I have a few friends in the automotive industry, and over the years I have enjoyed throwing a variety of hypothetical silliness at them for future design considerations.

Like, the NERF ® Car… ok, now it is out, if GM makes a big comeback with this… they saw it here first.

The idea is simple, we could virtually illuminate accident injuries and fatalities by manufacturing cars with a 6 inch think interior / exterior NERF ® coating.

At the same time, we would simultaneously end road rage, folks would be obliged to ram each other at will… freeways would become veritable bumper car extravaganzas of fun and frolic! Not enough room to get up to ramming speed… no worries, just take it out on the foam interior… go ahead; bash your fist, foot, head, or whatever against any available surface without damaging your vehicle or yourself! In just a couple short years of production we could completely change the modern driving experience…

Ok, so there is a down side… when your car gets wet you would have to endure that swampy old dog wet NERF ® smell; but car washes could be quickly retrofitted into washboard style squeezers to get most of the water out of your car’s side panels after a rain. Do you see the genius, a whole new industry would emerge! Just run with the spirit of entrepreneurial invention!

Well, my friends usually endure my over-hyped sophomoric sales pitch just long enough for me to get it out of my system and then they quickly diffuse all of my enthusiasm with some sobering realities along the lines of manufacturing impossibilities and the public’s inevitable rejection of clunky foam technology in deference for sleek chrome beauty.

If my make believe NERF ® car receives the derision it deserves, then I am grateful to see Mr. Zuckerberg reaping some as well.

Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today.

~Mark Zuckerberg, Washington Post Response to Privacy Concerns

Lee Siegel likens the explosive growth, acceptance, and trends of the internet to the recent past technical marvel of convenience… the automobile… before it had safety belts.

Not only was the public horrified; it was shocked. What it had accepted as an inevitable condition turned out to be wholly arbitrary. Things should have been very different from the way they were. And gradually, by means of public pressure, the “permanent” condition of the necessarily dangerous car did yield to the new condition of a safety-conscious auto industry. People stopped dying on the road in staggering numbers. Things changed.

Heaven knows, I’m not comparing the internet to a hurtling death trap. But the internet has its destructive side just as the automobile does, and both technologies entered the world behind a curtain of triumphalism hiding their dangers from critical view. Like the car, the internet has been made out to be a miracle of social and personal transformation when it is really a marvel of convenience–and in the case of the internet, a marvel of convenience that has caused a social and personal upheaval. As with the car, the highly arbitrary way in which the internet has evolved has been portrayed as inevitable and inexorable. As with the car, criticism of the internet’s shortcomings, risks, and perils has been silenced, or ignored, or stigmatized as an expression of those two great American taboos, negativity and fear of change. As with the car, a rhetoric of freedom, democracy, choice, and access has covered up the greed and blind self-interest that lie behind what much of the internet has developed into today.

~Lee Siegel, Against the Machine

• 
  Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
  Author: Lee Siegel

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Categories: Advertising, Social Networking, Technology, Books, Criticisms
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One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?

Freud knew full well that technical and scientific advances are not to be taken lightly, which is why he begins this passage by acknowledging them. But he ends it by reminding us of what they have undone:

If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and i should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage… And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

~Sigmund Freud as Quoted by Niel Postman, Technopoly

• 
  Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
  Author: Neil Postman

• 
  Civilization and Its Discontents
  Author: Sigmund Freud

I am one of those folks with perhaps an over active sense of irony. But I am learning that I am in good company amongst a long tradition within the secular world, Freud, and modern Christianity, Kierkegaard.

I do believe that irony is something that has a very honest unifying capacity in a world that is constantly being pulled apart by a polarity of interests and commitments. In reading this passage, is it not possible for both the social gospel humanitarian and the fundamentalist right to life protester to feel both affirmation of their sentiments and repentance for their myopia?

Despite all our efforts, I do believe that salvation still lies outside of our commitments to technology and our politics… Jesus, save us from ourselves.

The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty. I do not deny it: but this conception, like that of corporate guilt, is very easily used as an evasion of the real issue. God may be more than moral goodness: He is not less. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.

~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

• 
  The Problem of Pain
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Freud, Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis, Technology, Books
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Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God does not fill it, but on the contrary, God keeps it empty and so helps us keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain… The dearer and richer our memories, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy. The beauties of the past are borne, not as a thorn in the flesh, but as a precious gift in themselves. We must take care not to wallow in our memories or to hand ourselves over to them, just as we do not gaze all the time at a valuable present, but only at special times, and apart from these keep it simply as a hidden treasure that is ours for certain. In this way the past gives us lasting joy and strength.

