Newsletter
Upon reaching the Missouri’s great falls, the Corps of Discovery delayed a month preparing to portage the river’s impassable obstacles. Here at the top of the plains, they were met with numerous tumultuous summer storms with hefty sized hail that bruised and battered exposed expedition members. Lewis writes
Newsletter
Subscribe now “Our conventional response to all media (technology), namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964 The Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype-boom now in full flower can best be simply understood as the next generation
Newsletter
Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. For many years, I thought with all the patriotic bluster of Americans, they would not let their great experiment in democracy simply decline and disappear. At some point they'd stand up and declare “enough”
Newsletter
Subscribe now In April, after wintering in the middle of North Dakota, right before the river turns and heads due west, the intrepid Lewis and Clark expedition headed further up the Missouri. As they reached present Montana, the plains filled with ever greater number of animals, yet they still had
Newsletter
Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. Long ago, I quit reading philosophy – credit or blame Nietzsche. Immediately after, I read a number of the 20th century physicists who were immensely educational and enjoyable. In ways, it was philosophy of a different sort.
Newsletter
Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. Back long ago, when I was doing energy work, I worked with Global Green, the American affiliate of Mikhail Gorbachev's Green Cross International. Matt, who ran Global Green, asked me if I wanted to
Newsletter
Link Wray, Shawnee American, creator of one of rock and roll’s great sounds, one of the coolest cats to ever prowl a stage. Subscribe now What we consider labor, and certainly Labor with a capital “L”, is largely a creation of the Industrial Era. From the beginning, it was
Newsletter
Subscribe now The journals of Lewis and Clark regale with one of the great tales of American history. As with all American history, it’s filled with contradictions. The journals document the great vast wilderness surrounding the Missouri River at the beginning of the 19th century. A wilderness completely disappeared
Newsletter
Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. I don't talk much these days about what passes for politics in America, there’s a few notable exceptions, but mostly no one asks and I don't prod. Which is fine and
Newsletter
Death has a way of focusing the mind, especially if it’s someone who for no good reason slipped long ago from your conscious. The last couple weeks Sinead O’Connor reentered my life. She created a great diversity of music, but from song one, Sinead was and remained a
Newsletter
Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. (Continued from II) Wiener correctly foresaw information technologies increasing exponentially, thus too the quantity of information. Along with this growth in the quantity of information, just as importantly grew the quantity of “noise,” the other essential
Newsletter
Thank you for reading Life in the 21st Century. Please share this post. (Continued from I) Wiener sets our contemporary technological revolution in an historical frame, “Perhaps I may clarify the historical background of the present situation if I say that the first industrial revolution, the revolution of the “dark