Weird to think that a couple of hundred years ago people could figure it out, but there's not the imagination these days. Heck, there's hardly even some imagination needed. Just a photocopier and a spot of editing.
You've hit a great topic, Mq, the death of creativity and imagination caused directly by the technological advances you so lovingly embrace. Forget the photocopier and a spot of editing, a lot of what gets passed around as serious thought is "created" by the copy and paste function on everyone's browser. I see damned little original thought, though I read a lot more text.
We are drowning in a sea of ephemeral and useless cyber-pixels, Mq, wired and wireless, CDMA, WiFi, and GSM, just as surely as we are going deaf in a concert hall filled with Muzak and gansta rap, starving at a banquet where the main fare are McDonald's quarter pounders, going blind while watching unending doses of Terminator movies...
The Unabomber was onto something. Shame that he was criminally insane. Had he not been a bomb-mailing nutball, he could have been a good spokesman for the concerns he expressed. I often feel the temptation to chuck it all, go into hiding into the deepest forests of Montana, and escape the stultifying mill that carries the mistaken label "progress."
Since this is nominally a foreign policy thread, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the tenuous connection between Luddite Islamists and the concerns many of us have that progress isn't all that it is cracked up to be. It's worth exploring, though their means and their avowed ends are vile. Don't be surprised if the New Luddites join up with the Islamist Luddites, though their goals are vastly different. The American Taliban was the first of a lot more I expect to see. Naturally, he is from California, where trends such as that first blossom.
The kind of false progress we're seeing is directly related to the widespread availability of garbage, the pathological democratization of dreck, if you will. Our thread pet, Fareed Zakaria, like the Unabomber, is onto something significant too when he blames many of our political problems on an unthinking excess of democracy. He should have gone a bit further in his thinking and included our cultural problems resulting from the democratizing effect of high-tech communication devices.
In the old days before pathological mass democracy was empowered by high tech, those who did not have anything worthwhile to say were ignored since they had precious few places to exercise their tonsils and essentially no means of mass producing their views. High tech has changed all that. The genie is out of the bottle, never to return. I suppose the alternatives are to find a shack in the woods or become an insufferable elitist, neither of which appeal to me.
I would love to have seen Zakaria and a lucid Unabomber share a bottle of good Bordeaux. Perhaps they would have advised me to stop contributing to the already enormous number of excess electrons uselessly making the rounds. |
