Our Future - In Whose Hands ?

... oil, technology, cars, God or weapons ?

While I can't remember if there's anything is this piece by James Howard Kunstler about God or weapons, he looks at the first three. Here's an excerpt, setting out his recent experience at Google World HQ ... the rest is well worth your time ... but that's only my (warped) opinion.

" I was invited to give a talk at Google headquarters down in Mountain View last Tuesday. They sent somebody to fetch me (in a hybrid car, zowee!) from my hotel in San Francisco -- as if I had any choice about catching a train down, right? Google HQ was a glass office park pod tucked into an inscrutable tangle of off-ramps, berms, manzanita clumps, and curb-cuts. But inside, it was all tricked out like a kindergarten. They had pool tables, and inflatable yoga balls, and $6000 electronic vibrating massage lounge chairs, and snack stations deployed at twenty-five step intervals, with lucite bins filled with chocolate raisins and granola.

The employees dressed like children. There were two motifs: "skateboard rat" and "10th grade nerd." I suppose quite a few of them were millionaires. Many of the work cubicles were literally modular children's playhouses. I gave my spiel about the global oil problem and the unlikelihood that "alternative energy" would even fractionally replace it, and quite a few of the Googlers became incensed.

"Yo, Dude, you're so, like, wrong! We've got, like, technology!"

Yeah, well, they weren't interested in making a distinction between energy and technology (or, more precisely where Google is concerned, a massive web-based advertising scheme --

-- because it is finally clear that all this talk about "connectivity" just leads to more commercial shilling, shucking, jiving, and generally fucking with your headspace in the interstices of whatever purposeful activity one may be struggling to enact on the internet)."

I wish it weren't so. And .. regardless of the fact that we are surrounded by commercial shilling, shucking, jiving and fucking with headspaces, we are going to have to go on about our human lives and the activities that make them up (though to be as fair and balanced as I know how, I'm compelled to insert here a deliciously provocative phrase attributed to Hunter S. Thompson, found over on Mike Golby's blog ... "'I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time'. That yodel of individual freedom on the table, some people nevertheless will persist in struggling to find ways to connect with, engage in and enact purposeful activity on or using the Net.

And once it's owned, filled way beyond bursting with commercial activity, controlled and regulated by corpo-government required digital rights management ... what will we do then ? I suppose if you believe that almost everything we humans do in the real world is - or will be - mirrored in more-or-less composite reflections on/in the Web, there will come to be the equivalent of underground or resistance movements that have specialists who know how to disable or deke out DRM constraints and talk in techno-tongues.

But by then these specialists and the purposeful-activity movementists they serve will no doubt have been officially designated as techno-terrorists, targets for covert ops, snow crashes and other malevolent forms of punishment.

Note - for foreigners, "deke out" is a special way of faking out the challenger in front of you whilst careening around a sheet of ice wearing ice skates, carrying a long, thin curved piece of wood known as a hockey stick, and chasing a round hard black piece of rubber.

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