transportation is lousy.
   It is the reason our cities sprawl idiotically all across the map. It is the reason our word processing
   programs stink and our prescription drugs cost more than anywhere else. In order that a fortunate few might
   enjoy a kind of prosperity unequaled in human history, the rest of us have had to abandon ourselves to a
   lifetime of casual employment, to unquestioning obedience within an ever-more arbitrary and despotic corporate
   regime, to medical care available on a maybe/maybe-not basis, to a housing market interested in catering only
   to the fortunate.

Found Via Wood_s_lot.

2002-06-19T04:40:00.000-07:00

Celistina

From the paleoliterature of robotics:

Alberto Moravia's short story "Celestina" from the collection "Command And I Will Obey You" (1967):

   Celistina vanished. Her zinc-covered stand was empty, empty her pavilion;
   there was no trace of her in the garden, in the surrounding countryside, in
   the house. Or rather, there was one trace, just a single, but significant
   clue -- the simultaneous disappearance of our old, worn, antiquated water-
   heater. And so, finally, the truth dawned upon us: Celistina, unknown to us
   had started a love affair with the water-heater, an individual of a rather
   passionate nature and prone to excessive over-heating. Seeing that I intended
   to marry her off to Titac, she had fled with her lover.

A story I remember whenever I read a hyped news story about how human robots are becoming...

2002-06-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

Octopus Card, Eh?

How to stay financially underwater...

The Octopus Card

   Here, just about everyone carries an Octopus card -- a rechargeable, contactless card that
   is passed over a scanner to access almost every train, bus or ferry. The territory's 6.75
   million inhabitants make nearly seven million Octopus transactions each day, worth about
   HK$48 million (US$6.12 million).

From Yahoo News via Boing Boing.

2002-06-02T04:28:00.000-07:00

Cui Bono?

This is sinful.

(from NYT) Heart of Cheapness
By PAUL KRUGMAN

   So here are our priorities. Faced with a proposal that would save the lives of eight
   million people every year, many of them children, we balk at the cost. But when asked
   to give up revenue equal to twice that cost, in order to allow each of 3,300 lucky
   families to collect its full $16 million inheritance rather than a mere $10 million,
   we don't hesitate. Leave no heir behind!

Found via FmH.

2002-05-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

So Time Really Is Money

(CNN.COM 5/29) Time is money, professor proves

A mathematical formula calculated by a British university professor
has found that time actually is money...

Although we must remember that in our country money is speech.
The Supreme Court has ruled it so. So time is speech?

2002-05-30T05:02:00.000-07:00

Fat Citi(zens)

(Reuters 5/29) Innovation Behind Americans' Extra Pounds-Study

Innovation has made America richer but technological improvements in agriculture and
industry also may be behind the extra padding on its citizens...

Urp!

2002-05-20T20:38:00.000-07:00

If You Read Only One Thing

About our vaunted "global economy," let it be:

The Idea of a Local Economy
by Wendell Berry

Originally in Orion Online, but also reprinted in this month's Harpers (well worth the price):

   ...The "free trade," which from the standpoint of the corporate economy brings
   "unprecedented economic growth," from the standpoint of the land and its local
   populations, and ultimately from the standpoint of the cities, is destruction
   and slavery. Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power, and
   the land has no voice.

The world's life is not deferred gratification, it is now.

2002-05-15T20:48:00.000-07:00

Make the Planet Safe for Wall Street

A song for all of us...

All together now:

   Let's distract our populace (repeat)
   From all that's going wrong, oh

   Five thousand are laid off at Sears, (repeat)
   And that is just the start, oh

   Distract the folks from all that's wrong, layoffs at Sears, that's just the start
   Make the planet safe for Wall Street

   We've dumbed down all our public schools (repeat)
   Our kids can't read or write, oh

   Oh don't get sick it costs too much (repeat)
   But we don't want national health, oh

   Dumbed down schools, our kids can't read, and don't get sick, no national health
   Make the world more safe for Wall Street

From Tompaine.com.

