Writing worth Reading

[stagename]

It's funny, I feel I read this same fearful nonsense every time new tech is introduced. How many countless articles just like this have been written over the years? The internet, debit cards, video games, TV, cellphones, the printing press...have all had similar responses.

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1227/

[Fuuma]

Musing on international development failures and the problem with TED-talk thinking.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120178/problem-international-development-and-plan-fix-it

[trentk]

just about everything in jim simons' quanta magazine: http://www.quantamagazine.org/

[DudleyGray]

It's funny, I feel I read this same fearful nonsense every time new tech is introduced. How many countless articles just like this have been written over the years? The internet, debit cards, video games, TV, cellphones, the printing press...have all had similar responses.

I would love for my couch to tell me if I have a fever, my house to turn on the air conditioner because it knows I am 10 minutes away in my car, or my car to start warming up in the winter months because I am brushing my teeth in the morning.
Imagining my waffle maker hasn't been used in a year and it sends me an email telling me it's lonely, it might make me realize I don't need it.

Funny article, very one sided.

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1227/

No, I hate what technology has done to people. Maybe they've always been entitled approval/attention/stimulus-seeking one-upping impatient ADHD consumerists defining themselves through marketed product and lifestyle, but at least they weren't checking a display every 2 minutes.

[MJRH]

If condemnation must be made of modern society, let it at least be intelligent. There is nothing more modern, or tiring, than warbling the same lame litany of cliched jeremiads against our times; although exactly how 'modern' these jeremiads really are, you can judge for yourself given the word's etymology.

The following was written by William H. Gass, at the end of an essay called Culture, Self, and Style (in Habitations of the Word). It was published in 1984, which is before I was born, and I pretty much agree with its criticisms wholesale, because they have been apt at least since industrialization, and will continue to be so:

There is, then, meaning contemplated, meaning we repeatedly return to, meaning it as as good to hold in the mouth as good wine; and there is also its opposite, and here the analogy with language may help us find the enemies of culture which culture itself creates, because language allows anonymity as well as distinction; it has its signs which say GENTS, its fast foods, its wetting dolls, its drively little verses which sentimental sogs send as sops to other sogs, endless paragraphs and pages and entire books which anyone could have written and probably did: guidelines and directions and directories and handbooks and all sorts of reports and memos and factual entries and puffy bios of politicians and punks, stars of stage, screen, field, and whorehouse, and petty lies and dreary chat and insinuating gossip and the flatterous tittle-tattle of TV talk shows, with their relentlessly cheery hosts, and vomitous film scenarios and wretched radio gabble and self-serving memoirs and stilted forms and humiliating applications, contracts, agreements, subpoenas, creditors' threats, and private eye/romantic/western spy and sci-fi/fantasy films and fictions, and dozens of dirty gumshoe did-him-ins and wise guy all-abouts, how-tos, and why-nots, and fan mags and digests and Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews and clubby hobby gun and body beautiful books and the whole copiously illustrated pulp and porno scandal pushers from the hard-core soft-on press; and indeed machines might have made them, and one day will, with the same successful sameness as sheets of toilet tissue, similarly daisied, similarly scented, similarly soft, are presented to the uniformly smiling crack of all those similar consumers.

Even that is not the triumph of our culture's bottom end: it is the glassy plastic drinking cup. Scarcely an object, it is so superbly universal Hegel might have halloed at it. Made of a substance found nowhere in nature, manufactured by processes equally unnatural and strange, it is the complete and expert artifact. Then packaged in sterilized stacks as though it weren't a thing at all by itself, this light, translucent emptiness is so utterly identical to the other items in its package, the other members of its class, it might almost be space. Sloganless--it has no message--often not even the intended hallmark of its maker. It is an abstraction acting as a glass, and resists individuation perfectly, because you can't crimp its rim or write on it or poke it full of pencil holes--it will shatter first, rather than submit--so there is no way, after a committee meeting, a church sup or reception (its ideal locales), to know one from the other, as it won't discolor, stain, craze, chip, but simply safeguards the world from its contents until both the flat Coke or cold coffee and their cup are disposed of. It is a decendental object. It cannot have a history. It has disappeared entirely into its function. It is completely what it does, except that what it does, it does as a species. Of itself it provides no experience, and scarcely of its kind. Even a bullet gets uniquely scarred.

...

It is perfect. Nevertheless, the perfections of this plain clear plastic cup perversely deny it perfection. Since it is nothing but its use, its existence is otherwise ignored. It is not worth a rewash. It is not worth another look, a feel, a heft. It has been desexed. Thus indifference is encouraged. Consumption is encouraged. Convenience is encouraged. Castoffs are multiplied, and our world is already full of the unwanted and used up. Its rim lies along the lip like the edge of a knife. That quality is also ignored and insensitivity encouraged. It is a servant, but it has none of the receptivity of artistic material, and in that sense it does not serve; its absences are everywhere. Since, like an overblown balloon, it has as much emptiness as it can take, it is completely its shape, and because it totally contains, it is estranged from what it holds. Thus dissociation is encouraged. Poured into such a vessel, wine moans for a certain moment, and then is silent; its color pales, its bouquet fades, it becomes pop; yet there is a pallid sadness in its modest mimicry of the greater goblets, in its pretense to perfect nothingness, in its ordinary evil, since it is no Genghis Khan, or Coriolanus, but a discreet and humble functionary, simply doing its job as it has been designed and directed to do, like the other members of the masses, and disappearing with less flutter than leaves.

