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By her third play she was considered a “Great Person.” And she really was, one of those few folks who could change the world. Not the best thing to be in a burgeoning police state. But she loved her country and family and didn’t want to flee. She had to solve the puzzle: how to change everything while remaining invisible.

politics art
8 hours ago

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How will our starships navigate in deep space?

Currently there is an International Deep Space Network, with three massive antennas placed on three different places on Earth, each roughly one hundred and twenty degrees from each other, checking position on various space craft. The antennas are in the Mojave desert, in the United States, just outside of Madrid in Spain, and outside of Canberra, Australia.

There are European, Indian, and Chinese Deep Space Networks as well, and they all take advantage of one of the few easy things about space: it's easy to make signals omnidirectional. Three stations on Earth are all that you need — get thirty thousand kilometers away from Earth, and you're always in view of an antenna. Place an antenna in space, and let it send out radio signals in all directions, and you've got a beacon that shines everywhere.

Of course, as explorers get farther and farther out they'd need a longer and longer chain of beacons sending out signals that can lead them home. And assuming that each of these beacons is dependent on signals from the last to keep from straying off course, then if there's even one break in the chain, the entire system could go down. If one antenna on Earth went down, we might lose one third of the starships out there.

Even if everything works perfectly, there's an error of four kilometers for every astronomical unit traveled from Earth. An astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun — a tiny unit in the grand scheme of things. Although four kilometers is even tinier, a chain of mistakes could add up. This has caused some people to look for more natural landmarks, that will continue under their own power.

space navigation stars pulsars galaxies distance
11 hours ago

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Deconstructing our future

Shorter version: a big chunk of the "accelerating change" meme actually emerges from our experience of the future shock induced by our Martian invaders — the corporatist liquidation or privatisation of human social structures not mediated by money, culminating ultimately in the experience of disaster capitalism.

Yes, there is rapid technological progress in some areas. It's not all bad. But the beneficiaries of that particular shift (a narrow technological elite, and their masters in the shape of the 0.1%, the financial/social engineers who direct the new hive-organism aristocracy) have made a fetish out of change, ignoring (for the most part) the uncomfortable fact that "creative destruction" is an oxymoron:

future capitalism 2012 charlesstross tech singularity
13 hours ago

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The Unbearable Stasis of "Accelerating Change"

And when I declare that the more assertively "techno-transcendental" varieties of futurological discourse (like the transhumanists, the singularitarians, the techno-immortalists, the nano-cornucopians, the digital-utopians) are simply extreme and hyperbolic variations of mainstream neoliberal global developmental policy discourse and mainstream marketing, advertising, and PR forms, this latter claim shouldn't be seen as undermining the first. Because there is an unmistakably faith-mobilizing pseudo-transcendentalizing strain to be discerned in this very PR marketing imaginary, deranging us from our present distress into a yearning toward consumer techno-futures bathed in pastels and robots and cars and DNA helices and chocolate and glossy hair and youthful skin and golden sex.

Advertizing and online profiling practices are the opiate of the masses in the age of digitally-networked corporate-militarism (the present stage of capitalism), as Debord insisted in the sixties and Barthes in the fifties and Adorno in the forties and Benjamin in the thirties, a mass mediated Opium War (and often literal war) distracts the masses from awareness that we have already long since arrived at the techno-scientific level to provide security and equity and hence universal emancipation for all, distracting us endlessly instead into internecine struggles over pseudo-needs and pseudo-strivings that leave the obsolete bloodsoaked hierarchies enjoyed by elite incumbents in place, and so seduces us into ongoing collaboration with the terms of our own exploitation. The deceptive and hyperbolic advertising and marketing forms that utterly suffuse our public life amount to a reservoir of fervent reactionary religiosity, a religiosity that achieves one of its more incandescent expressions in the static ec-static intensities of the superlative techno-transcendentalizing futurology, and of the Robot Cultists who sing its praises unto death.

future tech brucesterling change 2012
13 hours ago

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Free To Be... Straight White Males

And TED-style libertarian techno-futurism is, finally, intensely dehumanizing, to me. Because the world humans live in is a world of power and influence. That is: of human bias and pettiness and ugliness and smallness and so on. When you lose that context—all of it, all the various kinds of privilege and reflexive privilege-denial—you are not talking about things as they are. You're talking about "killer apps" or "innovation," to and for rich people. The future won't look like that. It won't care about it. It shouldn't.

privilege race gender 2012 tedtalk money politics
3 days ago

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Detroit plans to shrink by leaving half the city in the dark

Detroit plans to shrink by leaving half the city in the dark [Urban Planning] from io9 http://io9.com

googlereader
3 days ago

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Welcome to the Future Nauseous

So what about elements of the future that arrive relatively successfully for everybody, like cellphones? Here, the idea I called the Milo Criterion kicks in: successful products are precisely those that do not attempt to move user experiences significantly, even if the underlying technology has shifted radically. In fact the whole point of user experience design is to manufacture the necessary normalcy for a product to succeed and get integrated into the Field. In this sense user experience design is reductive with respect to technological potential.

future culture mcluhan williamgibson 2012 tech
20 days ago

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Using Super Mario to explain the internal logic of Gothic manuscript illuminations - Boing Boing

Using Super Mario to explain the internal logic of Gothic manuscript illuminations from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net

googlereader
21 days ago

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RIP, MCA: Supercut of Adam Yauch opening lines from every single Beastie Boys song - Boing Boing

RIP, MCA: Supercut of Adam Yauch opening lines from every single Beastie Boys song from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net

googlereader
22 days ago

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The Case for Breaking Up With Your Parents

Even if you haven't read the books in which these invented beings appear, you've probably heard of them and their stories; may even have a rudimentary sense of what they are like as "people" (self-reliant, footloose, attractive, curious, quick-thinking, lucky, tricky, a mischief-maker, the proverbial black sheep ... and so on).

teaching education 2012 culture literature orphans children
22 days ago

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