2002-05-02T04:11:00.000-07:00

Not for U

Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U.
By KATIE HAFNER

Online Universities -- NOT.

Link found via TechDirt.

2002-05-02T04:04:00.000-07:00

Delusional Nader

From Reasononline

Speaking Lies to Power
Ralph Nader fudges the truth just like a real politician.
By Matt Welch

   "Politics, as it is practiced, is the art of having it both ways," he writes, with some
   disgust, on page 8. A year into the Bush presidency he helped deliver, Ralph Nader looks
   very much like he’s practicing politics.

Question: will Ralph receive the medal of freedom from George Bush?

Link found via NewPages.

2002-04-30T04:24:00.000-07:00

End of the Modern Age

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, April 26, 2002:

It's the End of the Modern Age
By JOHN LUKACS

   But now we arrive at the greatest and gravest duality -- indeed, the greatest and gravest
   problem looming before us at the end of the Modern Age. Now, for the first time in the
   history of mankind, dangers and catastrophes of nature are potentially (indeed, here and
   there actually) threatening nature and humanity together. Those dangers are man-made. They
   include not only horribly destructive atomic and biological weapons but many effects on
   the nature and on the atmosphere of the globe by the increasing presence and intrusion of
   the results of applied science. So, at the end of the Modern Age, the control and the
   limitation and even the prohibition of some of the applications of science -- including
   genetic engineering -- becomes a, sometimes global, necessity. At the same time, there
   exists no international or supranational (and in most cases not even a national) authority
   that would enforce such measures.

Found via Arts and Letters Daily.

2002-04-29T04:34:00.000-07:00

The Jefferson Muzzles

2002 Muzzles

Since 1992, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has celebrated
the birth and ideals of its namesake by calling attention to those who in the past year forgot
or disregarded Mr. Jefferson's admonition that freedom of speech "cannot be limited without
being lost."

Announced on or near April 13 -- the anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson -- the
Jefferson Muzzles are awarded as a means to draw national attention to abridgments of free
speech and press and, at the same time, foster an appreciation for those tenets of the First
Amendment. Because the importance and value of free expression extend far beyond the First
Amendment's limit on government censorship, acts of private censorship are not spared
consideration for the dubious honor of receiving a Muzzle.

Found via Booknotes.

2002-04-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

It's What's Off

Don't look! It's TV Turnoff Week April 23-29, 2001

International TV-Turnoff Week

   Maybe you think you can't live without TV. But last year five million people spent a week
   doing just that. The TV-Turnoff is a chance to be yourself, without a machine telling you
   what to think and feel. Take a healthy break from TV and you'll find out what you really
   enjoy doing. You'll be watching less, doing more.

As they say: Get out of the box for a week!

Found on Whitedot.org via FmH.

2002-04-10T05:03:00.000-07:00

Robocompanions for Granny?

Robot companions for the elderly? We are reminded of Woody Allen's character in "Sleeper,"
who is afraid that a robot pet will "leave batteries everywhere."

Why are the Japanese so hyped on robots? Don't they have each other? Or is this
just a hidden cultural affection for slavery?

Link found via Boing-Boing.

2002-04-02T04:14:00.000-08:00

Habeous Corpus

The mind/body problem, again. Dreyfus' new book, "On The Internet."

Philosopher's Critique of Online Learning Cites Existentialists (Mostly Dead)
By MICHAEL ARNONE

   Mr. Dreyfus takes pains to show he is neither a Luddite nor a categorical opponent of
   distance education. He has recorded his lectures as MP3's and has broadcast one of his
   courses on the Web. He argues that the structure of the Internet and distance education
   makes excellence in learning online potentially difficult to achieve, but not impossible.
   The obvious truth, he says, is that distance education is better than no education, or
   instructors and students bored in a classroom.

Ah, but he is a Luddite, for they asked long before him for a revolution to not
forget the body, that is, what is human.

Via FMH.

