Without comment on what quantifies “best” in the quote here, the piece I’m linking to it is worth a look. “The best newspaper in the world should not run articles that might as well be headlined “Ladies, You Might Think You Look OK, But You Don’t.””
Damn, this is good writing. Funny, insightful, beautifully expressed. I hope it will be heard. “Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women.” “Today 'empowerment' invokes power while signifying the lack of it.”
Brexit. Hmm. “My admittedly primitive understanding of democracy is that we're supposed to move toward it, not away from it, in a moment of crisis.” … an interesting essay, presented without opinions from yours truly. On the concept of “Too much democracy” …
... and here we have a civilized discussion (including actual British people!) at Colin Smith's blog ...
The bandit hero -- the underdog rebel -- so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves -- what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their 'charm'. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby. These are too often the revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit our lives and whom we sometimes try to be...
--Michael Moorcock
Not the NRA ... on the history of Sig Sauer.
On the question at this column, “Joke or Threat” – a joke isn't, if the audience is actually threatened. “If he’s been asked repeatedly to stop making sexual jokes and comments about Sophie, and continues to make them, he is actively and intentionally causing her harm.” It is dispiriting that this needs to be explained, even to people who think they are friends.
“For older folks, automobiles were, and are, the technology of freedom; you’ll get them into autonomous vehicles when you can peel the stick shift out of their cold, dead fingers. For younger people, automobiles, especially in cities, are becoming an unnecessary complication to their busy lives—a car detracts, rather than augments, their freedom and mobility. Rather, it is their smartphone that gives them access to the world and that they perceive gives them freedom.” (Bonus content – the usual dismissal of anyone between the so-called Boomer and Millennial generations: “The shift to on-demand, autonomous personal transportation as a service, rather than vehicles as owned artifacts, that generational change will enable, could happen relatively quickly—perhaps in less than a decade as purchasing power shifts from the boomer to the millennial generation.” Man. It’s a shame, sometimes, that my generation never existed.)
A lifetime of leers. Not an edgy short story, I'm afraid.
4 comments:
You know, I'm rarely one to go straight to the class angle on an issue, but that business with the cars...oy. For wealthy, urban millennials with educations, jobs, relatively supportive families, and sophisticated social networks, a car may not seem significant. But to their many contemporaries outside of those fairly rarefied circles, it may as well be the 1980s. Back then, a car could help a kid escape an abusive or unhappy household. A car could get a kid to a job. A car could help get siblings back and forth when parents were at work or otherwise unavailable. A car let you chase some whim. A car was a heady whiff of teenage responsibility. A car wasn't just mobility; it was also socioeconomic mobility.
We're getting these driverless cars, I sometimes think, because of the technocratic tendencies of a certain subset of millennials who don't need that socioeconomic mobility. They're indifferent to the people who'd be hurt by the consequences of their techno-faddism, people who would be better off if they had a $1,100 beater of a car than if they had to open accounts with car services (which, of course, require a credit card and a pricey smartphone--and thus being in thrall to two more corporations).
I'm also deeply skeptical of the suggestion in that article that driverless cars may someday be seen as instruments of freedom. True freedom isn't in the interest of the companies developing the hardware and the software for these things. But then I'm old enough to remember when people expressed at least a little bit of skepticism about big corporations before swooning and falling into their waiting arms...
Jeff, good points. Personally, I could never do a self-driving car as I am prone to motion sickness to a seriously compromising degree.
The fascinating point for me here is the lens through which we come to our perspectives. Being born where and who and what I am, it never would have occurred to me that driving was anything but an exciting goal for a kid. Just a week ago, I was talking to a parent of a sixteen-year-old about how strange it is getting the license no longer seems to be a HUGE milestone, the sixteenth birthday one of those great steps toward adulthood. So this hitting right after I'd had this conversation was striking. There has also been an ongoing, difficult issue in my family with someone still driving who should not be; another layer to the importance of driving which resonates right now.
To me, ceding of control is beyond unappealing - and, coincidentally, I pretty much hate "smart" tech generally (and specifically my phone). It's part and parcel with the selling of our collective privacy and even our bodies and lives to every database and algorithm out there. I'm leery even of certain aspects of my medical records/insurance, and that's old hat by now, in a world where smart DIAPERS are a thing. And posting DNA profiles or That One Entity which obsessively collects, collates, and sells the genealogies of everyone in the world without consent or any concept of consequences. If I had a cousin or something posting their genetic makeup, they're putting a part of ME, of my nieces, of my mom out in a place we haven't agreed to be displayed.
So. Yeah. Perspective is a curious thing ...
Sounds like we're pretty much on the same page, or at least in the same chapter.
I'm increasingly finding ways not to share my personal information. I'm not Facebook friends with my girlfriend, for example; we live together, so we don't need to connect online. Facebook seems baffled by me: it doesn't know who most of my relatives are, it doesn't know where I work, and the ads I get suggest that it can't tell if I'm gay or straight or what political party I prefer. Of course, it may not help that on those random occasions when I ask Facebook to stop showing me perfectly innocuous ads, I click "it's offensive" as the reason. I know I'm not making much of a statement, but I enjoy complicating things ever so slightly for the billionaires who would sell and exploit my data. It's curious that most people consider "free" use of these and similar services to be compensation enough; I'd prefer it if they paid me.
In all seriousness, though, it amazes me that after a century of sci-fi cautionary tales, almost no one wants to spend even a little time contemplating the downsides of corporate technological innovation. It's something weird about modern American culture: we don't just say, "hey, self-driving cars will be great for the elderly and the disabled." No, eventually we'll all have to use them whether we want to or not. The promise used to be that we'd be able to customize our own experiences with technology, but increasingly we can customize our tech only within approved parameters. To which I say: bah.
Haha - how's this for a statement? I'm not even on Facebook at all! I also own zero iDevices of any kind. I know, I know - not that others are acres better. But there's a principle of some sort in there, I pretend.
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