Men's Memes: Magical thinking

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Magical thinking

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once famously remarked that "Any sufficiently advanced technology will seem indistinguishable from magic."

Technology has already advanced to the point where most of its opperations are a mystery to us. A hundred or so years ago it was faily obvious to grasp how a plough, a pump, a windmill or even a gun worked, but how many of us today REALLY understand how a computer, cellphone, or modern car works? Some people understand the jist of it. Most don't understand the details and the principles behind them.

In the near future technology will be advancing at a quicker and quicker pace. The technology will become more pervasive yet more invisible. For example: websites can already tell what country you are from, and sometimes what your name is. In the near future its probable that when one is walking around, various signs and displays will greet us by name, and show us things that it - through its algorithms - thinks we might be interested in.

Future generations of children will grow up in a world that seems alive, objects that know who they are, and almost unimaginably powerful computing woven into every area of life.

What sort of ideas will such future generations have about the world? Will they subscribe to 'magical thinking' or perhaps they will end up understanding it all better than we do?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: "In the near future technology will be advancing at a quicker and quicker pace".

This assumes you have a smart enough population to invent these new things. The rich and the liberals have quite a different idea about this. Their idea is to fill up the whole of the Western world with a servant caste imported from the Third world -- essentially recreating the master-slave relationships of ancient Rome. The tech future that you envision is not what they envision, and they have the power to implement their vision. They have been doing it all my life.; 7:39 am

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Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."