On 07/27/2018 06:04 AM, John Newman wrote:
On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 10:58:31PM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
<SNIP>
I like Douglas Rushkoff, or his work at least: I make a point of reading everything of his I can get my hands on. He seems to have mastered the art of presenting information in a context that never quite crosses the line to offend Liberal and Oligarch sensibilities, but the data itself tends to convey an inherently radical message to anyone with more than half a brain & clue. He has often been been the first to bring the most useful and interesting "new stuff" to (nearly) mass market audiences. Students of propaganda should not miss the Rushkoff canon.
I think Kurzweil and most of the other "futurists" out there are really just shity wannabe sci-fi writers. Cory Doctorow excluded perhaps, he can actually write at least, and hasn't staked his name and career on predictions of some sort of technological ex machina that will save humanity from its own over-indulgence and inability to think in the long term.
Cory Doctorow is cool, and all, but his fiction is ~lame. I like the ideology pretty much, but the writing just doesn't grab me. But then, I'm rather into action porn, so hey. Anyway, I'm reminded of Old Bill Burroughs' stuff about the rich planning to escape Earth on nuclear-pulse-driven ships. He didn't flesh it out, but it basically involved planetary-scale destruction. Now of course, the g-forces involved would have killed everyone in the ships. But consider Vinge's ships, combining bobble tech with nuclear pulse propulsion. Bobbles, for those who don't know Vinge's stuff, are spherical stasis fields. Inside the bobble, time stops for some set external time. So from the outside, bobbles are perfect spherical mirrors. To everything, including acceleration. And you can have a complex structure, with configurations of bobbles nested within bobbles. So basically, the ship periodically drops a nuclear device, bobbles and rides the shock wave, and then de-bobbles and repeats. And there's no limit to the size of the nuclear devices. Could be the entire planet :(