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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
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. What's amusing, you need a good stomach, is in the last decades as environmental issues have begun to rudely intrude on the future, the thinking of how do deal with them remains firmly entrenched
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Mugabe is the official mascot of “Life in the 21st Century.” A dozen years ago, Mugabe was a young bull elephant in Tsavo, Kenya. He’d hang around one of the park’s camps and what does a ten-thousand pound bull elephant do in your camp? Anything he wants, thus
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Subscribe now Technologies create their own power structures. Even the most radical new technologies very quickly create organization working to conserve the new order they established. Representative of this are America's electric utilities. A century ago bestowed with government monopolies, they become some of America's most
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Subscribe now February, 2000 The electric industry remains firmly entrenched in the 19th century. Value is derived mainly from the generation and distribution of colossal quantities of energy. However, the industry is on the verge of a great change. With the implementation of a more distributed architecture and adding digital
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Subscribe now “I use to have this thing about Link Wray I use to play him every Saturday God Bless Saturday” Searching for the link to my “Politics of Technology” (2016) paper, I came across a podcast I did in summer 2021 with Matt Payne. He approached me out of