So how long do you think it’s going to be until they can’t afford to keep up all this ridiculous shit they’ve built and the entire thing turns into a post-apocalyptic wasteland with lawless bandits scavenging for all of the luxury items no one is around to pay for? Should be exciting!
I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I’m guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn’t there.
Something that always fascinated us about Ringworld was this notion of breeding people to be lucky (for those of you who had a social life as a teenager, the book in part was about a future in which many people have to win the lottery in order to have a baby); we have always been curious about whether this would actually work.
karma really is a bitch.
…
Virtually all of the houses with a single occupant or family (as indicated by a single doorbell or knocker) were shoveled clean. Nearly every house with multiple occupants — and most businesses — were unshoveled.
…
A common good that requires work to maintain is ignored if there is a diffusion of responsibility.
emphasis mine.
In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they’re indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little. We’ve now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.
Yep.
You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet.
I read this a little over a week ago. It rings so true I can hardly stand it. To what area of human endeavor does the principle, “Set your own limits or the environment will set them for you” not apply? Yet who lives by it consistently?
From Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows.
humans assume that environmental systems will help them succeed when, often, self-imposed limitations allow us to maximize our performance in relation to circumstance.
And too often, we fill that void with instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that Walter disdained, rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed. “What happened today?” is replaced with “Who won today?” The public debate cheapens. The public trust falters. We fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should –- and that has real consequences in our own lives and in the life of our nation. We seem stuck with a choice between what cuts to our bottom line and what harms us as a society. Which price is higher to pay? Which cost is harder to bear?
If I want to get home from work, the market offers me a choice between a Ford and a Toyota, but not between a car and a subway. That is a social decision.
interesting read via a & l daily. time constraints have led me to neglect the longer stuff highlighted on there - i need to make a point to get back into them.
fingers crossed, this will be the 2nd decade i’ve lived fully through.
what’s interesting to me is the way things are evolving. they’re not changing and becoming better (for instance, a car in 1970 pales in comparison to a car today) but instead - society has begun to eliminate, in some respects, what is unnecessary to survival. not for obvious actual survival reasons but we’ve begun to enact efficiencies on our lives. which is vaguely comforting to me.
Increasingly the choice of whether to adopt, or opt-in to a technology is one of whether to opt-out of society.
