Why is the United States the spearhead of the technological future? Beyond its massive power as the leading empire of 21st century political economy, what explains the remarkable historical situation that since its Puritan origins America has actually innovated the future thanks to a seemingly singular cultural genius for innovation, creativity and (patent-driven) consumer practicality? Here, seizing upon the language of technological innovation as its primary means of expression, what might be described as the discourse of technology and the American mind has become both the essence of American drive towards the fully realized technological future and increasingly, due to its hegemony as a dominant political power, the dominant cultural code of global society.    more »

The fortunes of Hölderlin under the Nazis are intricately intertwined with his fortunes in the hands of his most influential interpreter, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's meditations on the place of Germany in history are carried out largely in the form of commentaries on Hölderlin. In the 1930s Heidegger saw Hölderlin as the prophet of a new dawn; when the Reich collapsed he saw him as the consoling poet for dark times when the gods withdraw. While in rough outline this account squares with the Nazi version, it does an injustice to the seriousness with which Heidegger reflects on each line of Hölderlin. To Heidegger in "the completely destitute time" of the present (he was writing in 1946), when the relevance of poetry is everywhere in doubt, Hölderlin is the one who articulates most clearly the essential calling of the poet, namely to speak the words that bring a new world into being. We read Hölderlin's dark poetry, says Heidegger, not so much to understand him as to keep in contact with him until that future arrives when he will at last be understandable. He quotes Hölderlin:

The bold spirit, like an eagle
Before the tempests, flies prophesying
In the path of his advancing gods.    more »

It was in an equally desperate gamble at increasing popular awareness of the "flip" done to us by the age of electric circuitry that McLuhan undertook an essentially medical survey of technological society. McLuhan's "classification of symptoms" took the form of an elaborate and historical description of the evolution of technology from the "mechanical" extensions of man (wheels, tools, printing) to the mythic, inclusive technologies of the electric age (television, movies, computers, telephone, phonograph). His "diagnosis" was that the crisis induced by technological society had much to do with the "closures" (numbing) effected among the sense ratios by new technical inventions. McLuhan was explicit about the technological origins of the modern stress syndrome: "the outering or extension of our bodies and senses in a new invention compels the whole of our bodies and senses to shift into new positions in order to maintain equilibrium."
A new "closure" is occasioned in our sensory organs and faculties, both private and public, by new technical extension of man. And McLuhan's "therapeutic": the deployment of the "creative imagination" as a new way of seeing technology, and of responding, mythically and in depth, to the challenges of the age of electric circuitry. For McLuhan, the stress syndrome associated with the coming-to-be of the technostructure could only be met with the assistance of educated perspective. If it is the human fate to live within its (own) central nervous system in the form of the electronic simulation of consciousness, then it is also the human challenge to respond creatively to the "dread" and "anxiety" of the modern age. We may be the servomechanisms, the body bits, of a technical apparatus which substitutes a language of codes, of processed information, for "natural" experience, but this is a human experience which is double-edged. Without the education of perspective or, for that matter, in the absence of a "multidimensional perspective" on technique, it will surely be the human destiny to be imprinted by the structural imperatives, the silent grammar, of the new world information order.
But it was also McLuhan's hope, occasioned by his faith in the universality of reason that the electronic age could be transformed in the direction of creative freedom. After all, it was his over-arching thesis that the era of electric circuitry represented a great break-point in human experience: the end of "visual, uniform culture" based on mechanical technologies, and the ushering in of a popular culture of the "new man". which would be fully tribal and organic. In all his texts, but particularly in The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan insisted on teasing out the emancipatory tendencies in new technologies. Against the blandishments of an "official culture" to impose old meanings on novel technologies, McLuhan sympathized with "anti-social perspectives": the creative perspectives of the artist, the poet, and even the young, who respond with "untaught delight to the poetry, and the beauty of the new technological environment."
In his intellectual commitment to the development of a new perspective on technology, McLuhan was, of course, only following Joyce in his willingness to respond to the technological environment with a sense of its "creative process." "He (Joyce) saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it awake or awake or both." Anyway in McLuhan's world, in a society which has sound as its environment, we have no choice.
"We simply are not equipped with earlids."    more »

