Hey I have an idea! Let’s turn this into an argument about Snowden! He’s so much more interesting than those boring computer programs.
Similar to how Google and other corrupt entities like Apple and Microsoft aren’t on a level playing field with companies and small businesses that don’t “play ball” and sell out their customers to an authoritarian state. Being a scumbag sure has its perks.
I keep telling people (and the march of the fascist boot goes on…) that THX1138 was not science-fiction. It is future-docudrama.
Modern fascism is far superior and more sophisticated than the failed old models.
I wonder if this happens on other planets? A dominant species spends millennia bumbling along under feudal warlords until eventually, a spurt of technological development manages to squeeze through the dead hand of authority and there’s a brief period of progress culminating in a few generations of freedom and democracy never seen before. But the technology keeps getting better and the feudal warlords revive, and use it to return the species to the status quo.
…and seemingly immune to whatever anyone thinks or does about it.
Is that because it’s also more nebulous, more virtualised, perhaps, after the great Iain Banks, more synthetic?
It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.
From this essay:
A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE
I agree! Let’s start with Snowden’s condition of asylum in Russia that he no longer leak the world governments’ secrets…
Why would it have to happen on other planets when it keeps happening here?
“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
