Future Nausea

Another lengthy article I found on the internets. I really enjoyed reading this one.

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/

I bet that guy gets existential nausea from everything. Like going down the shops, drinking coffee, reading my posts.

I know I do.

I'm reading it and I am pleased as he is putting into words what I often find myself thinking. Especially in regards to culture...I often get the feeling that many present day post-industrial 'cultures' are confused, desperate attempts at 'a normalcy field'...vey easy to feel entirely alienated.

  On 10/24/2012 at 9:46 PM, delet... said:

I bet that guy gets existential nausea from everything. Like going down the shops, drinking coffee, reading my posts.

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't.

i loved this. great and insightful read.

there are a lot of things in here that neal stephenson wrote about, to a degree, in anathem (and other books too).

Really? I think it's a pretty low-brow piece based on semantics (used in the common sense of word selection, rather than in any sort of academic sense). I don't think of facebook as a school yearbook, nor do I fail to appreciate the wonder of modern flight (which explains why I never sleep on planes, well that and the free booze on international flights). I understand that modern flight is based on some very sound principles of physics such as lift, thrust, and drag. Facebook is, as he says, a bunch of servers in a warehouse running some custom MySQL, with far more standardization than all the jewelry designers ever came up with. Once you understand it, it's boring.

Future technology gets absorbed into the general psyche at the rate by which the market will accept it, and nothing is gonna change that. It gets adopted, people learn to utilize it. They might not understand the basic underpinnings (but then again, did pre-historic pastoralists understand the reason for the grazing patterns of their herds?), but they learn enough to deal with it in their own reality (philosophy majors need not bother with "what is reality" at this point please).

And mentioning Neil Diamond, the author writes: "Do you really want to read about a newspaper made of flexible e-ink that plays black-and-white movies over WiFi?" Hello, The Diamond Age called, it wants its premise back.

I dunno, I guess it's an interesting thought process, but it's so basic. A better (and easier to read) look at how rapid change affects out lives would be Anthony Giddens' Runaway World or Ulrich Beck's World Risk Society. The wiki primer on Risk society is useful, if only for the suggested readings. Also I'm not sure if I get his idea that due to facebook we're all going to be living in small-f fields. there's a seminal work by a guy called Benedict Anderson called Imagined Communities that describes how the spread of information is vital in creating identities. Well, through the internet (sending TCP/IP packets through fiber to servers, which relay the information to a desired address, wheee it's the postal system with a digital metaphor) we can live in a much bigger global field than at any time in the past.

Finally, just because he gets all his news through a drunken, primordial soup that he calls facebook, doesn't mean we all do.

Blech. Whatever, it's still more interesting than studying the effects the enclosure system had on agricultural productivity in 17th century England and whether or not that can be considered a proximate factor in the Industrial Revolution. And nowhere near as depressing as reading about the use of child soldiers in war.

So thanks for the link. :)

that is an interesting response

Sorry, the low-brow comment was directed at kaini. just cuz he's a bro. ;)

I liked the link, and it's good that people are linking to stuff like this which at least gets the old critical thinking skills working, as opposed to just "i can haz cheezburgr?" (although there is mos def a time and place for that as well!)

Just - so much more could be done with the ideas in there.

probably the best one I've ever seen!

  On 10/24/2012 at 10:09 PM, chenGOD said:

  On 10/24/2012 at 9:46 PM, delet... said:

I bet that guy gets existential nausea from everything. Like going down the shops, drinking coffee, reading my posts.

 

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't.

haha, give you a hug for that one. hah !! ;-]