1. Slides for Ray Kurzweil's Talk
2. Reading List
Mediated, Thomas De Zengotita (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2005)
"Let your mind alone!" wrote New Yorker humorist James Thurber in a broadside against self-help tomes by psyched-out psychologists and other well-meaning oafs. But the mind is, as the Zen masters say, a drunken monkey—and does not want to be left alone. In an age of endless e-mails, tidy TiVos, cell phones, Blast-faxes, broadband and satellite channels by the hundreds, being left alone is not an option for many in the overdeveloped world.
Mediated, by Harper's magazine contributing editor Thomas de Zengotita, aims to "zap the Zeitgeist." It's a fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media—aphoristic and brilliant in spots, way over, under and around the top in others. The dust jacket blurb by the bombastic Norman Mailer is no accident, comrade.
De Zengotita shows why we viewers are endlessly "flattered" by the way the world is brought to us by our many fiber-optic wires. You live, he writes, in "a world of effects" where you can be "a connoisseur of what moves you." "It's all about the options—and they are all about you. No limits. You are totally free to choose because it really doesn't matter what you choose." Why? Because we live in a world where instant shifts by remote controls, mouse clicks and Verizon 411 make our own identities fluid.
"We are all Method actors now," writes de Zengotita, who actually did study Method acting. Because we see so many performances, we live in a Performance Culture, aided by a Therapy Culture. Ever notice how even "normal" people speak in sound-bite when interviewed at random? That's because our behavior becomes part of an ongoing narrative about ourselves, shaped by the thousands of narratives we are force-fed by our endlessly seductive media every day.
The upside of media saturation is that we are more tolerant of others because we see their stories, too. One downside is that childhood has become a cult, replete with options that often last into "midolescence" (kids in their twenties, unable to choose, living at home). The antique world view of a stable, instructive mom and dad on "Leave it to Beaver" has been replaced by "The Simpsons," where the world is "chaos. No one is in charge. It is absurd in small ways, teetering on the brink of catastrophe in larger ways. . . . Adults in this show are weak, conniving, hypocritical, vain, confused, deluded—at best they are well-meaning but inept." At the end "we know the Simpsons will gather again on their couch bathed in the glow of their giant television . . . We understand why they immerse themselves in representations to shelter themselves from whatever reality there is out there—may the saints preserve us from it. We do the same thing."
De Zengotita's is a book of provocative description. He is an adventurer of the digitized American psyche, telling you the strange and glittering concepts he saw looking at "the ids of our kids," the twilight of our heroes (about whom we now know too much), politics in the grip of crisis and scandal (the only time we care) and how even once-awesome Nature has to get "realer than real" to hold our vagrant attention.
—from the Washington Post review
Mediated web site
The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil (New York: Viking Adult, 2005)
At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and the most in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.
For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he presented the daring argument that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, computers would rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now, in The Singularity Is Near, he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our own creations.
That merging is the essence of the Singularity, an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.
While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near maintains a radically optimistic view of the future course of human development. As such, it offers a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.
—from the Singularity web site
Post-Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker (New York: HarperCollins, 1994)
The number of absolute shifts in human social organization are few. The first came in the aftermath of the last Ice Age when hunter-gatherers began to settle down and learned to husband animals and cultivate plants and fodder. Thus began the Agricultural Age. Some twelve thousand years or so later, people learned to invent and apply mechanical devices to increase yields, expand trade, and devise new means of providing creature comforts, thus beginning the Industrial Age. And within the past century, discoveries by physicists studying quantum mechanics and relativity gave rise to transistors, digital computing, and fiber optics (among other wonders), and thus we ushered in the Information Age.
Drucker, the famous analyst of Western capitalist production systems, looks at the dynamics of this emerging era and makes some important observations. For the first time, he asserts, people generally will own their own means of production—our own knowledge and creativity. In the Industrial Age, the means of production—factories and large-scale transportation networks—required enormous amounts of capital and labor to derive value and efficiencies. But in the Information Age, all one theoretically needs is a personal computer with appropriate software and a link to the Internet, and one can be in business on his own.
Drucker calls those with individual capital portability "knowledge workers," and explores in Post-Capitalist Society the implications of a society based on knowledge workers. He foresees that a networked "society of organizations" will become the primary structure of social interaction.
"Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work—on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself—it must be organized for constant change. It must be organized for innovation; and innovation, as the Austro-American economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) said, is 'creative destruction.' It must be organized for systematic abandonment of the established, the customary, the familiar, the comfortable—whether products, services, and processes, human and social relationships, skills, or organizations themselves. It is the very nature of knowledge that it changes fast and that today’s certainties will be tomorrow’s absurdities."
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman (New York: Viking Adult, 1985)
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right
—From the Forward
Further reviews of Amusing Ourselves to Death