Our culture hesitates between these two polarities of pure end and even purer means, between utility and consecration, and it dreams of men who are worthy to be ends in themselves, who will take any trouble to be free of the shackles of ease and convenience, who truly treasure the world; and it desires men who will be willing to be mowed down in anonymous rows if need be, used up in families, in farms and factories, thrown away on the streets of sprawling towns, who want to pass through existence so cleanly no trace of them will ever be found. It is not an easy dilemma, because, of itself, use is as innocent as aspirin, and the damage it does, it does not: we do. Yet use is naturally annihilation. Ideally, it is to disappear without remainder. Confronted by its pale translucent face, can the maiden, the orphan, the poor man, the hunted slave feel safe? Only so long as their safety has its uses. Only until the stock gives out. Not when there is no difference between plastic cup, its instant coffee, and swallowing mouth.

[interest1]

Leon Wieseltier: Beware 'The Tyranny Of Technology'

Among The Disrupted

an essay in The NY Times

( twenty-somethings of the forum: don't bother clicking. )

[galia]

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed

The campuses of the tech industry are famous for their lavish cafeterias, cushy shuttles, and on-site laundry services. But on a muggy February afternoon, some of these companies’ most important work is being done 7,000 miles away, on the second floor of a former elementary school at the end of a row of auto mechanics’ stalls in Bacoor, a gritty Filipino town 13 miles southwest of Manila. When I climb the building’s narrow stairwell, I need to press against the wall to slide by workers heading down for a smoke break. Up one flight, a drowsy security guard staffs what passes for a front desk: a wooden table in a dark hallway overflowing with file folders.

Past the guard, in a large room packed with workers manning PCs on long tables, I meet Michael Baybayan, an enthusiastic 21-year-old with a jaunty pouf of reddish-brown hair. If the space does not resemble a typical startup’s office, the image on Baybayan’s screen does not resemble typical startup work: It appears to show a super-close-up photo of a two-pronged dildo wedged in a vagina. I say appears because I can barely begin to make sense of the image, a baseball-card-sized abstraction of flesh and translucent pink plastic, before he disappears it with a casual flick of his mouse.

Baybayan is part of a massive labor force that handles “content moderation”—the removal of offensive material—for US social-networking sites. As social media connects more people more intimately than ever before, companies have been confronted with the Grandma Problem: Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet’s panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies. They won’t continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video. Social media’s growth into a multibillion-dollar industry, and its lasting mainstream appeal, has depended in large part on companies’ ability to police the borders of their user-generated content—to ensure that Grandma never has to see images like the one Baybayan just nuked.

[click title to read article in full]

[eleves]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/op...=tw-share&_r=1

Neurologist/Writer/Professor Oliver Sacks on his terminal cancer diagnosis

[stagename]

To lighten the atmosphere (aka for the lols). It's a bit dated but here's the best restaurant review of last year. It's brutal:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/restaurant-reviews/america-at-the-trump-hotel-the-food-is-amazing-but-you-shouldnt-eat-here-ever/article21833277/

"Greg has an ex and a kid, he says, but he “got off” paying just $200,000 in yearly support. And anyway, Greg adds, à propos of lord knows what, Greg makes $10-million annually. He’s the sort of patron you’d pay that much to never have to sit beside. At America, the tacky, new-money restaurant on the 31st floor of the Trump International Hotel and Tower Toronto, a guy like Greg no doubt feels right at home."

[MJRH]

"There is servitude everywhere at America, but good service is remarkably hard to find."

That is a brilliant description of too much of the service industry

[Faust]

On giving up public, contemplative space to private interests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/the-cost-of-paying-attention.html?_r=0

[Faust]

Fantastic interview with Dieter Rams about design philosophy and sustainability.

[Faust]

The continuing infantalization of the American student body. Lasch, Bloom, and Hughes must be laughing (through tears) in their graves.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitz-hiding-from-scary-ideas.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&src=me&WT.nav=MostEmailed&_r=0

[MJRH]

Why Johnny Can't Dissent

"Rebellion makes no sense without repression; we must remain forever convinced of capitalism's fundamental hostility to pleasure in order to consume capitalism's rebel products as avidly as we do.
...
Nobody wants you to think they're serious today, least of all Time Warner. On the contrary: the Culture Trust is now our leader in the Ginsbergian search for kicks upon kicks. Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival, our slang-speaking partner in the quest for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm. The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation."

===

Well-done article dissecting several annoying cultural themes, but ultimately failing to answer for itself. Is this article establishment or rebellion? Trying to balance between the two, if the author's arguments against commodified rebellion are valid, is just as much a sell-out as outright rebellion.

Worth reading for its prophetic ('97) calumny of tedculture at its worst. And for how beautifully Henry Rollins gets sniped at the end

[DudleyGray]

If rebellion can be seen as a power play by the disenfranchised, then capitalism is more accurately an indicator as to who holds how much power, rather than a system to be dismantled.