Dennett's singularly contentless commentary reminded me of this motto and its corollary, "When you have nothing to say, say it louder"—a tactic that got 450 prophets of Baal into terminal trouble with Elijah. Dennett devoted the longest chapter of his recent book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to what I described as "an excoriating caricature of my ideas, all in order to bolster his defense of Darwinian fundamentalism." In two recent articles in this journal, I presented a response that, although strongly worded in my own defense, presented a series of general intellectual arguments and specific documentations. In Part 1, I critiqued the three metaphors (and metaphor-making as a scientific tactic in general) that underpin the logic of Dennett's entire case: Darwinism as a "universal acid"; the image of cranes vs. skyhooks as explanatory principles; and the claim that evolution is algorithmic. In my own defense in Part 2, I then explained the potential importance to evolutionary theory of three arguments associated with my work, and falsely branded as trivial by an uncomprehending Dennett: punctuated equilibrium, spandrels, and contingency of evolutionary patterns. Finally, I quoted specific examples of his unfair rhetorical tactics in four categories: false assimilation to statements made by others, false characterizations, high density of factual error, and gratuitous speculation about motives.   more »

The first part of this article outlined the general fallacies of ultra-Darwinian fundamentalism, especially in the light of new theories and discoveries in the core disciplines of developmental biology, paleontology, and population genetics. In this second and concluding part, I shall analyze a prominent philosopher's influential but misguided ultra-Darwinian manifesto—Darwin's Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett. I shall also take upthe methodology of so-called "evolutionary psychology"—a field now in vogue as a marketplace for ultra-Darwinian explanatory doctrine. Evolutionary psychology could, in my view, become a fruitful science by replacing its current penchant for narrow, and often barren, speculation with respect for the pluralistic range of available alternatives that are just as evolutionary in status, more probable in actual occurrence, and not limited to the blinkered view that evolutionary explanations must identify adaptations produced by natural selection.   more »

A spokesman for Novell, Bruce Lowry, said: "We don't want to speculate on what would happen under the next version of the GNU General Public License because things are still in motion." Microsoft had no comment. In the meantime, the prospect of a drawn-out legal battle with Microsoft, an experienced litigator, could push users of Linux into the hands of Novell and away from dominant Linux provider Red Hat Inc. (RHAT.O), which does not have such a deal with Microsoft. Although Linux is free, providers of the system offer the software with packaging, documentation and -- most important -- installation and maintenance, so that any client shift from Red Hat would cost it money. "Either customers desert Red Hat to go to Novell, to get safety, or Red Hat will be forced into a similar deal with Microsoft," said Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York. LIABILITY? Under the Novell deal, in which both companies agreed not to sue each other's clients for patent violation, Microsoft agreed to pay Novell $348 million, with Novell paying Microsoft $40 million, on the basis that Novell has fewer customers.    more »

Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.    more »

Occidentalism is the twin sister of Orientalism which was considered in the excellent article Deb just posted from the London Review (rc):

"Oswald Spengler warned in 1933 (of all years) that the main threats to the Occident came from "colored peoples" (Farbigen).[5] He prophesied, not entirely without reason, huge uprisings of enraged peoples in the European colonies. He also claimed that after 1918 the Russians had become "Asiatic" again, and that the Japanese Yellow Peril was about to engulf the civilized world. More interesting, however, was Spengler's view that the ruling white races (Herrenvölker) were losing their position in Europe. Soon, he said, true Frenchmen would no longer rule France, which was already awash with black soldiers, Polish businessmen, and Spanish farmers. The West, he concluded, would go under because white people had become soft, decadent, addicted to safety and comfort. As he put it: "Jazz music and nigger dances are the death march of a great civilization."
If criticism of the West was influenced by half-baked ideas from Germany, more positive views of the West were also influenced by German ideas. The Slavophiles and the Westernizers, who offered opposing views of the West in nineteenth-century Russia, were both equally inspired by German intellectual currents. Ideas for or against the West are in fact to be found everywhere. The East does not begin at the river Elbe, as Konrad Adenauer believed, nor does the West start in Prague, as Milan Kundera once suggested. East and West are not necessarily geographical territories. Rather, Occidentalism, which played such a large part in the attacks of September 11, is a cluster of images and ideas of the West in the minds of its haters. Four features of Occidentalism can be seen in most versions of it; we can call them the City, the Bourgeois, Reason, and Feminism. Each contains a set of attributes, such as arrogance, feebleness, greed, depravity, and decadence, which are invoked as typically Western, or even American, characteristics.
The things Occidentalists hate about the West are not always the ones that inspire hatred of the US. The two issues should not be conflated. A friend once asked in astonishment: "Why does he hate me? I didn't even help him." Some people hate the US because they were helped by the US, and some because they were not. Some resent the way the US helped their own hateful governments gain or stay in power. Some feel humiliated by the very existence of the US, and some by US foreign policy. With some on the left, hatred of the US is all that remains of their leftism; anti-Americanism is part of their identity. The same goes for right-wing cultural Gaullists. Anti-Americanism is an important political issue, related to Occidentalism but not quite the same thing".    more »