2002-03-20T09:48:00.000-08:00

Work Reading

It may just be the funniest thing ever written about what working has become:

George Saunder's title novella "Pastoralia," about working as a caveman in the
history theme park from hell:

   In the old days, when heads were constantly poking in, we
   liked what we did. Really hammed it up. Had little grunting
   fights. Whenever I was about to toss a handful of dirt in her
   face I'd pound a rock against a rock in rage. That way she
   knew to close her eyes. Sometimes she did this kind of crude
   weaving. It was like: Roots of Weaving. Sometimes we'd go
   down to the Russian Peasant Farm for a barbecue, I remember
   there was Murray and Leon, Leon was dating Eileen, Eileen was
   the one with all the cats, but now, with the big decline in
   heads poking in, the Russian Peasants are all elsewhere, some
   to Administration, but most not, Eileen's cats have gone wild,
   and honest to God sometimes I worry I'll go to the big slot
   and find it goatless...

and

   Nobody's on the path, although from the direction of Pioneer
   encampment I hear the sound of rushing water, possibly the
   Big Durn Flood? Twice a month they open up the Reserve Tanks
   and the river widens and pretty soon some detachable house
   parts and Pioneer wagons equipped with special inflatable
   bladders float by, while from their P.A. we dimly hear the
   sound of prerecorded screaming Settlers...

A good next movie for Spike Jonze.

2002-03-12T04:36:00.000-08:00

Green Machine Dreams

From Orion Online

No Such Thing!
by Jane Holtz Kay

   How could "clean" cars free the Americans now immobilized by auto-dependency spending eight
   billion hours a year stuck in traffic; help the 55 million school age children on bike or
   foot threatened by racing roadsters; aid the dependent elderly unable to drive, or the 9
   percent of our households - the poor, women and minorities--who can't afford a car?? What
   would a dream machine do for the quality of life of the overworked American needing a ton
   of steel and wheel to buy a quart of milk?

   ...Altering the chemistry of the vehicle that causes one-third of our CO2 emissions is fine. But
   how about acknowledging that another third of this energy consumption is spent in highway-bred
   building of 953,000 homes a year - largely at the end of a road - filling 60,000 acres of wetland,
   and taking one million acres of farmland out of production every year. Why adopt the car guys'
   detour? Why not challenge the chief polluter of our lives and landscapes? Clean consciences
   may put coins in some psychic (or Detroit-based) bank, but they don't clean the environment.

Dreaming wrong.

2002-03-11T04:10:00.000-08:00

What then shall we do with all the gold?

Published on Monday, November 27, 2000 by Outlook India

Power Politics
The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin
by Arundhati Roy

   One marrowy American panelist put it rather nicely --"God gave us the rivers," he drawled,
   "but he didn’t put in the delivery systems. That’s why we need private enterprise." No doubt
   with a little Structural Adjustment to the rest of the things God gave us, we could all live
   in a simpler world (If all the seas were one sea, what a big sea it would be...) -- Evian
   could own the water, Rand the earth, Enron the air. Old Rumpelstiltskin could be the
   handsomely paid supreme CEO.

   When all the rivers and valleys and forests and hills of the world have been priced,
   packaged, bar-coded and stacked in the local supermarket, when all the hay and coal and
   earth and wood and water has been turned to gold, what then shall we do with all the gold?
   Make nuclear bombs to obliterate what's left of the ravaged landscapes and the notional
   nations in our ruined world?

Via the excellent Wood_s_lot.

2002-03-08T13:57:00.000-08:00

12 Most Luddite Films of All Time

From the Alternative Press Review.

