The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades—physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists—protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the [...]
Libertarian futurists such as Tyler Cowen and Brink Lindsey sometimes write as if the point of all our remarkable techno-progress—the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of “human capital”—is some combination of the emancipatory hippie spirit of the 1960s with the liberty in the service of individual productivity of Reagan’s 1980s. [...]
Tiny hand held screens are soon to be replaced with screens built into glasses, screens on wrist watches like that gadget Dick Tracy used to have, and even screens built into contact lenses. Micro screens are challenged by macros screens with jumbotrons in stadia, billboards which have morphed into macro screens and advertising screens built [...]
Her is quite the meticulous and creepily seductive criticism of our techno-orientation toward transhumanism. It is the dystopian film of our time, a haunting glimpse at the near future. The transhumanist theory is that, when you strip away the illusions, we’re all basically operating systems. We’re, as Descartes first explained, conscious machines. A problem, though, is that our bodies [...]
The average person checks their (sic) phone every six-and-a-half minutes a day. One in four of us admits to spending longer online each day than we do asleep, while 73 percent say that we would struggle to go the whole day without our phones or computers… By the age of seven, the average British child [...]
There is a growing consensus among human beings that the effects of our developing technology are not conducive to human development. Popular technology, despite its claim to interact and connect, breeds isolation. It causes people, especially young people, to stray into an introverted withdrawal from others and the world. As such, these results are antithetical to [...]
Tinkering in your cellar to build a time machine, as many of our readers claim to do, you’ll eventually require an operator’s manual. Much frustration can be avoided by reading a clever short story that is in many ways opposite to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, often as fun and infinitely [...]
The imagination of the child is very powerful, and sometimes we can still recall the mystery with which it invested the pages of the comic books we devoured when young. There is an atmosphere, a richness, a whole universe associated with those now dulled and faded inks on cheap paper, as the fragrance of our [...]
The reason Socrates banished laughter or comedy from the poetry of the just city is that comedians, at their best, remind us of what we all know: there is an inexpressible sadness just beneath the surface of all our happy talk, and that means there are limits to how much any of us can be [...]
Will the world end with a bang, or just a whimper, as T.S. Eliot predicted? Or will nobody notice at all? An eerie silence, as everyone listens to an endless stream of digital music on their iPods. Gradually, step by step, with the advance of computer technology, real things are being replaced by images of [...]
Raphael’s School of Athens The humanities in American higher education are in deep crisis, and the cry of alarm released on June 18 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences will probably contribute little to a renaissance. How deep is the crisis? Here a few warning signals. According to the New York [...]
by Stephen Masty A 1960s/1970s comedian from before entertainment was invented, Rodney Dangerfield, had a catch-phrase complaining “I don’t get no respect.” American conservatives, outside of their own small communities, could make the same gripe. Until now. According to industrial leaks, Google, the cutting-edge IT company, is already designing a second-generation of its highly-anticipated Google [...]
My habit was this—wake up, make breakfast with my wife, and as she was going to work, I would read the day’s headlines from the “news,” and we would talk about it over the phone. Over recent months, especially the last several days, I felt like I was reading more news, and watching more news, [...]
I distinctly remember reading Jacques Ellul’s books on technology, and specifically even remember where I was sitting when I read his The Technological Bluff, where he essentially argues that it is all but over and people will give over to the tidal wave of technology/technique. Here we are more than twenty years later, and if [...]