I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There’s the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future.
And then there’s the future where everything just sort of keeps going on the way it has, with incremental changes, and technology is no longer the deciding factor in things. You don’t need high tech to change the world; you need Semtex and guns that were designed by a Russian soldier fifty-odd years ago.
Meanwhile, most of the people with any genuine opportunity or ability to effect global change are too busy patting each other on the back at conventions and blue-skying goofy social networking tools that are essentially useless to 95% of the world’s population, who live within fifteen feet of everyone they’ve ever known and have no need to track their fuck buddies with GPS systems. (This, by the way, includes most Americans, quite honestly.)
You can’t blame them for this, because it’s fun and it’s a great way to travel and get paid, but it doesn’t actually help solve any real problems, except the problem of media theory grad students, which the rest of the world isn’t really interested in solving.
Feeding poor people is useful tech, but it’s not very sexy and it won’t get you on the cover of Wired. Talk about it too much and you sound like an earnest hippie. So nobody wants to do that.
They want to make cell phones that can scan your personal measurements and send them real-time to potential sex partners. Because, you know, the fucking Japanese teenagers love it, and Japanese teenagers are clearly the smartest people on the planet.
The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.
Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.
On first glance I’m not sure I understand what’s so brilliant about this piece. Firstly, I don’t like its tone which follows a certain tendency I’ve been noticing regularly, ie everytime a writer wants to really, really tell-it-like-it is, s/he injects a couple of variations of “fuck” and other short tracks to purported down-to-earthness. Secondly, one has to be quite insulated to find Ellis’ observations anything but obvious. So he argues that the entertainment branch of technology hasn’t immediate ramifications for starving people? Get out, I’d never have thought of that!
posted by FrF
on December 17, 2006 #
Meanwhile, most of the people with any genuine opportunity or ability to effect global change are too busy patting each other on the back
The piece is brilliant because it strokes the ego of the more reflective blogger attending conferences sponsored by WIRED magazine. If only these genius social networking theorists would stop wasting their abilities on studying how FACEBOOK affects college dating, and instead applied their gifts to global economic and regional conflict issues, the world might have a chance at being a better place. However, they don’t, so we are stuck with perpetual bloodshed and famine. Oh well.
posted by Master's Degree in Science
on December 18, 2006 #
I’m disappointed that Aaron characterizes the piece as brilliant.
In fact we are doing stuff and when you can look back over a reasonable span of experience (say 75 years or so) you will find the article’s pesscynicism laughable.
Muhammad Ali is way hipper than Joshua Ellis, as is the 95 year old woman I play pinochle at the Senior Center with on Friday afternoons.
Love.
posted by William Loughborough
on December 18, 2006 #
While I appreciate the bracing point he makes, ultimately it’s a rant. Rhetoric like the following does not strike me as particularly reasonable:
…between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.
I also object to the notion that the sort of technology we’re talking about has little bearing on the problems of the world’s poor. For example, letting “fuck buddies” drive widespread adoption of GPS eventually makes it cheap enough to be applicable to, say, African food distribution networks. Mobile phones are currently revolutionizing commerce in parts of Africa, where corrupt/incompetent local utilities don’t provide reliable land lines or electricity.
(BTW, anyone looking for last-minute Xmas gifts should consider a Kiva gift certificate, which provides collateral-free microcredit to entrepreneurs in developing countries.)
posted by Mike Sierra
on December 18, 2006 #
While I appreciate the bracing point he makes, ultimately it’s a rant.
What’s wrong with rants? I love ‘em.
And do you really think that African food distribution networks are waiting until we testmarket GPS on Japanese teenagers? I really fail to see the logic in that.
posted by Aaron Swartz
on December 18, 2006 #
I don’t understand the logic of your question, and what you mean by “waiting.” I guess relatively poor Africans “waited” for the price of mobile phones to come down to a certain level, but once they did, they benefitted from it, even though the phones weren’t marketed with poor Africans in mind. You might object to the “trickle-down”-ness this represents, but that’s how all material progress happens: things that start out as luxuries eventually become commodities.
And the problem with rants is their often irrational component. Is Ellis seriously suggesting that the world’s poor have much to fear from “faith-ridden” Americans? Would that include people who donate to Catholic Charities?
posted by Mike Sierra
on December 18, 2006 #
Give the guy a bit of credit. This is just the Jihad vs. McWorld or dystopia vs. utopia story, he’s not saying anything particularly earth shatteringly new, just phrasing it in an emotionally resonant way.
I agree that the focus on web/tech people as the distracted saviors is mistaken, but they’re his audience. so…
I also suppose that I disagree in some deep intellectual sense with the notion that technology can’t change things, because my take on civilization is that society is the substrate on top of technology mediated by economics. But he’s focused on the very short term change in technology here, not change in the civilizational-level dialectical sense.
posted by Firas
on December 18, 2006 #
“And do you really think that African food distribution networks are waiting until we testmarket GPS on Japanese teenagers? I really fail to see the logic in that.”
You can’t see the logic in it because that’s not what was said/implied. Rants about rants are amusing but what’s getting clouded here is that 100 years isn’t really all that long a time - except when there’s a race against oblivion (and even that is too loaded a term).