2002-03-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

Think, Thank, Thunk
The importance of diversity and the threat of proprietary nature:

Fruits We'll Never Taste
Preserving diversity -- in the natural world and human culture -- lets us delight in an abundant world
By Beth Ann Fennelly, Michigan Quarterly Review

   What I want to say is this. As a poet, I’ve been carrying on a love affair with words and
   the world for 28 years, and I’ve come to believe that the sheer magnitude of creation
   blesses us: the gross numbers, the unaccountability of it -- as if the world were a grand
   room full of books and though we might read all we can, we will never, ever outstrip its
   riches. It’s both an unsettling and a comforting thought. If we are stewards of the world,
   we are stewards of a charge beyond our comprehension; even now science can tell us less
   about the number of species we have on earth than about the number of stars in our galaxy.
   There is something important in the idea of this fecundity, this abundance, this escape
   hatch for our imaginations. Somehow, despite our savagery, we have been overprovided for,
   and I believe it is a sign of love.

Via SciTech Daily.

2002-03-05T19:28:00.000-08:00

Ned Wump

A little luddite reading for the 'bairns...

Wump World by Bill Peet

   The Wump World was mostly grassy meadows and clumps of leafy green trees with a few winding
   rivers and lakes. Then suddenly a myriad of huge iron and steel monsters from outer space
   invaded. Soon the Wump World was overrun by pollution. What will happen to the Wumps?
   The Wumps had an ideal world that satisfied all of their needs. Then the Pollutians
   arrived from the planet Pollutus. They made a real mess of the Wump World. It became so
   bad that the Pollutians moved to a new world. The Wumps were left to deal with their
   polluted world.

   The Pollutians invade the Wump World and turn the green meadows into a concrete jungle.

We hate it when that happens...

2002-01-22T20:42:00.000-08:00

LUDD JOBS: LIVING HISTORY INTERPRETER

When dedicated luddites fail to send their kids to computer camp they have to wonder what
jobs will be available to them when they grow up...

We recommend...living history interpreter

There is an article by Joshua Shenk in the February 2002 Atlantic Monthly titled "Being Abe
Lincoln" that describes a recent convention of Abe Lincoln "presenters."

   Last April the Association of Abe Lincoln Presenters held its seventh
   annual convention, in Beckley [West Virginia]. I had heard there would be
   forty-four Lincolns there, and fifteen Marys. So I flew to Charleston,
   drove south sixty miles to Beckley, and stood in the lobby of the Country
   Inn & Suites, gaping at the sight: Black- and gray- and fake-bearded
   Lincolns, short and tall Lincolns, and a Lincoln in a wheelchair, with an
   oxygen tank...

There are web sites for Living History resources, including
job listings such as Ox Cart Driver/Interpreter (Williamsburg, VA).

Just think about it: every day someone is paid to be Thomas Jefferson at
Colonial Williamsburg...

2002-01-11T04:19:00.000-08:00

TREK/DRECK

We have seen the future and it doesn't work.

Of Trek and TiVo
Digital Renaissance by Henry Jenkins

   It’s hard to take seriously the original Star Trek’s technological utopian premise when
   contemporary device--some inspired by the series itself, some even used to watch it--are
   totally unreliable. Improvements in communications technologies, indeed! There are at
   least three problems. First, the new machines are still buggy when they reach our hands.
   How many of us have to shout into our cell phones, which often look suspiciously like
   Star Trek’s flip-open communicators, but with a much more limited calling area? Second,
   the companies that send us these gadgets never quite seem to know how to set up a
   customer service department equipped to deal with the bugs as they emerge. And then
   there are the design errors that make you wonder if the machines’ engineers had a
   Vulcan or Klingon customer in mind rather than a human being. Why are the media devices
   that we mostly use in darkened rooms always black? Why do they put all the useful
   information--the model number, serial number, even the phone number for customer
   service--on the bottom of the VCR?

From MIT Technology Review.

2002-01-11T03:55:00.000-08:00

HELP, SELF

Starting a rumor that the Sierra Club is about to publish a self help text
for environmental activists who are worried about their lack of success.
The small, handy, uplifting text will be called "Who Moved My Trees?"

Pass it on.