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

• 
  A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings, and Sermons
  Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Lewis had at the cornerstone of his faith experience something that he referred to as “joy”. But what he called joy, was much different than what is typically conjured in my mind when I hear the word. I quickly relate joy to happiness and then I contrast and differentiate it from happiness by making an experiential distinction. Happiness is something I can categorize as moments of circumstantial favor for my particular disposition. Joy is a more willful choice I make to see the happiness I ought to have regardless of my circumstances.

I believe that Lewis’s conception of joy differs from my trained perception in that it has an inherently transcendent nature, in his own words “a longing”, and is usually described as a very spiritual experience in which the object of the longing is perhaps just out of reach in this life.

Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? “Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.” But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.

In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.

Here, then is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies.

If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself.

~C.S. Lewis

On some level I have come to accept and look for this phenomenon in most every aspect of life. At first it seems like a cruel joke, a cosmic teasing of sorts. But vain attempts to try to satisfy or saturate the desire always leaves such a profound lack of satisfaction that the “joy” of longing for something better does start to emerge.

Our current technologies are often focused on solving perceived problems of want or desire. If you want to make a mint in the tech world, then find a stock consumer driven complaint; solve it efficiently with a web page, device, or pill and then sit back and collect as the consumers attempt to satisfy whatever is missing by clicking and swallowing after the ever regressing dopamine feedback loop.

But, perhaps “the problem” technologists are trying to fix is the very intimation of joy (longing) that is the best hint this world has to offer towards better fulfillments yet to come. Well at least, this is I believe where Lewis would reside in his analysis of modern tech trends… of which he may lump them all together with his fictional mud pies anecdote.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

~C.S. Lewis; The Weight of Glory

• 
  The Weight of Glory
  Author: C. S. Lewis

And this is where I see a universal connection to people who would scoff religion, Christianity, the Bible, and perhaps even the vague land of “spirituality” on one page… and then on the very next page assert this very same profound observation of the good nature of longing that is deeply rooted in what it means to be a human. To remove the longing by employing a gadget is a spiritual trespass.

If some infantile trauma or anxiety can be made obsolete by technology, then what will happen as soon as possible (perhaps even sooner!).

Children want attention. Therefore, young adults, in their newly extended childhood, can now perceive themselves to be finally getting enough attention, through social networks and blogs. Lately, the design of on-line technology has moved from answering this desire for attention to addressing an even earlier developmental stage.

Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the close door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.

~Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget

• 
  You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
  Author: Jaron Lanier

Categories: C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Social Networking, Technology, Books
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It’s worth repeating obvious truths when huge swarms of people are somehow able to remain oblivious. That is why I feel the need to point out the most obvious overall aspect of digital culture: it is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia.

Some of the greatest speculative investments in human history continue to converge on silly Silicon Valley schemes that seem to have been named by Dr. Seuss. On any given day, one might hear of tens of hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to a start-up company named Ublibudly or MeTickly. These are names I just made up, but they would make great venture capital bait if they existed. At these companies one finds rooms full of MIT PhD engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks. At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school.

It might seem that I am skewering the infantile nature of Internet culture, but ridicule is the least of my concerns. True, there’s some fun to be had here, but the more important business is relating technological infantilism neoteny to a grand and adventurous trend that characterizes the human species.

And there is truly nothing wrong with that! I am not saying, “The Internet is turning us all into children, isn’t that awful”; quite the contrary. Cultural neoteny can be wonderful. But it’s important to understand the dark side.

~Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget

• 
  You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
  Author: Jaron Lanier

I believe that Jaron is hinting at a timeless struggle with creativity in these observations. In fact, many of my favorite authors and theologians, are often times describing a paradoxical approach to life that involves a simultaneous enjoyment of childlike wonder and the challenge towards maturity. When either pursuit is abandoned we end up with something that is either stoic and cruel or shallow and vapid. It just may be that some of our best solutions to complex “serious” problems come out of naive play and whimsical enjoyment in seemingly unrelated realms. Whenever one decides that “Now I am only going to do important and worthwhile grownup things.” they are almost immediately doomed to not only fail in their endeavor but also succeed in bringing sanctimonious misery to themselves and whomever is unfortunate enough to have to work with them.

…but nevertheless, when you walk into the room of PhD educated professionals outfitted with the most powerful tools known to mankind, throwing themselves at digital tasks of inane and childish invention, you have to ask,

“Don’t you folks have anything better to do?”

