We were pleased to certify the veracity of a quotation by engineer and futurist Buckminster Fuller on the topic of policing the under-class by insisting that we all be kept occupied and not left to our own devices. Speaking volumes on the subject of universal basic income and technological redundancy, Fuller in 1970 answering to an environmental teach-in reported by New York magazine replied:
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Again, instead of being fearful of robots taking our jobs, we ought to welcome it, lest it this revolution, disruption be misappropriated once again.
Wednesday 17 May 2017
i seem to be a verb
when i’m sixty-four
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the release of SGT Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Boing Boing informs, the BBC is airing a documentary featuring biographies on every one of the sixty plus individuals featured on the album’s jacket cover, minus the Beatles.
postcards from the new east
Friend of the blog Messy Nessy Chic revisits the photography of Frank Herford and his collateral series of impression of the post-Soviet building-boom collected while travelling through Russia and its former cadet republics.
agent orange
Breaking with the long-standing tradition that the first foreign visit of a US president is either to neighbouring Canada or Mexico, and amidst the milieu of garnering the displeasure with Turkey over the decision to arm Kurdish rebels in Syria—though despots can always find common-ground, especially when goons can be dispatched to rough up the rabble—I wonder if Dear Leader might not consider foregoing his visit to the Middle East and Italy.
Dear Leader could blame anyone he cares to or make up any excuse and I feel the world might give him a pass for sparing us all the embarrassment and diplomatic damage. The audacious hectoring of presuming to usher in peace in the region (by means of a speech on religious tolerance delivered to audience in a primarily Islamic country excluded from the proposed travel ban due to private business interests) and the rather pushy demand for an audience with the Pope was already edging away from the bounds of normalcy, but now the stakes are much higher—having demonstrated how the regime is willing to risk alienating both political and religious leaders with poor messaging that betrays a fundamental and profound ignorance of statecraft and diplomacy. The partner state’s intelligence that was ill-advisedly boasted about to Russia is likely one of entourage’s whistle-stops. The world has already seen quite enough of Dear Leader’s abominable tantrums and nothing constructive could conceivable come of this excursion.
http referer
Via Kottke, we are directed to a reflection on how the online environment has changed in the past decade by technology correspondent Alexis Madrigal writing for The Atlantic. The article is definitely worth reading through and of course where we are with the internet becomes all the more absorbing when conditioned with the filter of time and wondering how things might be different.
As a fellow purveyor of fine hypertext products surely appreciates diverting from one playground to explore others—or in other terms, to escape from a walled-garden, the central thesis of Madrigal’s argument is encapsulated by those who dare click on a link—with discrimination, sadly, as there are an awful lot of imposters and catch-penny sites and worse out there. What do you think? For better or worse, in 2007—which also saw the iPhone become commercially available, the internet was a quite different network of connections where as much happened below the surface and behind the scenes and parting that curtain to follow the daisy-chain of links to an unexpected place was more routine, whereas after the growth of social platforms (parallel with the pace of the progress of mobility) and dominance—at the expense of the monumental architecture of entities like Wikipedia and the blogosphere though there are quite a few troopers and true-believers, most of the action is on the surface and corralled.
