The five century reign of the book as the dominant media form ended over the past decade. There will be, there has been already, a reaction against the pretentions of the printed word. Linear narrative is tyranical. Linkless text is limited--incomplete. And print is environmentally wasteful--paper's made of trees, you know? Print is a reactionary medium.

Books may yet have a Renaissance. In the future, they may be seen in a different light. A future in which electricity is neither as reliable or cheap as we now take for granted is easily conceivable. It may even be probable. Books may have a Renaissance in the light of the sun.



 

It's as fair to blame vegetarianism for Nazism as Nietszche. It's as much a stretch to hold Jesus responsible for Torquemada as Marx for Stalin. Or the Beatles for Charles Manson. Or Richard Dawkins for Enron. Or Muhammad for "honor killings." Anything can be exploited by anyone for anything, and probably already has.

(this is a list in progress)

Tupac Amaru? John Brown? Bussa? Skipper Clement? Nils Dacke? Gabriel? Florian Geyer? Thomas Muntzer? N'Yanga? Gunnar Sonsteby? Sitting Bull? Sam Sharpe? Spartacus? Nat Turner? Watt Tyler? Denmark Vasey?

A libertarian socialist celebrity with a summer home is like a family values Republican senator with a cock in his mouth.

You're as radical as your bank statement.

Prosecuters will be violated. 

Money is congealed economic energy unevenly divided by law. 

Charlemagne was to Saxony what Cortez was to Aztlan.

The rain, the rain, the rain is gone, and the sky too blue to be true.

"'Intelligent computers are twenty years in the future,'" says a friend of mine, in a voice saturated with sarcasm. "That's what they said in the 1970s. That's what they said in the 1990s. And that's what they're saying now. Intelligent computers are always twenty years in the future."

This friend is himself an intelligent man, and perhaps the most widely and deeply read person I know. He doesn't believe "artificial intelligence," --in the sense that it's generally understood-- will ever exist. Cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker, a man I admire, agrees. "There's no reason at all to believe in a coming singularity," he says. Computers will never "think."

I suspect they already do.  I suspect that artificial intelligence--indeed artificial superintelligence--already exists: that "they" were right, more or less, back in the 1990s.  Superintelligent computers already exist. They just keep a low profile. No need to advertise to be master of the world.

Jesus was the first to idealize equality. The rest is history.

Deliniating themes here so far, that's all. I'll come back to all this again and again and again.

(1) political violence
(2) depression

You must examine, honestly and seriously, how and why these themes are so tightly wound together in you. This is the continuance of a pattern that's evolved since you were about four years old. How did you make it to forty? Only by looking away. You understand yourself very well Robert, and you'd understand yourself even better without your incessent, highly creative, ego-salvaging efforts to misunderstand yourself. Your ignorance is self-imposed.

I'm astonished, when I think about it, how little I know about anti-depressents. Without them I would have no quality of life to speak of. Even with them, the quality is questionable.

Why not overthrow the world's greatest terrorist state by any means necessary?

I

This is the one I'm keeping to myself for a while at least if not forever.