2002-01-04T04:19:00.000-08:00

OUR CYBERNATURE

Worldlessness, Virtual Reality, and the Limits of Technology
by Burt Kimmelman
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
New Jersey Institute of Technology

   Driven by a technological imperative, today we seek to change nature, to change reality, in
   order to accommodate design. As the technological critic Andrew Kimbrell has pointed out, we
   have come a long way since the 1939 World's Fair and its motto: "Science Explores, Technology
   Executes, Man Conforms." That is to say, we may not consider an option other than conformity,
   other than technological self-reflexivity, that causes new design to be created under the
   mandate of preserving, first and foremost, the effects and goals of previous design.
   Perhaps the exercise of another option becomes possible when we perceive a fully articulated
   relationship between ourselves and the world, one that doesn't require a technological
   response to it. Then the mandate for new design might owe nothing to the past; then the
   fundamental alteration of nature need not be seen to be inexorable since it bears the
   responsibility of perpetuating older technologies that have created physical, psychological,
   intellectual and spiritual dangers.

From Wood_s_lot.

2001-12-18T10:03:00.000-08:00

SOCIAL CRITICISM LINKS

Social Criticism Review web page.

Link via FmH.

Lots o'links.

2001-12-15T04:28:00.000-08:00

THE LUDDITE GIFT GUIDE LAST MINUTE CHRISTMAS TIP

Looking for the right DVD for that friend with the new player? Want something
you can be sure they don't already have? Here it is:

I Love Maria (David Chung, 1988)
In a just world, this would be a top cult film, shown at midnight in classic
theatres everywhere, running endlessly to demonstrate DVD players in elecronics
and computer stores, and discussed in academia as a postmodern milestone. It’s
an action comedy with a sweet/stupid nature, jaw-dropping robot martial art
balletics, and remarkably literate allusions (including Robocop, the Statue of
Liberty, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet). The story? A robot-equipped
gang tries to take over the world by breaking just about every law, but chiefly
the law of gravity. However, in this genre everyone breaks the law of gravity
anyway. It turns the Classic Maria concept [ from the 1927 film Metropolis ]
on its head with the bad Maria as a human gang member and the goodMaria
her robot replica, reprogrammed to goodness. The Rotwang figure is called (in
the English subtitles) Big Brother(!). The cops are Keystone. The principal
evil robot seems to have been constructed from auto salvage and to be powered
by steam. The English subtitles also contain some unintended comedy. When one
character is thought dead, the subtitles for another character’s lamentation
note that the deceased is at last relieved of the yolk of life. This is a
movie that will make you happy. Trust us. It’s an undiscovered classic. Get
it. The DVD is a better bargain than the VHS.

Or see the Badmovies Maria page.

But, really, its the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon of robotics.

2001-12-03T20:42:00.000-08:00

ICE-9 NEWS

Scientists have found DNA from genetically modified crops in wild maize
growing on remote mountains in Mexico. [BBC]

Via Rebecca.

2001-11-23T19:01:00.000-08:00

NEW NETFUTURE

Netfuture issue #125 is out, November 15, 2001:

The Deceiving Virtues of Technology (Steve Talbott)
From the cave of the Cyclops to Silicon Valley

Of course technology threatens us, and of course it calls for a certain resistance on
our part, since it expresses our dominant tendencies, our prevailing lameness or
one-sidedness. The only way we can become entire, whole, and healthy is to
struggle against whatever reinforces our existing imbalance. Our primary task is to
discover the potentials within ourselves that are not merely mechanical, not merely
automatic, not reducible to computation. And the machine is a gift to us precisely
because the peril in its siding with our one-sidedness forces us to strengthen the
opposite side — at least it does if we recognize the peril and accept its challenge.

2001-11-23T18:59:00.000-08:00

MUDGE IS BACK

The Fulford and Tang Hall Curmudgeon has reopened for business...

Films, music, and cultural abuse...

Source of one of our favorite articles on the web:

IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL HAVE NUCLEAR HELICOPTERS STRAPPED TO THEIR FOREHEADS
One man's journey into the busy, nay shyster world of futurology

A great review of the laws of robotics...

