Here’s a pointedly stark and palpably fierce excerpt from art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, which was published just this month: If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems…
Tag: Dystopia
We’re all deep fakes now
Nicholas Carr at his (consistently essential) blog, Rough Type: It’s revealing that, before the arrival of the net, people didn’t talk about “authenticity” as we do today. They didn’t have to. They understood, implicitly, that there was something solid behind whatever show they might put on for public consumption. The show was not everything. The…
“It’s an Alien Life Form”: David Bowie on the Internet’s Exhilarating and Terrifying Potential
There’s been a lot of ink spilled in the last thirty years, both physical and digital, explaining and exploring the phenomenon that is the Internet. From the enthusiastic optimism of such influential figures as Clay Shirky and Seth Godin, to the heavily cautious middle ground of such figures as Douglas Rushkoff, to the all-out pessimism…
Uneasy thoughts on our bookless future
Mark Bauerlein in Claremont Review of Books, in a perceptive review essay on Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, with additional consideration of Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading: It won’t be long before all living memory of…
Teeming Links – March 15, 2019
In light of yesterday’s awful mosque attacks in New Zealand, I feel led to start with this except from a 2003 PBS interview with Thich Nhat Hanh. After an extensive conversation about Buddhism, Christianity, mindfulness, and other such matters, and their relationship to gritty large-scale matters of war and violence, the interaction ends with this:…
The man who invented the Internet didn’t foresee our Neuromancer/Black Mirror future
The following insights are excerpted from a brief but engaging NPR piece that traces the cultural arc from Vint Cerf (the “inventor of the Internet”) and his early naive optimism about this new technology, to William Gibson’s uncanny prescience in forecasting exactly where the Internet would really take us (to a corporate-controlled cyberdystopia with sharply…
You will be assimilated: Our future of tech-enhanced brains to keep up with AI
Here’s renowned neuroscientist Christopher Koch explaining in a Wall Street Journal piece that our future will be a dystopian nightmare in which humans will necessarily become ever more completely fused on a neurological level with super sophisticated computer technologies. This will, he says, be a non-negotiable requirement if we want to keep up with the…
How Google replaced God
NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway, writing for Esquire: Our brains are sophisticated enough to ask very complex questions but not sophisticated enough to answer them. Since Homo sapiens emerged from caves, we’ve relied on prayer to address that gap: We lift our gaze to the heavens, send up a question, and wait for a response…
Instagram and the memeification of human experience
Courtesy of The Guardian, here’s another way the Internet is making life better and more fulfilling for all of us (by which I mean worse and more soullessly unsatisfying for a great many of us): Tourists have always taken photographs. Like graffiti, it’s a very human way of saying “I was here.” But in the…
Your smartphone is built to hijack and harvest your mind
At the beginning of each semester I tell my students the very thing that journalist Zat Rana gets at in a recent article for Quartz when I deliver a mini-sermon about my complete ban on phones — and also, for almost all purposes, laptops — in my classroom. A smartphone or almost any cell phone…