via The Long Now:
A stunning painting of a possible future (or present depending on how you look at it)… walled cities of techno-utopia surrounded by the rest of the world living in the middle ages. Here is a link to the large version on Zilinzky’s site. (Found via Coolvibe.)
Chuck Klosterman, in his essay, “Fail,” (one of several collected in the book, Eating the Dinosaur) wrote:
“We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now.”
Is this really true? I tend toward thinking it is, particularly from my vantage point in a technology-driven industry as well as, frankly, my own tendency toward techno-pessimism. In a post from last month, I explored this theme a bit in terms of how we augment our bodies and experience with technology—that there is almost no separation between us and our technology. This quote from Klosterman gets at the same point, but it also brought to mind some trends that I see specifically in the workplace. Much of what we do is enabled by communications technology. In particular, email, instant messaging, shared calendars, project management applications, social media tools and the like enable a team to quickly mobilize and complete projects even if the resources are spread out geographically. This is the modern, web-working paradigm. While most of these tools have been a revelation as functional enablers of otherwise dysfunctional team setups, efficiency and cost savings, I wonder if they are always the most effective thing available to us. Actually, I’m willing to just come out and say that at least sometimes they’re not.
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What If… exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin
A nice comment from Kat Austen of the New Scientist’s Culture Lab:
Many of the exhibits are heavily dystopian, and address questions on scientific or medical ethics that must be asked in our bio-technological age. Both the installation that posits using pigs and other animals as life support machines and Future Farms - where people use their own bodies to grow stem cells for medical procedures - evoke the kind of discomfort you feel when you watch a news story about an impoverished parent resorting to selling their own kidney just to put their child through school.
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