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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
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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”
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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A couple decades ago, the term Information Age was bandied about to define our new technological era, not so much anymore. Maybe, unlikely as it appears, we realize we remain firmly entrenched in industrialism and we've never really understood that. Claiming the era was the Information Age was