If you haven't already, you've got to watch this. There's some new ideas that NYU prof Clay Shirky presents that are really exciting. Wikipedia, video games that help cure diseases, and who knows what else may be portending an amazing shift in society; one that techno-utopians have been slaveringly anticipating for decades. Maybe this was what Marshall McLuhan was probing at way back. Not sure, but it's fascinating.
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Label: clay shirky, cognitive surplus
“…it’s hard to resist your own substance, you’d like to stop all this, give yourself time to think about it and listen without difficulty to your heartbeat, but it’s too late for that. This thing can never stop. This enormous steel box is on a collision course; we, inside it, are whirling madly with the machines and the Earth. All together, along with the thousands of little wheels and hammers that never strike at the same time, that make noises which shatter one another, some so violent that they release a kind of silence around them, which makes you feel a little better. You give into noise as you give in to war. As the machines you let yourself go with the two three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that’s the end. From then on everything you look at, everything you touch is hard. And everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savor in your thoughts.” Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
“It’s not that I like the empire—I hate it—but there’s nothing I can do about it right now.” Luke Skywalker, Star Wars
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