From an essay by Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University: We are all centaurs now, our aesthetics continuously enhanced by computation. Every photograph I take on my smartphone is silently improved by algorithms the second after I take it. Every document autocorrected, every digital file optimised….
Tag: Dystopia
The Sad Failure of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ to Prevent the Future
Teeming Brain readers are familiar with my longtime focus on Fahrenheit 451 and my abiding sense that we’re currently caught up in a real-world version of its dystopian vision. This is not, of course, an opinion peculiar to me. Many others have held it, too, including, to an extent, Bradbury himself. I know that some…
Our smartphone apocalypse, animated by Steve Cutts
This remarkable animation comes from the hand (or computer) of illustrator and animator Steve Cutts, famed for such things as 2012’s Man, which packs an unbelievable punch. So does the one I’ve chosen to post here. Cutts created it for last year’s hit song “Are You Lost in the World Like Me?” by Moby and…
Our Craving for Apocalypse: ‘Dispatches from the Ruins’ (short video)
This brief video essay on the source of our collective craving for “the awful futures of apocalyptic fiction” is really well done. Skillfully executed and thought-provoking. A worthwhile investment of five reflective minutes. Here’s the description: In the first two decades of the new millennium, stories of the post-apocalypse have permeated pop culture, from books…
Orwell Meets Frankenstein: The Internet as a Monster of Mass Surveillance and Social Control
The following paragraphs are from a talk delivered by Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski at the recent Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia. Citing as Exhibit A the colossal train wreck that was the 2016 American presidential election, Cegłowski basically explains how, in the current version of the Internet that has emerged over the…
Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Dehumanization: Surrendering to the Death of Democracy
Greetings, Teeming Brainers. I’m just peeking in from the digital wings, amid much ongoing blog silence, to observe that many of the issues and developments — sociocultural, technological, and more — that I began furiously tracking here way back in 2006 are continuing to head in pretty much the same direction. A case in point…
Short Film: ‘2084’
Remember: You must conform. Better yet: Doughnut thing. (Watch for explanation.)
Utopia, dystopia, and the eternal present of Amish time
Traditional Amish Buggy. By Ad Meskens (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons When I was a kid, the first time I ever heard of the Amish was when I watched the movie Witness for the first time. Much later, in the first decade of the aughts, I lived…
Dehumanized in a dark age
“Fire of Troy” by Kerstiaen de Keuninck (Coninck), 17th cent. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons NOTE: This post was originally published in January 2007 in a different form. Based on various circumstances — including the publication just yesterday of a post titled “Collective Brainwashing & Modern Concentration Camps” over at Daily Grail, which calls out…
“A web of flesh spun over a void”
“The Madhouse” by Francisco Goya [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons So brilliant: an implicitly ironic but outwardly straight-faced reading of the DSM-5 as a dystopian horror novel, complete with a quasi-Ligottian assessment of the book’s narrative voice and view of humanity. Great dystopia isn’t so much fantasy as a kind of estrangement or dislocation from…