Links
I call this paragraph-sized post required reading for my fellow Americans.
RIP, Kill Your TV Try this quote: "By escaping its box and slipping into every crevice of our lives, television has performed the devil’s trick of making us believe it doesn’t exist."
The Revolution will Not Be Televised. From another time, when the walls of our prison were visible. . .
An interview in the 90s.
Media Burn in 1975 by the Ant Farm Collective. More anti-television. Alas, also piped through YouTube.
. . . Set to Music
New subject: on the basis of the information in this article alone, I am going to forecast that we will experience significant disruptions of the internet (at least for the 80-99%). I say the odds are 60% by 2030 and 80% by 2040. I also would not be surprised if this broke sooner.
I also found out about the right to repair movement. This leads the the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and repair.org.
I try to avoid too much insight this path did lead me to Paul Nystrom's remarkable insights into consumerism. . . from 1928.
I gave some thought to taking up wood carving. I found a great carver [his newer site] who uses a utility knife as his main tool.
Aphorisms/Shorts
"The only thing worse than having a crisis is not having a crisis." Lou Kemp from Samsdat. Slightly tweak that to:
The only thing worse than having a crisis is never having a crisis. Just realized that is close to "If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake." --Frank Wilczek.
My current understanding is that solar power is good tactically, but poor strategically.
Identity is deeper to people than happiness. Consumerism exploits this by sandblasting our organic, healthy identities, so we are left struggling to try to fashion them on our own. We try to buy them, which is good for profits in the short-run, but is a source of system-threatening internal contradictions in the long run.
I have seen the worst souls of my generation destroyed by Twitter (well, damaged further).
"We used to have to talk to other humans if we wanted to join a cult." comment on a Reddit thread by user named 77096.
A frontier is not just the only place a certain type of individualism works, it is also the only place a certain type of communitarinism works. How sad to not see the real common enemy of bureaucracy.
I have been thinking more about the devil's trick -- see first link above -- touch screens fool us into thinking we are not using a tool. . . and that the tool isn't using us.
