So, what will you do about it?

The thing is, you're not going to stop progress towards those hideous futures, any more than we could stop the atom bomb, genetic engineering, cloning, or the car usurping bikes. People will push and push and push for reasons banal and sublime, and there are enough of us, and enough cats out of the bag, that it's inevitable.

Besides, the most instructive lessons are often the ones that involve the most suffering. Surely you don't think someone's going to, say, not push towards nano-surveillance drones because some futurist said it's bad, right?

Edit: if you ask me, we're heading for another 'Dark Age', and it's worst in the U.S. We have religious nutsos actively attacking science on every front, and people are losing their will to think for themselves. Europe, from what I understand, has similar problems with fundamentalism, and fascist revivals in response to Muslim cultural encroachment. It's definitely looking ugly for the near future. Pendulum swings....

Well, obviously, I tend to agree. (Have you read Chris Hedges' American Fascists, btw?) But I've got just squeakingly enough faith in people that I thought if they were presented with accurate information on ubiquitous information technologies, in a reasonably accessible way, then hopefully they'd make wise decisions about what to embrace, and how. And some days I still manage to believe that.

the argument adam linked to is silly

and would be equally true at all times


not to mention the common assumption
that because of the causes of our existence
we could only ever be born at one time anyway,
not at time chosen randomly across the existence of the species


second i hear what peeps r saying
about the likely hollowness of complex (in language, concept, and both) explanations
of personal or shared experience

allowing for hollowness though is reasonable considering my limited access to verifiable knowledge

this is to say my bs detector is broken to the point that i wouldnt know what one might be

also now is special that is what makes it now

i'd be perfectly able to understand the emotional excitement of the author had he conveyed any emotional excitement. i don't feel that he did so, nor do i feel that that was his aim in the article. in addition, the point of the article wasn't that this is his OWN experience, but that it is a shared experience in a shared role in a shared environment. the focus of the article is "the messenger" in a communal sense, not an individual sense.

regardless, i'm not going to be baited into a personal pissing match with you.

we used to call that sword fighting when i did it with my brother as a kid

i agree with this fully. advances will always be made that can be used in a variety of ways - some positive and some negative. generally whether the uses are ultimately positive or negative won't be clear to most people without examples to support the reasoning. the reasoning will of course exist prior to the proof, but people won't heed it without the suffering that schnee mentions.

i did that on my birthday after a lot of whiskey

winning is a matter of being more ruthless than your opponent

if im ever in brklyn lets have a match

spend some time finding a reliable second

ill post an ad on craigslist to find one in nyc

since flying mine out would be too expensive

No, it isn't. It's saying that now is different from then. That only makes it special if you ignore tomorrow, which is not something that futurists or other announcers of new ages are often accused of doing.

I hardly think there's anything postmodern about suggesting that human behavior will change when the consequences of satisfying one of humankind's more primal urges are changed or removed.

Whether or not you approve of the philosophy or ideology or vocabulary of the people pointing it out, it happens to be true that the last several hundred years (and especially the last hundred) have seen many profound changes to the way human beings live and interact and perceive things. And these changes have not been of the cyclical, pendulum-swingy variety, as in a land where serfs may toil in the fields for Christian overlords in one century and toil in the fields for Muslim overlords in another but the toil never changes.

Claims that actually make a case for the uniqueness of now might very well be seductive for that reason. Indeed, they have been seductive for that reason: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" But the claims you describe make no such case, for reasons I've already gone into.

It may be exhilarating, but the entire history of the human experience and even a basic understanding of human psychology argue pretty strongly against it being comforting.

The fact that fanfare inevitably dies down is only instructive about fanfare.

interesting
just as this freedom of anonymity is lost to us in all other realms...messengers and everyone else are being filmed, recorded, tracked all the time. 1984. America 2014. Minority Report. The Matrix. The Real World. and The real world. dutret, did you know that every google search that yOu perform is recorded and kept indefinitely?
ok...shhhhhh...enough said...'s gettin hot in here