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…we now produce enough bullets each year to kill every person on the planet — twice.
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From the perspective of your brain, dreaming and movie-watching are strangely parallel experiences. In fact, one could argue that sitting in a darkened theater and staring at a frivolous thriller is the closest one can get to REM sleep with open eyes.
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Reblogged from randomsignal| |#
Philip K. Dick (via randomsignal)
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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
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By some miracle he is able to sound both uber-confident and completely baffled at the same time. If that doesn’t describe humanity to a T, than i don’t know what does.
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Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress, page 57
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Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one likes about the past - without having to confront the bones, potsherds, and inscriptions which tell us that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes.
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You’re dealing with time travel. Maybe you should expect it to be weird.
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Of course there’s a new Luddism! There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change. I mean, Luddism is specifically a demand that the people who benefited from the old system be consulted before any technology is allowed to disrupt it…
And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore…
The baby boomers, when we were young, we had zero, zero patience for the idea that people who are in their fifties in the ’70s and ’80s should somehow be shielded from cultural changes because somehow the stuff that we were doing was upsetting them. So, now it’s our turn and we ought to just suck it up…
What is quite obviously happening is that the number of things that are available for short attention are increasing. But, so is the ability to consume complicated, long-form information.
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Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (or here)
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Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes. The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.
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G.K. Chesterton
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Man is an exception, whatever else he is…If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
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The most important question we must ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?
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It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides—after all, it’s not a revolution if nobody loses.
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(via BookTwo)
(From Benjamin, Illuminations, quoted by WG Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, pp 67-8).
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Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” whose “face is turned to the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
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Frank Chimero (I had a hard time figuring out which portion of his honest admission of professional questioning and weariness I should quote. I think I know exactly how he feels, and have felt it multiple times already in my career… In any case, read the whole thing.)
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Sometimes, even I’m unconvinced of the utility of what I’m doing. And, I’d say that the times that we have to launch our $10,000 websites while sitting in the shadow of a $15,000 ice sculpture are the frustrating moments when we think we’ve been found out for the farces that we really are. It starts with anger. Then, a scary thought creeps in: “What if they’re right?”
What is all this stuff for any way? Is it even worth it? Maybe I should do something with my life and teach kids how to add and read or about evolutionary biology, and let someone else worry about how that button looks on that website. But, I don’t think I could make it in a room full of kids. It’s a tough crowd. But, buttons aren’t very good company either.
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We’re going to need strategies to deal with lots of information, and they’re going to be computational. The future historian will need to do some data mining.
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Through Twitter, Facebook and email, a child in 2010 will, over their life, produce a body of writing that dwarfs the collected output of even the most prolific Founding Fathers such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. This volume will shift the problems of historical research from the archeological recovery of rare texts and letters to the process of sifting through vast fields of digital information that weave through legal gray areas of corporate and private ownership.
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