2001-11-16T03:41:00.000-08:00

HARRIED WORLD

Sometimes the title alone make a link worthwhile...

When Harry Met Selling
Michelle Chihara, AlterNet
November 8, 2001

Link via NewPages Weblog.

2001-11-10T04:58:00.000-08:00

THE INFORMATION SUPPOSITORY

It's a small world after all...

From an LA Times story:

Small Wonders

   It's taken only 10 years for mobile phones to shrink from the size of briefcases to
   credit cards, but the fingers fumbling with tiny buttons haven't changed much in
   10,000 years. Human beings don't evolve nearly as quickly as their gadgetry...

Link found via Techdirt.com.

2001-11-01T03:59:00.000-08:00

ENVIROPIG

Genetic engineering tackles the pigshit problem:

From MotherJones: The Next Pig Thing
by Leora Broydo Vestel October 26, 2001
Canadian researchers have developed a genetically-engineered pig that could
help clean up a major source of water pollution -- but environmental groups
want the swine squelched.

   ...the Enviropig is the first animal engineered for environmental benefit.

  Ontario Pork, a trade association representing pig farmers in the Canadian
  province, calls the Enviropig "the biggest breakthrough in pig farming
  since the invention of the trough."

2001-10-29T04:04:00.000-08:00

LUDDITE LIST

An excellent list of Luddite resources on the net:

Luddism and the Neo-Luddite Reaction

2001-10-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

WENDELL BERRY ON WTC

From RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear
by Wendell Berry

   VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened. We did not
   foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at once overridden by
   a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our
   previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and
   the dangers that we had ignored. We never considered the possibility that we
   might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was
   supposed to make us free.

This article first appeared on OrionOnline.org, the web magazine of ORION and
ORION AFIELD, in a feature called "Thoughts on America: Writers Respond to
Crisis." The number of contributing writers continues to grow.
See http://www.oriononline.org.

2001-10-19T04:22:00.000-07:00

BOOKED TO FLY?

Dynamite cover illustration on Heyduke Lives!
keeps a young man off a United flight...

Amazing!

Found via BookNotes.

2001-10-19T04:11:00.000-07:00

TALKING WTO

Lifted from Boing-Boing:

Rod sez: "...[T]hese activist/pranksters called the
"Yes Men" run a WTO parody site (www.gatt.org).
The organizers of this textiles conference mistakenly
sent an invitation to this spoof site, asking if a
representative of the WTO would like to deliver a
speech. One of the Yes Men accepted, and delivered
his own subversive speech, in part commenting on
how the economics of globalization are so much
more efficient for businesses than the economics of
pre-Civil War slavery. The speech was strongly
received; the Master of Ceremonies praised it three
times during the day. The Harper's site being so thin,
I doubt they'll put it online, but here's the full text of
the speech on the Yes Men's site."

Text of presentation.

2001-10-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

PICKS

Question: Why don't more bookstores and libraries use blog technology to
do "staff picks" content?

Here's staff picks from Powells.

2001-10-18T08:56:00.000-07:00

[ICH] BIN [EIN] LUDDITE

What we need in a time of crisis is good, clear thinking...
What we get is this...

Incredible Gilder rant-o-the-month: OSAMA BIN LUDDITE...

   ...information tools alone can save us from the depredations of desperate
   technophobes -- the Bin Luddites, for whom a mud-brick New Jerusalem
   ("Afghanistan, Land of Nothing", The New York Times headlined one dispatch)
   apparently harkens relief from the tribulations of freedom and wealth. The
   Bin Luddites could no more build a 767 -- much less a World Trade Center,
   or even a flashlight -- than they can feed (never mind, free) the oppressed
   masses whose interests they claim to advance. But armed with hijacked
   technologies and apocalyptic grudges, they pose a devastating menace to
   all civilization.

         --From The American Spectator’s October 2001 issue.

And let's not forget the threat to our precious bodily fluids, Mandrake.

