So, this moldy jail I was in was this old dot-com McMansion, out in the Permanent Foreclosure Zone in the dead suburbs. That's where they cooped us up. This gated community was built for some vanished rich people. That was their low-intensity prison for us rehab detainees.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or urlShareable: The Exterminator's Want-Ad - 1 views
-
-
This place outside was a Beltway suburb before Washington was abandoned. The big hurricane ran right over it, and crushed it down pretty good, so now it was a big green hippie jungle. Our prison McMansion had termites, roaches, mold and fleas, but once it was a nice house. This rambling wreck of a town was half storm-debris. All the lawns were replaced with wet, weedy, towering patches of bamboo, or marijuana -- or hops, or kenaf, whatever (I never could tell those farm crops apart). The same goes for the "garden roofs," which were dirt piled on top of the dirty houses. There were smelly goats running loose, chickens cackling. Salvaged umbrellas and chairs toppled in the empty streets. No traffic signs, because there were no cars.
-
The rich elite just blew it totally. They dropped their globalized ball. They panicked. So they're in jail, like I was. Or they're in exile somewhere, or else they jumped out of penthouses screaming when the hyperinflation ate them alive.
- ...12 more annotations...
THE MACHINE STOPS ... E.M. Forster - 3 views
-
like the cell of a bee
-
She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously
-
I can give you fully five minutes
- ...40 more annotations...
Hayabusa2 and the unfolding future of space exploration | Bryan Alexander - 0 views
-
What might this tell us about the future? Let’s consider Ryugu as a datapoint or story for where space exploration might head next.
-
robots continue to be cheap, far easier to operate, capable of enduring awful stresses, and happy to send gorgeous data back our way
-
Hayabusa is a Japanese project, not an American one, and national interest counts for a lot. No humans were involved, so human interest and story are absent. Perhaps the whole project looks too science-y for a culture that spins into post-truthiness, contains some serious anti-science and anti-technology strands, or just finds science stories too dry. Or maybe the American media outlets think Americans just aren’t that into space in particular in 2018.
- ...13 more annotations...
A woman first wrote the prescient ideas Huxley and Orwell made famous - Quartzy - 1 views
-
In 1919, a British writer named Rose Macaulay published What Not, a novel about a dystopian future—a brave new world if you will—where people are ranked by intelligence, the government mandates mind training for all citizens, and procreation is regulated by the state.You’ve probably never heard of Macaulay or What Not. However, Aldous Huxley, author of the science fiction classic Brave New World, hung out in the same London literary circles as her and his 1932 book contains many concepts that Macaulay first introduced in her work. In 2019, you’ll be able to read Macaulay’s book yourself and compare the texts as the British publisher Handheld Press is planning to re- release the forgotten novel in March. It’s been out of print since the year it was first released.
-
The resurfacing of What Not also makes this a prime time to consider another work that influenced Huxley’s Brave New World, the 1923 novel We by Yvgeny Zamyatin. What Not and We are lost classics about a future that foreshadows our present. Notably, they are also hidden influences on some of the most significant works of 20th century fiction, Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.
-
In Macaulay’s book—which is a hoot and well worth reading—a democratically elected British government has been replaced with a “United Council, five minds with but a single thought—if that,” as she put it. Huxley’s Brave New World is run by a similarly small group of elites known as “World Controllers.”
- ...12 more annotations...
Could fully automated luxury communism ever work? - 0 views
-
Having achieved a seamless, pervasive commodification of online sociality, Big Tech companies have turned their attention to infrastructure. Attempts by Google, Amazon and Facebook to achieve market leadership, in everything from AI to space exploration, risk a future defined by the battle for corporate monopoly.
-
The technologies are coming. They’re already here in certain instances. It’s the politics that surrounds them. We have alternatives: we can have public ownership of data in the citizen’s interest or it could be used as it is in China where you have a synthesis of corporate and state power
-
the two alternatives that big data allows is an all-consuming surveillance state where you have a deep synthesis of capitalism with authoritarian control, or a reinvigorated welfare state where more and more things are available to everyone for free or very low cost
- ...4 more annotations...
Sad by design | Eurozine - 0 views
-
‘technological sadness’ – the default mental state of the online billions
-
If only my phone could gently weep. McLuhan’s ‘extensions of man’ has imploded right into the exhausted self.
-
Social reality is a corporate hybrid between handheld media and the psychic structure of the user. It’s a distributed form of social ranking that can no longer be reduced to the interests of state and corporate platforms. As online subjects, we too are implicit, far too deeply involved
- ...20 more annotations...
1 - 7 of 7
Showing 20▼ items per page