Another Delphic passage from Alan Watts' The Book. Again, bear in mind that this was written in 1966.

... To most of us living today, all these fantasies of the future seem most objectionable: the loss of privacy and freedom, the restriction of travel, and the progressive conversion of flesh and blood, wood and stone, fruit and fish, sight and sound, into plastic, synthetic, and electronic reproductions. Increasingly, the artist and musician puts himself out of business through making ever more faithful and inexpensive reproductions of his original works. Is reproduction in this sense to replace biological reproduction, though cellular fission or sexual union? In short, is the next step in evolution to be the transformation of man into nothing more than electronic patterns?

This passage is stimulating in how it seems a melange of on-the-mark as well as off-the-mark speculations. 41 years later, "restriction of travel" seems quite off, in light of how all corners of the globe have become more accessible by jet, etc. -- but if he means a "reduction of movement" or "increasingly sedentary life", as in the post below*, well, we need only to think of computer-bound office workers, bloggers, etc. "Loss of freedom" since the time he wrote is also debatable: in some respects, we (or at least a great many of us) have more choice and influence at our fingertips than ever; in others, we feel ever more powerless to affect things. But what he says about cultural reproduction -- again, bang on, my dear Watts!

*this passage is only two paragraphs after the one below, and in between he talks mainly about the "individual getting smaller and smaller" as population increases and resources shrink.

Alan Watts

Take a look at this prophetic observation by the brilliant Alan Watts. This is from his book titled The Book and was written in 1966. To put it into today's context, we need only think of the internet, broadband, and the corporatization of media:

Despite the fact that more accidents happen in the home than elsewhere, increasing efficiency of communication and of controlling human behavior can, instead of liberating us into the air like birds, fix us to the ground like toadstools. All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body—even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual—an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. There may be specialized types, just as there are specialized cells and organs in our bodies. For the tendency will be for all individuals to coalesce into a single bioelectronic body.

Our Collective Alzheimer's

Print books, if taken care of, can last 3-800 years. Paper, three thousand. Shakespeare's

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme

was predicated on that.

CD's will soon be as unreadable as LP's are becoming now.

Computer disks get damaged or outmoded; who can read a low-density floppy?

Microfiche fade and can't be replaced (nobody's making them anymore, nor the machines to read them -- from what I hear decades of major newspapers are being lost...)

History is being effaced in an amnesia of succeeding technologies, a kind of collective Alzheimer's induced by scientific advancement.

So when will this blog go *poof*????

Digital Maoism

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

-- Jaron Lanier, "Digital Maoism"

Blog bog...

Old template problems in Explorer seem to have cropped up again. The sidebar (with profile, etc.) has been pushed down below the posts. I've rectified any posts that could have caused problems. The last solution, pasting a certain line into the template as kindly suggested by you AD here doesn't seem to be required. Do you see what I see in Explorer? i.e. that my blog is a mess?

UPDATE: I seem to have solved the display problem in Explorer at least for the front page of this blog by reducing the number of posts displayed here from 23 to 10. This will doubtlessly reduce load times as well, and make "culprit posts" that cause the display to go askew easier to isolate. I guess I'm attached to my posts -- at least the better ones -- and set the number high about a year back so as not to consign them too soon to the nether world of the back pages. On some previous months there are display problems, but at least the front page displays well...

SOME TECHNICAL NOTES, OF INTEREST TO FELLOW & POTENTIAL SUFFERERS:

Have been having all kinds of problems with Blogger of late. For the past three days, I have been unable to access this blog through Firefox; through Explorer, I could see the blog, but up to now, couldn't enter past the dashboard to post. This also for three days. Finally the problem seems to have been rectified, after several complaints to Blogger Support and the help group answered only by autoresponds. (Dozens if not hundreds of people, apparently, have had this problem...)

Right now though, I’m cutting/pasting all my writings here to Word as a backup. I discovered I can cut and paste the text, pictures, links, everything right from the display with a simple press of Select All and Copy. Saving a month takes about 30 seconds. Apparently there's a more sophisticated program available to do that more accurately, and perhaps I'll download and learn it eventually. All this as a potential stress saver. I wasn't exactly worried out of my mind -- Google for goodness' sake I was sure would come up with something, eventually -- but still, I was beginning to feel uneasy. Hundreds of hours have been invested in this blog, and I would hate to see it all go up in smoke.

My impression is that Blogger is understaffed, and that Google (despite it's oodles of $$$) is not giving its all to be a truly responsive or solicitous service. I've never gotten more than autoresponds to questions or reports of problems, never an answer more specific than general advice on their Help page provides. Eventually Blogger may screw up big time, as they almost did with me, and scandalized users will jump to Typepad or some other alternative service, and let the word spread loud and wide.

It seems a law of commercial (viz. human) nature that top dogs get complacent and fall asleep, then tumble to the bottom because they just stop feeling that necessity to be AWARE. Compare to Bill Gates & company winning the browser war, and then letting Explorer go to pot (no updates, security holes breached by hackers) because they haven't felt the need to fight it anymore. Compare to the fall of the Roman empire.

P.S. By the way, as a browser, I highly recommend Firefox, rather than this clunky, unstable thing the majority of you are using... I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Get Firefox. Opera, too, seems to be getting good reviews.

MY LATEST TOY

Here are some sample photos -- courtesy of Google Images -- from my latest toy, which I downloaded for free and spent about two hours with this weekend: Google Earth. Consisting of satellite photos that have been blended together into a composite 3-d photo of the Earth, you can fly anywhere within seconds -- even tip the world on its axis and glide over its surface as if in an airplane. This program is still in its early generations, but is already amazingly sophisticated. You can type your address into the "Fly To" window, free fall through space and within seconds be hovering over it at about 1,000 feet. Some places -- like the Eiffel Tower above or the Grand Canyon below, are really well photographed, and you can hover over them at 900 feet and see the view below at a pretty nearly perfect resolution. Other places -- in the midst of Africa, Siberia, Antarctica -- get blurry below about 20 or 30,000 feet. (Apparently an enhanced version, for which you pay about $20 a year, is better...) I can imagine in a few years we'll be taking virtual tours through cities, with scenes recorded in real time. Apparently the military doesn't like this, for obvious security reasons. But one thing I like about this program is that it reinforces the notion of the world as one ball in space -- and rather small one, at that. So we'd better take care...

Next time you look up into the sky, smile: a satellite may be taking your photo!