If you think Muhammad Ali was “waiting” for anything you haven’t paid attention - oh, I forgot, you weren’t around when he was Cassius Clay and now a main street in Louisville is named after him.
“Barack Obama for …” who cares? the real issue is whether our disdain for borders/nation-states and your recently reinforced indifference to money will triumph over some temporary pragmatism about “how will we pay for all this?”
Please re-read Bucky’s “Critical Path” and get back into the dream - it would help if you moved to a place where there’s decent air to breathe, water to drink. I still have a spare room.
Love.
posted by William Loughborough
on December 19, 2006 #
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Comments
On first glance I’m not sure I understand what’s so brilliant about this piece. Firstly, I don’t like its tone which follows a certain tendency I’ve been noticing regularly, ie everytime a writer wants to really, really tell-it-like-it is, s/he injects a couple of variations of “fuck” and other short tracks to purported down-to-earthness. Secondly, one has to be quite insulated to find Ellis’ observations anything but obvious. So he argues that the entertainment branch of technology hasn’t immediate ramifications for starving people? Get out, I’d never have thought of that!
posted by FrF on December 17, 2006 #
The piece is brilliant because it strokes the ego of the more reflective blogger attending conferences sponsored by WIRED magazine. If only these genius social networking theorists would stop wasting their abilities on studying how FACEBOOK affects college dating, and instead applied their gifts to global economic and regional conflict issues, the world might have a chance at being a better place. However, they don’t, so we are stuck with perpetual bloodshed and famine. Oh well.
posted by Master's Degree in Science on December 18, 2006 #
I’m disappointed that Aaron characterizes the piece as brilliant.
In fact we are doing stuff and when you can look back over a reasonable span of experience (say 75 years or so) you will find the article’s pesscynicism laughable.
Muhammad Ali is way hipper than Joshua Ellis, as is the 95 year old woman I play pinochle at the Senior Center with on Friday afternoons.
Love.
posted by William Loughborough on December 18, 2006 #
While I appreciate the bracing point he makes, ultimately it’s a rant. Rhetoric like the following does not strike me as particularly reasonable:
…between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.
I also object to the notion that the sort of technology we’re talking about has little bearing on the problems of the world’s poor. For example, letting “fuck buddies” drive widespread adoption of GPS eventually makes it cheap enough to be applicable to, say, African food distribution networks. Mobile phones are currently revolutionizing commerce in parts of Africa, where corrupt/incompetent local utilities don’t provide reliable land lines or electricity.
(BTW, anyone looking for last-minute Xmas gifts should consider a Kiva gift certificate, which provides collateral-free microcredit to entrepreneurs in developing countries.)
posted by Mike Sierra on December 18, 2006 #
What’s wrong with rants? I love ‘em.
And do you really think that African food distribution networks are waiting until we testmarket GPS on Japanese teenagers? I really fail to see the logic in that.
posted by Aaron Swartz on December 18, 2006 #
I don’t understand the logic of your question, and what you mean by “waiting.” I guess relatively poor Africans “waited” for the price of mobile phones to come down to a certain level, but once they did, they benefitted from it, even though the phones weren’t marketed with poor Africans in mind. You might object to the “trickle-down”-ness this represents, but that’s how all material progress happens: things that start out as luxuries eventually become commodities.
And the problem with rants is their often irrational component. Is Ellis seriously suggesting that the world’s poor have much to fear from “faith-ridden” Americans? Would that include people who donate to Catholic Charities?
posted by Mike Sierra on December 18, 2006 #
Give the guy a bit of credit. This is just the Jihad vs. McWorld or dystopia vs. utopia story, he’s not saying anything particularly earth shatteringly new, just phrasing it in an emotionally resonant way.
I agree that the focus on web/tech people as the distracted saviors is mistaken, but they’re his audience. so…
I also suppose that I disagree in some deep intellectual sense with the notion that technology can’t change things, because my take on civilization is that society is the substrate on top of technology mediated by economics. But he’s focused on the very short term change in technology here, not change in the civilizational-level dialectical sense.
posted by Firas on December 18, 2006 #
“And do you really think that African food distribution networks are waiting until we testmarket GPS on Japanese teenagers? I really fail to see the logic in that.”
You can’t see the logic in it because that’s not what was said/implied. Rants about rants are amusing but what’s getting clouded here is that 100 years isn’t really all that long a time - except when there’s a race against oblivion (and even that is too loaded a term).
If you think Muhammad Ali was “waiting” for anything you haven’t paid attention - oh, I forgot, you weren’t around when he was Cassius Clay and now a main street in Louisville is named after him.
“Barack Obama for …” who cares? the real issue is whether our disdain for borders/nation-states and your recently reinforced indifference to money will triumph over some temporary pragmatism about “how will we pay for all this?”
Please re-read Bucky’s “Critical Path” and get back into the dream - it would help if you moved to a place where there’s decent air to breathe, water to drink. I still have a spare room.
Love.
posted by William Loughborough on December 19, 2006 #
You can also send comments by email.