“The idea that something new is possible is spreading. Most favorably, it is giving rise to a new type: the cultural entrepreneur.”
The Adventures of Bucakroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension - one of the best movies to make it out of the 80s.
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims. In his own words the Unabomber says: “The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”
I too argue that the technium is guided by “technical necessity.” That is, baked into the nature of this vast complex of technological systems are self-serving aspects – technologies that enable more technology, and systems that preserve themselves — and also inherent biases that lead the technium in certain directions, outside of human desire. Kaczynski writes “modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the ‘good’ parts.”
read the rest on Kevin Kelly’s Technium blog
Triple Canopy works collectively with writers, artists, researchers and other collaborators on projects that deal critically with culture and politics, and the ways people engage them, both online and in the world at large. These investigations are realized in an online magazine as well as in public programs and print publications encompassing various fields and locales. We aim to present work and advance ideas informed by a multitude of disciplines and perspectives, and to disseminate them among a broad and diverse audience. Our first issue was published on March 17, 2008.
Issue #4 (entitled War, Money, Magic) offers up these delights and more:
The Gift of Eternal Life
by Marc Vives
A filmmaker visits the Holy Land Experience theme park, where Christ is crucified twice a day.
Specters of a Young Earth
by Joseph Clarke
The dinosaurs at Kentucky’s Creation Museum are stalking evolution, reason, and the American city.
Original Ideas in Magic
by Tim Davis with Hannah Whitaker
“Think of a number between thunder and money.” Poems and proliferating visions of a magician’s lair without a magician.
Heraclitus Series
by Amir Mogharabi
Currents in logic made ancient, for OS 9. An artist project bringing together the fragments of Heraclitus and the calculus of truth tables.
Sorry to bring it up, Christians in the audience. Had to be said though.
For the record, one could replace ‘Christianity’ with any number of other destructive social control systems which waste human energy with irrelevant pursuits or out-and-out destruction.
And it’s not really fair to single out Christianity either, as every religion has at its core an enlightened person who’s words were twisted over time to aid the ruling class in their efforts to control their fellow men.
Following a reference from the Vanity Fair story I just posted, I ran across these wonderful illustrations from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor:
Kind of an asshole, but his rhubarb prices are the lowest in all of Christendom.
Two words: free boot-laces.
By night, Joe Ades dines with his fourth wife at exclusive restaurants, sips Veuve Clicquot at the Pierre, and goes home to a three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment. By day, he is something else altogether. At 72, the “peeler guy” in the Turnbull & Asser shirts is a New York legend.
Do we have any interesting street characters like this in St. Louis? Someone with such an unusual charater that one could write a fascinating story like this about them?
