Last week Wired magazine made waves by publishing an epic article about a vast spy center that’s currently being built by America’s National Security Agency in the Utah desert. The real bombshell was the revelation that the project is ground zero for a galactically powerful and all-encompassing surveillance program that targets literally all communications and…
Advertising is pseudo-therapy. Consumers are its patients.
Neil Postman wrote this in 1993. It still holds true today. Maybe even more so. [A] discovery which for convenience’s sake we may attribute to Procter and Gamble [is] that advertising is most effective when it is irrational. By irrational, I do not, of course, mean crazy. I mean that products could best be sold…
Gamma (short SF/dystopian film)
GAMMA from Factory Fifteen on Vimeo. (Be sure to expand the frame and watch this film in full-screen mode. It looks simply amazing. Many thanks to Jesús Olmo for bringing it to my attention. -Matt) SYNOPSIS: In a post-nuclear future, when the earth is riddled with radiation, a new urban developer proposes to regenerate the…
On the demise of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition
Have you heard? After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print. Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said. In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age…
Is America an economic hothouse for growing psychopaths?
The past year has witnessed the rise of a kind of cottage industry of speculative blogging and associated online chatter about the idea that America’s ruling economic and political institutions — which have now, let us note, collapsed together to become one and the same — are ideologically and bureaucratically structured to attract and promote…
The NSA is building America’s biggest spy center, and “Everybody’s a target”
Recently, in response to Google’s Orwellian collapsing and combining of 60 separate privacy policies (the better to construct a Master Profile of its users for selling and surveilling), I took pains to extricate myself from the tentacular grasp of its many products. I’m now Google Free and Loving It (although I did, yes, include three…
Today we “medicate” anxiety, but for Kierkegaard it was central to being human
My own personal experience has borne out, in spades, Kierkegaard’s exquisitely expressed contention that a full engagement with the anxiety or dread that goes with being human is, in fact, central to the spiritual task of realizing one’s humanity. In this brief New York Times piece, philosopher Gordon Marino draws out this central theme of…
Utopia or dystopia? Corning’s viral video “A Day Made of Glass” envisions “a shift in the way we will communicate and use technology”
Ironically, just as I’m preparing to abandon Facebook within the next week or so, my horror author colleague Ted Grau has used FB to share one of the more fascinating items that I’ve encountered for quite some time. It’s a five-minute video titled “A Day Made of Glass,” and it represents Corning’s vision of a…
Pentagon says it has no records of bin Laden death
Just one word, uttered with full ironical, scorn-filled inflection: Seriously? The hunt for Osama bin Laden took nearly a decade. It could take even longer to uncover U.S. government emails, planning reports, photographs and more that would shed light on how an elite team of U.S. Navy Seals killed the world’s most wanted terrorist. Ten…
Private corporation to U.S. states: “We’ll buy your prisons if you guarantee 90% occupancy rate”
Welcome to the rest of our corporate-consumer dystopian future. It’s nice to see/hear some politicians speaking out against this development, but we can rest assured that such protests won’t really matter, since all policy decisions are now automatically and universally determined by financial considerations (see the final line excerpted below), and thus, many or most…