From the Archives

“What is the Internet”, asked Bryan Gumble in 1995.

The Today show segment on which he asked that question is now a piece of history.

Copy Paste Culture

Anna Weiner writes about Silicon Valley. Her chosen site is San Francisco. The Valley and it’s egotech culture is well documented by Weiner in her bestselling memoir, The Uncanny Valley.

In a recent piece in the New Yorker Magazine, Weiner takes on the flattening of the cultural landscape of the famous Golden Gate city by two ubiquitous presences: The Waymo self-driving cars and the honey bear.

The ending is damning:

“Maybe this is what is meant by “tech culture.” A self-driving car named Sourdough ferries novelty-seeking passengers across the Inner Sunset while capturing footage that might be useful for the cops. A local artist scales by adopting political causes as if they are software skins. At the grocery store, a man and I stand beside each other, deliberating over mustards–but I am running errands, and he is on the clock. Walking through the city, I wonder whose block parties, medical appointments, or conversations could someday be weaponized by the law enforcement. Even if it’s not the end of privacy, or mystery, it marks a decline in imagination–a capitulation into generic sensibility, and to a visual culture of copy-paste. It’s the aesthetic of software at scale, in every window, at every stoplight, on every city block.”

Artist Fnnch’s Honey Bear (this one cost around $1,029)

Waymo’s self-driving car

Muskism As Misreading

Harvard History Professor, and one of my favorite writers of science-related matters, Jill Lepore, calls out techno-billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for foisting on us their extravagant plans of futuristic planetary and extra-planetary lives in the name of saving humanity, from the risks of civilizational and climate catastrophe (the latter inducing the former).

What interests me most is that these plans are largely inspired by writers like Iain Banks of the Culture series fame, Douglas Adam’s of the Hitchhiker’s Guide fame, Issac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, anti-capitalistic writers who espoused utopian socialism and an egalitarian world view. They were anti-capitalistic.

Muskism, described by Professor Lepore as the emergent brand of capitalism conceptualized by techno-billionaires, is anything but a stepping stone to a just, equal and fair social order. Professor Lepore questions how an “extreme, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven less by earnings than by fantasies from science fiction,” could have been inspired by a genre that “indicts capitalism.”

Muskism, Professor Lepore conjectures, involves misreading.

Can Common Sense be Digitized?

Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, believes it can. He has invested 125 million dollars in the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence to help codify the “simple truths,” of life that children receive, and the wisdom that we, as humans, accrue through our life experiences, so they can be taught to machines.

 

Upgrade

Calvin Trillin fears the word “upgrade” most, and here is why.

Engendering Empathy

“The glib dismissal of the humanity of the enemy is not so much about the limits of empathy as it is about the limits of imagination.” So say the makers of a new virtual reality project that will eventually culminate into a documentary, “The Enemy.”

“The Enemy” is a collaborative endeavor by war photojournalist Karim Ben Khalifa and Fox Harrell, Associate Professor of Digital Media at M.I.T. The project was conceived by Mr. Khalifa in a fit of epiphany when, traveling from one war zone to another, he discovered 

[A] culture of warfare that often perpetuated itself through misunderstanding and misinformation, with no mechanism for those of opposing sects or political forces to gain a sense of the enemy as a fellow human being.

He wanted to change the way mutual enemies perceived one another. With the help of virtual reality technology Khalifa, along with Harrell decided to engender empathy for the other through making the other’s presence visceral. When one sees the enemy speak less as an “enemy” and more as a fellow human, then one gets closer to the putative other.

“The Enemy” is a work-in-progress.

While Jarett Kobek, the writer of a fictional biography (“Atta”) of 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta, gives a caustic subtitle to his new novel, “I Hate the Internet”, the crux of the novel is an uncompromisingly harsh social criticism of our times.

The following is a list of the instruments of our time that are slashed by Kobek:

The comic book genre:

(Comics) are subtle pornography for the mentally backward,” while comic-book conventions are “an excuse for people to dress up like the intellectual properties of major corporations.”

Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer is “an unprofitable website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry.”

Instagram is “the first social media platform to which the only sane reaction was hate.”

Kobek asks why are humans so eager, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, to give away their intellectual property to wealthy white men?

About Twitter he queries as to what has happened to political activism? Do people think typing 140-character morality lectures is pushing society forward?

Kobek’s words of wisdom resonate: One of the curious aspects of the 21st century was the great delusion amongst many people, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technology platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible.

Jarett Kobek is white but does not quite write from within the place of “white privilege” as he is Turkish-American.

 

 

A New World Enlightenment

The domination of technology is complete.

Global policy-makers, shapers, movers and doers, are convinced that the world can move from whatever darkness it’s still in, into light, wirelessly.

An Editorial column in the NYT says,

Most of the world’s 7.2 billion people still do not have Internet access, but there is a lot that governments can do to make sure their citizens are not left in the dark.

The language is steeped in the brine of an ideology, that of the power of the wireless in advancing human civilization in toto.

So many are denied access to the fundamentals of what constitutes human civilization; would the mere ability to snap pictures of a parade on a cheap mobile device change that?