Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
For an overall commentary on this particular crop of fascinating, worthwhile, disturbing, and/or necessary reading and viewing, see “Alan Moore: The revolution will be crowd-funded,” recently published at Salon. In this interview, “the ‘Watchmen’ creator talks about his new Kickstarter-funded film series, zombies and the surveillance state.” Most pointedly of all (in my humble opinion), he says the following:
There seems to be something going on, even from the briefest appraisal of the news, with the amount of events transpiring. This is such a connected world, it’s useless to isolate any part of it as a discrete phenomenon. You can’t really talk about the problems in Syria, because its problems are global. The waves of discontent and outrage — whether in the Arab countries, or in Brazil, or in America and Europe over the degrees to which its citizens are being monitored — are not separate phenomena. They are phenomena of an emergent world, and the existence of the Internet is one of its major drivers. We have got no idea how it’s going to turn out, because the nature of our society is such that if anything can be invented, then we will invent it. Sooner or later, if it is possible.
So the Internet is changing everything, but I wouldn’t yet want to say for good or ill. I suspect, as ever, that it will be an admixture of both. But we are all along for the ride, even those people like me who do not have Internet connections, mobile phones or even functioning televisions. I’m slowly disconnecting myself. Basically, it’s a feeling that if we are going to subject our entire culture to what is an unpredictable experiment, then I’d like to try to remain outside the petri dish. [Laughs] It’s only sensible to have somebody as a control.
. . . While I’m remote from most technology to the point that I’m kind of Amish, I have played a couple of computer games — until I realized I was being bloodied with adrenalin over something that wasn’t real. At the end of a couple of hours of very addictive play, I may have procured the necessary amount of mushrooms to save a princess, but I also wasted hours of my life that I’ll never be able to get back. This is the reason I am not on the Internet. I am aware of its power as a distraction, and I don’t have the time for that.
Despite the constant clamor for attention from the modern world, I do believe we need to procure a psychological space for ourselves. I apparently know some people who try to achieve this by logging off, or going without their Twitter or Facebook for a limited period. Which I suppose is encouraging, although it doesn’t seem that remarkable from my perspective. I think that people need to establish their own psychological territory in face of the encroaching world.
Amen, Brother Alan.
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The Blip (New York Magazine)
What if everything we’ve come to think of as American is predicated on a freak coincidence of economic history? And what if that coincidence has run its course?
Turns of the Century (The European)
What the protests in Brazil and Greece tell us about world history. “The big shift of our time, the epochal change that affects or will affect billions of people around the globe, isn’t the rising threat of terrorism, but the rising precariousness of economic realities. The story of the 21st century begins in earnest with ticker news about imminent financial collapse.”
Detroit bankruptcy: Is it a warning sign for America? (+video) (The Christian Science Monitor)
How Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has dealt with financial crises in the state — and how he will handle the Detroit bankruptcy — could hold lessons for the rest of the US.
The Last Days of Big Law : You can’t imagine the terror when the money dries up (The New Republic)
On the escalating crisis inside an old and high-profile profession, whose entire ecosystem has dramatically changed in just a single generation, largely due to greed. The resulting new environment is soul-crushing for everybody involved.
University Suspends Online Classes after More Than Half the Students Fail (Slate)
Inside Higher Ed reported on Thursday that San Jose State is suspending the Udacity partnership just six months after it launched.
Inside Google HQ: What does the future hold for the company whose visionary plans include implanting a chip in our brains? (The Independent)
A visit to the legendary “Googleplex” at Mountain View. The company “is staking its future on a vast store of information called the Knowledge Graph, which is growing at an exponential rate. . . . The future [says Ben Gomes, a Google fellow and the company’s Vice President of Search] is for this enormous resource to be ‘present everywhere.'”
Faith and Works at Apple (The New York Review of Books)
“The world-religion of the educated and prosperous in the twenty-first century is Apple, with its Vatican in Cupertino and its cathedrals in the light-filled Apple Stores that draw pilgrims gripping iPhones and iPads like rosaries.”
How Scientology changed the Internet (BBC News)
What do Wikipedia, Wikileaks, Anonymous and copyright law have in common? The answer is they have all been influenced by the Church of Scientology International (CSI), as it took on ex-members and critics who took their protests on to the internet. As the Church successfully removes another website, just how big an influence has Scientology had on the internet we all use?
What’s Wrong with Technological Fixes? (Boston Review)
Terry Winograd Interviews Evgeny Morozov. “According to Morozov, some of life’s good things come from ignorance rather than knowledge; opacity rather than transparency; ambivalence rather than certainty; vagueness rather than precision; hypocrisy rather than sincerity; messy pondering of imponderables rather than crisp efficiency.”
Rise of the Warrior Cop (The Wall Street Journal)
Is it time to reconsider the militarization of American policing?
Radley Balko: “Once a town gets a SWAT team you want to use it” (Salon)
America’s police are beginning to look like an army, and the author says there’s very little we can do about it.
Lyons: Police raid felt like home invasion (Sarasota Herald-Tribune)
“The man just demanded they open the door. The actual words, the couple say, were, ‘We’re the f—— police; open the f—— door.'” Why did more than two dozen federal marshals and local police officers with guns and tactical gear think a Florida nurse and her boyfriend were harboring a child rapist in her apartment? “[W]hen the people in Goldsberry’s apartment didn’t open up, that told [federal marshal Matt] Wiggins he had probably found the right door. No one at other units had reacted that way, he said.”
Save the Movie! (Slate)
If you’ve been wondering why so many “blockbuster” Hollywood movies now feel exactly the same, here’s the answer: there’s actually a formula — one that lays out, on a page-by-page and moment-by-moment basis, exactly what should happen in a screenplay. It was introduced in 2005, and it threatens the world of original screenwriting as we know it.
Word Compression Blues (First Things)
On Facebook, Twitter, and the awesome cultural pressure to compress and condense verbal communication into ever shorter forms. “Our shriveling discourse with one another, our ever shorter exchanges and undeveloped rim-fired speculations: Is this how we seemingly have come to talk past each other? If that is happening with the small topics, what is happening with the big ones?”
UFO Cover-Ups Must End, Moonwalker Edgar Mitchell Says (Bloomberg)
A new interview with the sole individual out of the 12 men who have walked on the moon to go on record about his controversial belief in extraterrestrial UFOs — and of a possible government cover-up.
Stunning UFO Footage Shows Multiple Objects Darting, Flashing Over Russian Sky (Who Forted?)
Incredible footage of a cluster of UFOs captured above Russia was posted to the Alien Andromeda YouTube channel in late June, and the striking video has caught the attention believers and skeptics alike. [Click through to read full description and comments on the video below.]
Alan Moore is a cultural treasure, a creative visionary who is also a solid social critic; that’s a rare animal. I like your aggregation of techno-pessimists and contemplators of dystopias and I think we need more of that ‘anti-TEDx’ stuff online, to counterbalance the ridiculous ‘social media and tech start-ups are going to save the universe’ atmosphere that permeates our digital lives.
I have long contemplated on surveillance, censorship, greed, market malfunction and their intersections and I think the only answer at this point is to geographically – and after some effort, psychologically – abandon the West, for emerging, developing world peripheries with high risk/high reward and frontier mentalities.