Early in 1995, his tenure as George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense timed out, Dick Cheney was raising money for a stalled 1996 presidential run when he was asked, legendarily out of the blue on a fly-fishing trip but in fact unsurprisingly for someone with government connections in both energy and defense, to become CEO of Halliburton. In the early summer of 2000, flying home with his daughter Mary from a hunting trip, Cheney, then five years into his job at Halliburton, a period for which he had collected $44 million (plus deferments and stock options) and during which the Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root had billed the United States $2 billion for services in Bosnia and Kosovo, told Mary that Joe Allbaugh, the national campaign manager of Bush's 2000 campaign, had asked him to consider being Bush's running mate. In July 2000, after conducting a search for another candidate and detailing the reasons why he himself would be a bad choice ("Knowing my dad, I'm sure he didn't hold anything back as he laid out the disadvantages of selecting him as the nominee"), in other words assuring himself carte blanche, Cheney agreed to join the ticket. In February 2001, Joe Allbaugh, whose previous experience was running the governor's office for Bush in Texas, became head of FEMA, where he hired Michael D. ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job") Brown. In December 2002, Allbaugh announced that he was resigning from FEMA, leaving Brown in charge while he himself founded New Bridge Strategies, LLC, "a unique company," according to its Web site, "that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq." This was the US-led war in Iraq that had not then yet begun. When David Kennedy spoke at Stanford about the vacuum in political accountability that could result from waging a war while a majority of Americans went on "with their own affairs unbloodied and undistracted," he was talking only about the absence of a draft. He was not talking about the ultimate step, the temptation to wage the war itself to further private ends, or "business opportunities," or other priorities. Nor was he talking about the intermediate step, which was to replace the manpower no longer available by draft by contracting out "logistical" support to the private sector, in other words by privatizing the waging of the war. This step, now so well known as to be a plot point on Law and Order (civilian contract employees in Iraq fall out among themselves; a death ensues; Sam Waterston sorts it out), had already been taken. There are now, split among more than 150 private firms, thousands of such contracts outstanding. Halliburton alone had by July 2004 contracts worth $11,431,000,000.    more »

With early ambitions of being a novelist, Dr. Geertz brought a distinctly literary sensibility to the study of anthropology with his sophisticated prose and vivid descriptions of social customs abroad. While at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, Dr. Geertz (pronounced "Gurts") was the leader of the "symbolic anthropology" movement, which departed from the idea of relying on established, hard-and-fast facts. He saw anthropology as more of an imaginative undertaking than a science. All an anthropologist could hope to do, he believed, was to understand the rituals, myths, language and art that govern a society's day-to-day actions. In his most influential book, "The Interpretation of Cultures" (1973), Dr. Geertz described culture as "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life."    more »

Animals are on the run. Plants are migrating too. The Earth's creatures, save for one species, do not have thermostats in their living rooms that they can adjust for an optimum environment. Animals and plants are adapted to specific climate zones, and they can survive only when they are in those zones. Indeed, scientists often define climate zones by the vegetation and animal life that they support. Gardeners and bird watchers are well aware of this, and their handbooks contain maps of the zones in which a tree or flower can survive and the range of each bird species.
Those maps will have to be redrawn. Most people, mainly aware of larger day-to-day fluctuations in the weather, barely notice that climate, the average weather, is changing. In the 1980s I started to use colored dice that I hoped would help people understand global warming at an early stage. Of the six sides of the dice only two sides were red, or hot, representing the probability of having an unusually warm season during the years between 1951 and 1980. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, four sides were red. Just such an increase in the frequency of unusually warm seasons, in fact, has occurred. But most people —who have other things on their minds and can use thermostats—have taken little notice.
... we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating. To achieve the alternative scenario will require prompt gains in energy efficiencies so that the supply of conventional fossil fuels can be sustained until advanced technologies can be developed. If instead we follow an energy-intensive path of squeezing liquid fuels from tar sands, shale oil, and heavy oil, and do so without capturing and sequestering CO2 emissions, climate disasters will become unavoidable.   more »

Despite much recent controversy about the theory of evolution, major changes in our understanding of evolution over the past twenty years have gone virtually unnoticed.[1] At the heart of Darwin's theory of evolution is an explanation of how plants and animals evolved from earlier forms of life that have long since disappeared; but his theory says nothing about the factors that determine the shape, color, and size of a particular fish, whale, or butterfly. Darwin and his contemporaries realized that understanding the evolution of animal forms and understanding how a fertilized egg develops into a whale, cow, or human being must be deeply connected; but they didn't know how to make the connection. Surprising discoveries in the 1980s have begun to tell us how an embryo develops into a mature animal, and these discoveries have radically altered our views of evolution and of the relation of human beings to all other animals. The new field of study in which these breakthroughs have been made is called Evo Devo, short for evolution and development, "development" referring to both how an embryo grows and how the newborn infant matures into an adult.    more »

