A new Hope?

author Neal Stephenson nails it (once again)

When he was asked, toward the end of lunch, where he thought computing might be headed, he paused to rephrase the question. “I’ll tell you what I’d like to see happen,” he said, and began discussing what the future was supposed to have looked like, back in his 1960s childhood. He ticked off the tropes of what he called “techno-optimistic science fiction,” including flying cars and jetpacks. And then computers went from being things that filled a room to things that could fit on a desk, and the economy and industries changed. “The kinds of super-bright, hardworking geeky people who, 50 years ago, would have been building moon rockets or hydrogen bombs or what have you have ended up working in the computer industry, doing jobs that in many cases seem kind of ignominious by comparison.”

“What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And that at some point we’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, that was interesting — we have a whole set of new tools and capabilities that we didn’t have before the whole computer/Internet thing came along.’ ”

He said people should say, “Now let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things.”

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/out-of-neal-stephensons-imagination-came-a-new-online-world.html?pagewanted=2&_r=3&adxnnlx=1323183633-0j5l3nPjZr4rnCaXDNHXcA

Most idiot job description of 2009

read in the newspaper interview of the failed attempt by activists to destabilize the Copenhagen summit in 2009-12: interview of XX, 21years old climate activist

how sad

He should rather have read Stewart BRAND, hippie and avant-garde environmentalist, and a true eye-opener: read last weekend's FT interview

For more than 40 years, Brand has been at the nexus between California’s counterculture and its technological avant-garde. A quintessential 1960s figure – one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, he appears on the second page of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – who organised a “trips festival”, which brought together 10,000 people to listen to the Grateful Dead and drink acid-laced punch, he is also a Stanford-educated biologist and anthropologist interested in information systems and networks. In short, he has foreseen the future; sometimes blurrily but more often than not with immense prescience. For Brand is an intellectual entrepreneur; he makes ideas happen. His 1968 brainchild, the Whole Earth Catalog, an encyclopaedic review of all that a commune-dweller might need, has been described by Steve Jobs as “sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”. His latest book, Whole Earth Discipline, throws down a gauntlet to the environmental movement he once helped to nurture.

Science fiction as a literature genre? lecture by Neal Stephenson

Xeno-ethnologist, confusion of genres, the standard model, post-cypberpunk.
Neal Stephenson has it all, in his ex cathedra "seminar" at Gresham College.
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