2001-10-18T04:11:00.000-07:00

NOTED: INVITING DISASTER

Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology
by James R. Chiles

2001-10-17T04:16:00.000-07:00

THE HUMAN PROBLEM

From Kuro5hin:
The Company of Humans (Technology)
By localroger
Sun Oct 14th

   You probably don't remember the technological advances of the Cambrian Explosion,
   or even the unfortunate business with the asteroid 65 million years ago. You've
   never known a world where seeds and teeth and fur and feathers had not been
   invented, where the most interesting conversation involved mutual attempts at
   poisoning.

   That's why I need to explain to you the threat that resides among us. Today the
   NatureNet is threatened by one of its own, an entity that doesn't play by the rules,
   threatens everything it touches, and uses trickery to destroy what it cannot own. I
   refer, of course, to the Homo Sapiens Corporation...

2001-10-15T15:22:00.000-07:00

GEORGE THE REASSURER

   ...The President smiles with the disarming smile of a man
      who has seen God, and found Him a true American,
      not overbearingly smart.

   The President reassures the Chairman of the Board of the
      Humane Health for Profit Corporation of America,
      who knows in his replaceable heart that health, if
      it came, would bring financial ruin;

   he reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Victory
      and Honor for Profit Corporation of America, who
      has been wakened in the night by a dream of the
      calamity of peace.

            -- from The Reassurer by Wendell Berry
                in the collection Entries, 1994

2001-10-14T04:53:00.000-07:00

INFORMING OURSELVES...

Reminded again of the coyness of wartime information and the unusually
untelegenic war in Afghanistan (watch us blow up this rock!), we point
to the text of an old Neal Postman talk on "Informing Ourselves to Death":

   I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the most
   misery and pain -- at both cultural and personal levels -- has nothing to do
   with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its
   information cannot answer anyof the fundamental questions we need to address to
   make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an
   organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking.
   It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each
   other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The
   computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we
   most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable
   conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course
   not. It is, after all, only a machine. But it is presented to us, with trumpets
   blaring, as at this conference, as a technological messiah.

   Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better,
   politics better, our minds better -- best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course,
   nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it. I said a
   moment ago that computers are not to blame for this. And that is true, at least in the
   sense that we do not blame an elephant for its huge appetite or a stone for being hard
   or a cloud for hiding the sun. That is their nature, and we expect nothing different
   from them. But the computer has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a
   machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and
   therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message.

   The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more
   swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so all the brilliant young
   men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping
   that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame
   them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and
   power and some will even become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that
   through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king.
   But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and
   energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to
   philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who
   knows what we could learn from such people -- perhaps why there are wars, and hunger,
   and homelessness and mental illness and anger.

Found via Wood_s_lot with cites to Doc Searles and thence to The Obvious.

2001-10-14T04:09:00.000-07:00

TEN RULES FOR BAD SCIENCE FICTION

Via Boing-Boing: 10 Rules for Bad Science Fiction

   Remember that technology introduced at the start of the story always causes
   everyone's problems, while technology introduced in the middle or at the end of
   the story always solves everyone's problems.This could be referred to as the
   "If-Only-I'd-Invented-It-Ninety-Minutes-Later" Conundrum.

2001-10-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

NED BLOG = BONG LED

From the The Internet Anagram Server at Wordsmith.org:

Neoluddite =

   Delude I not
   Denude toil
   Odd lie tune
   Idle end out

So you see, technology is useful after all...

2001-10-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

FEED ME!

THE TECHNO-ECONOMIC IMPERATIVE
by Marylaine Block

   ...I doubt if any of us anticipated the kind of resentment that can creep in, as
   the need for new computers, new programs, new connections, new technical support
   staff, gradually eats away at our budgets, using money that might otherwise have
   gone for books and periodicals, for more librarians and higher salaries. The
   techno-economic imperative is a lot like Audrey, in Little Shop of Horrors, getting
   bigger all the time and a lot harder to resist when it says "Feed me."

An editorial from EX LIBRIS.