Pankaj Mishra is the latest distinctive heir to this tradition, and his deepest theme is how the dream of the West at once inspires and confounds a hopeful young man in small-town India who longs to escape the "cruel, garish world of middle-class India" and to remake himself, much as Naipaul has done, through books and reflective wanderings alone. Mishra's first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995), describes his travels around a provincial India where a new video-and-Vegas culture is creating a bumptious bourgeoisie that has taken in the latest toys from the West, but has no sense of how to use them. His first novel, The Romantics, in 2000, brought the theme closer to home by describing an Indian student in Benares, his head full of Flaubert and Turgenev, watching, in bewilderment and with mingled wonder and disappointment, the Western visitors around him picking up and dropping philosophies and partners with an ease unimaginable to him. These drifters look nothing like the people he has met in the pages of Edmund Wilson or Schopenhauer; more hauntingly, though having had the benefits of Enlightenment cultures, they seem lost themselves, confused and disenchanted. The book is moving because it shows us the passage to the East as it looks from the other side of the fence, Siddhartha, you could say, as it might seem to one who looks for the answer to life's riddles to Germany.    more »

Ontotheology means the ontology of God and/or the theology of being. It refers to a tradition of philosophical theology first prominent among medieval scholastics such as Anselm, Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. In some usages, the term has been taken to refer to Western metaphysics in general. Contents [hide] 1 History and Usage of the term 1.1 Kant 1.2 Hegel 1.3 Heidegger 1.4 Contemporary Writers 2 See also 3 Selected writings 4 Notes and References [edit]History and Usage of the term    more »

James Lovelock is among the planet's most interesting and productive scientists. His invention of an electron capture device that was able to detect tiny amounts of chemicals enabled other scientists both to understand the dangers of DDT to the eggshells of birds and to figure out the ways in which chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were eroding the ozone layer. He's best known, though, not for a gadget but for a metaphor: the idea that the earth might usefully be considered as a single organism (for which he used the name of the Greek earth goddess Gaia) struggling to keep itself stable. In fact, his so-called Gaia hypothesis was at first less clear than that— "hardly anyone, and that included me for the first ten years after the concept was born, seems to know what Gaia is," he has written. But the hypothesis has turned into a theory, still not fully accepted by other scientists but not scorned either. It holds that the earth is "a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system" and striving to "regulate surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life." Putting aside questions of planetary consciousness and will (beloved as they were by an early wave of New Age Gaia acolytes), the theory may help us understand how the earth has managed to remain hospitable for life over billions of years even as the sun, because of its own stellar evolution, has become significantly hotter. Through a series of processes involving, among others, ice ages, ocean algae, and weathering rock, the earth has managed to keep the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and hence the temperature, at a relatively stable level.    more »

The process called 'Autopoiesis' purports to capture this invariant feature of living systems, which are characterised as 'living machines'. The wider body of Autopoietic theory expresses this idea, and a number of other ideas supporting and expanding on it, representing a complete and coherent worldview. This body of theory contains novel and significant perspectives on a number of familiar phenomena and concepts, such as behaviour and observation. It is not hard to see why this theory might appeal to a variety of other academic disciplines - the constructs involved are based on dynamics and relationships, not the particular 'stuff' or constitution of a system (except in so far as they instantiate the relevant dynamics), and hence permit their potential application to anything that can be expressed in terms of 'systems'.   more »

I am not sure if the course content I surveyed quite lives up to the Vision Statement, but here unexpectedly is SAIMC http://www.saimc.com/    more »

Fresh disasters at the polls -- and new evidence from an industry insider -- prove that electronic voting machines can't be trusted.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" -- his report on Republican methods for keeping more than 350,000 Ohio voters from casting ballots or having their votes counted.

The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation's election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio - where, as I recently reported in "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County. ...   more »

We are very pleased to announce a new CTheory Live symposium: "Religion, Technology & Terrorism," which was broadcast from the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture, University of Victoria (www.pactac.net) on Thursday, October 19, 2006. The symposium was followed by the electronic book launch of two new CTheory Books projects.   more »

If a dramatic new truth about the world were to come [into] view; if, in the succession of the Copernican revolution, Darwinian evolution, Freudianism, or quantum mechanics, we were tomorrow to become completely convinced that extrasensory perception, say, is a reality, or if we were to discover life on other planets so radically deifferent that it threw the question of what life is into an entirely new perpective--if revolutionary discoveries such as these were to come into view I suspect that interest would swing rapidly from many of our present minute concerns toward working on the implications of the new discoveries for our view of life and reality in general.    more »