And I suppose that is where I start to take umbrage at the shape of communication technologies that I now feel are being forced upon me. If I have to spend the next decade of my life clicking, yelling, and VR swatting the ignore button on digital teddy bears in order to communicate with the people in my life… I would rather just Opt-Out, walk next door, and have a cup of tea with someone who missed the digital boat and is not really sure why they would want to “logon” in the first place.

http://www.shanesevo.com/blog/2009/07/21/heroic-luddite-refuses-hypertext

Categories: Maturity, Technology, Books
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For the telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make “one neighborhood of the whole country.” It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse. Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau, who remarked in Walden that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Main to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate… we are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Thoreau, as it turned out, was precisely correct. He grasped that the telegraph would create its own definition of discourse; that it would not only permit but insist up on a conversation between Maine and Texas; and that it would require the content of that conversation to be different from what Typographic Man was accustomed to.

The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.

~Neil Postman; Amusing Ourselves to Death

• 
  Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
  Author: Neil Postman

I believe that Andy Crouch in his recent book, Culture Making, describes an important acknowledgment that the modern world has refused to make in its progress and invention;

Every new cultural good performs these two functions–making things possible that were impossible, and perhaps more importantly making things impossible that were once possible.

~Andy Crouch, Culture Making

• 
  Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
  Author: Andy Crouch

Every new bit of created culture makes some new activity possible and some old activity nearly impossible. We now live in a world where the the limits of communication have been stretched beyond our imagination and the unforeseen consequence is that the possibility for meaningful context is becoming strangely elusive.

We are constantly being fooled by the current crop of visual information tools into believing that a dashboard of blinking messages can makeup for this spiritual loss of context. I believe this is plain to see in a slice of information from the equivalent of the modern day news telegraphy devices; television and now the internet news portal… both of which feel very much alike, except the passive experience of TV surfing is now replaced by the active hypertext anxiety of drilling into the information portal of a hundred different simultaneous threads.

The 21st century news portal has arrived and it is the fully wired, ever shifting interface of randomly shredded and regurgitated information from everywhere. When you are done skimming, clicking, and browsing what have you gained other than a superficial confidence in “knowing” what is going on, and an anxious guilt of being numbly incapable of experiencing true apathy for any of the people represented in the story content… because you still don’t know them or hardly anything about them… and so what if you did?

This is the information environment that we live in, are we truly to believe that it will have no effect on us?

I know there are “success” stories of the person who reads a random headline, becomes intrigued by some issue or happening on the other side of the world and then sells everything they own to pursue a calling, event, person, or vocation full of purpose and meaning. But even then, I do believe that the personal context of one’s own soul is much more valuable than the bit of information that has traveled through space and time to your consciousness. I suppose this is just what I have found true for myself, until I am completely enamored with the immense and immediately incarnate value of my own neighbor and neighborhood it is impossible for me to care about anything else. I don’t believe that apathy emerges from a lack of information, but rather can be arrived at by attempting to respond to every fragment of tragic news floating in a sea of flippant banter.

Back in August of 2009 before the earthquakes this year I spent about two weeks following out the lives and interviewing a collection of people who had dedicated themselves to the prosper of foreign people in a foreign land. I asked pretty much everyone I interviewed how it was that they found themselves in Haiti as a servant, worker, resident, missionary, or returning native. The answers ranged from nothing short of a prophetic dream to visiting on a short term missions or service project and feeling a deep connection to the land and the people. Short term visits of service and embedded knowingness sealed the deal for everyone who decided to commit. First person stories conveyed orally and in person to small collections of friends and congregations seemed to be the very best way to invite new recruits.

Almost as soon as the news hit the airwaves about the disastrous earthquakes in Haiti there was a fearful plea by heartfelt advocates to not let the Haitian people disappear from the focus of the worldwide community. People were already lamenting the status of being the tragedy of the week, soon to be eclipsed by the most trite of celebrity gossip stories… after all, Haiti was the only news capable of defeating the incessant cataloging of Tiger Woods’ adulterous lifestyle.

Next week Haiti moved from the headline, to the corner update box, the week after that to the bottom ticker tape, and then relegated to the consistent ping-blip popping up with regular annoyance in front of the most recent news. And every time we are reminded, but not in the context of prayer or personal story, something in us is twisted against what it means to be human and to know with the potential of response. Jesus may have been near overwhelmed by the crowds, but at least he was able to face them in person and with human presence. And why did He instruct so many to not tell anyone what had happened?

Luke 8:40-56

As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years,[d] but no one could heal her. 44She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.

45″Who touched me?” Jesus asked.
When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”

46But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”

47Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. 48Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

49While Jesus was still speaking, someone came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. “Your daughter is dead,” he said. “Don’t bother the teacher any more.”

50Hearing this, Jesus said to Jairus, “Don’t be afraid; just believe, and she will be healed.”

51When he arrived at the house of Jairus, he did not let anyone go in with him except Peter, John and James, and the child’s father and mother. 52Meanwhile, all the people were wailing and mourning for her. “Stop wailing,” Jesus said. “She is not dead but asleep.”

