Desperado Philosophy. A River in Egypt
Now comes the voice of Tad Delay, author of the recently published Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change, via an interview well worth listening to in its entirely.
The future of technological progress, Rushkoff argues, is now an experimental endgame in which the wealthiest and most powerful race to find the escape hatch; it is less about raising up humanity than rising above the rest of us.
Jared Marcel Pollen in The Nation. Why Billionaires Are Obsessed With the Apocalypse
In Survival of the Richest, Douglas Rushkoff gets to the bottom of the tech oligarchy’s fixation on protecting themselves from the end times.
Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff
In his review Pollen cited Neil Postman in explaing what Rushkoff refers to as "The Mindset." That mention got me reading an article by Postman from 1974. Postman asks what it would take to move schooling in a more humae and sensible direction? I would like to see that sort of question asked quite broadly.
To be remembered is to be alive and to be forgotten is to die. This idea is foundational to ancestral veneration and animates the very life of a community. In fact, in African spirituality, it is memory that makes ancestors because ancestors are those whom the living remember. Those who are not remembered slowly drift into the realm of nonbeing, the realm of nothingness, the final death. Death is therefore kept at bay through memory. Here, memory is metaphysical rather than just social or political. Here, memory is spirituality because it is rooted in the deep structures of life. Suppressing memory generates individual and social death and forecloses futures.
David Tonghou Ngong at Africa Is a Country. Saved by memory
A new Brazilian film shows the role memory plays in African spirituality and dreams of liberation.
Solmatalua, 2022, Brazil. Directed by Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade.
Pamela was arguing that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least, it qualifies as one of those “badges.” So sexual, bodily freedom is not simply a matter of privacy, and constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they strike at the heart of human autonomy and liberty. Effectively, they reinstitute slavery.
JoAnn Wypijewski at Counterpunch. The Long Hand of Slave Breeding, Redux
Thanks to Shrinkrants for linking to the article.
Anti-abortion rights advocates have adopted the rhetoric the fetus-as-slave. Wypijewski directly confronts it. It’s this sort of use of “slavery” in discussing law and abortion that sometimes makes it difficult to make meanings clear. I pointed to two law journal articles to show some of the reasons why it’s so difficult.
Wyijewski’s piece is incisive as it is constructive.
Although our present crisis is so threatening precisely because it plays out on the physical plane, where our bodies and other creatures live, it is a crisis of knowledge. We lack a crucial mental skill. I contend that our position today regarding the way we make decisions about technologies is similar to the dilemma that pre-Enlightenment scientists faced in the sixteenth century. We simply don't have a good method for thinking and making decisions about how to apply (and not apply) the powerful tools of rationality, the scientific method, reductionism, the combination of logic and efficiency embodied by technology.
Howard Rheingold. Technology 101: What Do We Need To Know About The Future We're Creating?
Readabilty link strips out 1998 HTML. In 1998 Howard Rheingold saw quite clearly. He is one of the great treasures of the Internet era.
Nature has had fun with the project design flood. Everyone still remembers the five-hundred-year flood in 1993, which was the biggest flood since the one in 1827. Then there was five-hundred-year flood in 2008, followed by the five-hundred-year flood in 2011. Given the frequency of these five-hundred-year floods, you can hardly fault the model for failing to keep up. For all our high-tech visibility into the Mississippi watershed, we find ourselves constantly filling sandbags.
Maciej Ceglowski in Idle Words. Confronting New Madrid
KickStarter: Send Idle Words to Antarctica
But this vision, like so much contemporary advertising, is based on a lie: in this case, on the increasingly bizarre idea that, in the twenty-first century, humanity can burn its way through significant parts of the planet’s reserves of fossil fuels to achieve a world in which everything is essentially the same -- there’s just more of it for everyone. In the world portrayed by Exxon, it’s possible for a reassuring version of business-as-usual to proceed without environmental consequences. In that world, the unimpeded and accelerated release of carbon into the atmosphere has no significant impact on people’s lives. This is, of course, a modern fairy tale that, if believed, will have the most disastrous of results.
Michael Klare at Tom Dispatch. Carbon Counterattack
How Big Oil Is Responding to the Anti-Carbon Moment
Toffler’s own conception of futurology was never progressive. Progress was always presented as a problem that needed to be solved.
David Graeber in The Baffler. Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
Make and enjoy culture that is true to where it comes from, not to what color it is supposed to be.
Adam Rothstein at The State. how not to be white on the internet
In the future as used by storytellers for ages, another world isn’t just possible, it’s already there. It’s a place when the embedded antagonisms that flow through everyday life become visible, when lines can be drawn. The robots rise up, the government wears jackboots; there are often rebels who call themselves ‘the rebels.’
Malcolm Harris in The State. bifo says relax by malcolm harris
So, assuming this love for our children thing is valid, why is it that we burden the children we apparently love so much with these endless heaps of waste left over from our activities, many of which have nothing to do with our survival as such? At best it's a strange way of showing our love, at worst it looks more like the exact opposite of love. If mere survival was the goal, we could take it a lot easier, put on an extra sweater, walk to the store, that basic sort of thing, and build our communities to fit that kind of lifestyle.
Raul Ilargi Meijer in The Automatic Earth.
To kill it and pretend that that was some kind of accident, that is shameful. To kill and eat it is fierce, but it’s honorable. Because you are taking the substance of the past and making it part of yourself. You are giving it new form and allowing it to take flight.
Bruce Sterling in Wired. Text of SXSW2013 closing remarks by Bruce Sterling
Money follows attention. Wherever attention goes, money will follow. I don’t know the exact revenue model, but I know money will come. The real key is getting people to pay attention.
Kevin Kelly interviewed by Sonia Sariya on Findings. HOW WE WILL READ: KEVIN KELLY
"Permission to dream. To be human is to dream, to think beyond what exists today. To celebrateSteelcase’s 100th anniversary, we’re collecting dreams – insights into the coming century –to guide and speed us all to the achievements to come."
This is a very nice video reminding how much we must learn from our children.
If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free.
Michael Chabon The Omega Glory (PDF). Originally published in Details Magazine, 2006. At The Long Now Foundation.
Looking to an end-time is a way of failing to cherish the present - the only time that is truly our own.
John Gray at the BBC. A Point of View: The endless obsession with what might be
We should probably focus less on "singularity" and more on the waning potential for survival as a species.
Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky annual State of the World jam on the WELL