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Continued from (II) Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. Specialists and Generalists The greatest change electric networked information technologies beget is a loosening of specialist control, requiring more whole, systemic views. As McLuhan notes this change goes deep, much deeper, into the
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Continued from (I) Today, the screen is connected across the planet receiving and sending instantaneous information and perspectives from which, tactility, the receiver is completely removed. “Our highly literate societies are at a loss as they encounter the new structures of opinion and feeling that result from instant and global
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Subscribe now Note: I have pulled thinking from Wiener's and McLuhan's two works – The Human Use of Human Beings and Understanding Media respectively – attempting to combine the similarity of their thought as a basis for what can be considered a politics of technology. The similarities are
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“The war in Ukraine was avoidable,” the excellent director Werner Herzog correctly states in a recent interview. But then looking back at 75 years of the American National Security State, how many military misadventures they've largely, or in part, been responsible for were necessary? Borrowing the words of
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Hey man you shouldn’t do that Don’t you know you’ll stain the carpet The FT has an amusing piece titled “Democrats are too scared of a contested convention.” As a former Democrat, I'm all for an open convention. At this point, it’s the only
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Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands is a valuable history book. It's a history of earth stretching back 550 million years composed of chapters of a variety of geologic periods and the life forms existing in each time. It's a book that would be more invaluable as series
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It’s sort of amusing. Various segments of the American oligarchy have been all about democracy over the last couple years. Not that any of them could explain what it is, or if they gave any real thought about it, wouldn’t much care for it. Case in point is
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. Here's three similar and important thoughts on democratic organization from three disparate figures across the 19th century. “Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the
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It’s interesting how information has now become an industry. I don’t mean in the sense of the various compute technology and communication, but the actual physical storage of information. This physical storage now demands its own massive energy consumption. The FT has a piece on the growing energy
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Have you been to the English Deer Park? It’s a large type minstrel ranch This is where C. Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark Have you been to the English Deer Park? Hey tourist it wasn’t quite like what you thought Not quite like what you thought Subscribe
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In Tocqueville's Ancien Regime there’s an excellent chapter titled, “How around the middle of the eighteenth century men of letters became the leading political figures in the country and the consequences of this.” It's a wonderful explanation of the unequaled importance books and their authors
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Where there is no vision, the people perish - Proverbs 29:18 Reuters: United States exporters of thermal coal earned more than $5 billion in 2023 as they shipped out more than 32.5 million metric tons of the high-polluting power fuel, data from ship-tracking firm Kpler shows. The thermal