53They laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. 54But he took her by the hand and said, “My child, get up!” 55Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up. Then Jesus told them to give her something to eat. 56Her parents were astonished, but he ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened.

Categories: Communication, News, Haiti, Technology, Books
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It breaks my heart when I talk to energized young people who idolize the icons of the new digital ideology, like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and free/open/Creative Commons mashups. I am always struck by the endless stress they put themselves through. They must manage their online reputations constantly, avoiding the ever-roaming evil eye of the hive mind, which can turn on an individual at any moment. A “Facebook generation” young person who suddenly becomes humiliated online has no way out, for there is only one hive.

I would prefer not to judge the experiences or motivations of other people, but surely this new strain of gadget fetishism is driven more by fear than by love.

At their best, the new Facebook/Twitter enthusiasts remind me of the anarchists and other nutty idealists who populated youth culture when I grew up. The ideas might be silly, but at least the believers have fun as they rebel against the parental-authority quality of entities like record companies that attempt to fight music piracy.

The most effective young Facebook users, however–the ones who will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults–are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

They tend their doppelgängers fastidiously. They must manage offhand remarks and track candid snapshots at parties as carefully as a politician. Insincerity is rewarded, while sincerity creates a lifelong tainting. Certainly, some version of this principle existed in the lives of teenagers before the web came along, but not with such unyielding, clinical precision.

The frenetic energy of the original flowering of the web has reappeared in a new generation, but there is a new brittleness to the types of connections people make online. This is a side effect of the illusion that digital representations can capture much about actual human relationships.

The binary characters at the core of software engineering tends to reappear at higher levels. It is far easier to tell a program to run or not to run, for instance, than it is to tell it to sort-of run. In the same way, it is easier to set up a rigid representation of human relationships on digital networks: on a typical social networking site, either you are designated to be in a couple or you are single (or you are in one of a few other predetermined states of being)–and that reduction of life is what gets broadcast between freinds all the time. What is communicated between people eventually becomes their truth. Relationships take on the troubles of software engineering.

~Jaron Lanier, The Abstract Person Obscures the Real Person

• 
  You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
  Author: Jaron Lanier

Categories: Social Networking, Technology, Relationships, Books
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If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophesy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will–or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual–then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic.

Humans are free. We can commit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion.

Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.

~Jaron Lanier; You are not a Gadget, The Zombie Army

• 
  You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
  Author: Jaron Lanier

Is this simply some over indulgent post apocalyptic worrying or is Jaron getting at something old and true about the perennial temptations to view humankind as less than it is?

More often than not when confronted with something that smells of a conspiracy theory, I produce a derisive smile, perhaps a snide remark, and then I move on with my life and work. But when I read a description like this… when I think through the modern fixation with the “zombie” creature… I can not help but to consider the connection to the creature that C.S. Lewis so aptly named…

Men Without Chests

I do believe that Lewis laid out the formal argument and history for this temptation in his book, “The Abolition of Man” and I believe he carried it out in narrative form through his space odyssey, especially and specifically the third book in the series, “That Hideous Strength”.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that our age of technological immersion of humanity and personhood is going to greatly challenge everything that is an accurate and honest answer to the question…

What does it mean to be human?

…the problem is; zombies don’t answer questions, nor do they pose them.

• 
  The Abolition of Man
  Author: C. S. Lewis

• 
  That Hideous Strength (Space Trilogy, Book 3) (Paperback)
  Author: C.S. Lewis

Categories: Personhood, Zombies, C.S. Lewis, Technology, Books
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How much do you make? have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been…? Are you aware of the fact…? I have here before me… Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions–the patterns of mechanistic technologies–are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank–that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes.” We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. how shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change? What’s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?

~Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the MASSAGE

• 
  The Medium is the Massage
  Author: Quentin Fiore

Categories: Identity, Communication, Culture, Technology
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The worst images are of people who are overloaded with information, they don’t know what to do with it, and have no idea of what is important… they become information junkies.

~Neil Postman

• What is the problem that a technology seeks to solve?
• Who’s problem is it?
• What new problems does the technological solution create?

Neil Postman, our future problems…

Categories: Advice, Technology
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Online culture, he goes on, “is a culture of reaction without action” and rationalizations that “we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm” are just that — rationalizations. “The sad truth,” he concludes, “is that we were not passing through a momentary lull before a storm. We had instead entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.”

~Jaron Lanier, from the NY Times

• 
  You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
  Author: Jaron Lanier

Categories: Technology, Books, Criticisms
No Comments »

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed “infinite riches” in what would have been to motorists “a little room.” The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.” It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.

~C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

• 
  Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
  Author: C.S. Lewis

Categories: C.S. Lewis, Technology, Travel, Books
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