#longquotation

[blakechastain]

The Long Quotation, 5/31/13: Douglas Coupland

“But somewhere around 2003 the texture of daily life inside Western media-driven societies began to morph, and quickly, to the point where, a half-decade later, it’s now obvious to people who were around in the twentieth-century that time not only seems to be moving more quickly, but it’s beginning to feel funny, too. There’s no more tolerance for waiting of any sort. We want all the facts and we want them now. To go without email for forty-eight hours can trigger a meltdown. You can’t slow down, even once, ever, without becoming irrelevant. Music has become more important because music is a constant. School reunions are beside the point because we already know what our old classmates have done. Children often spend more time in dreamland and cyberspace than in real life. Time is speeding up even faster. And then the economy collapsed in a weird way that felt like a hard-to-describe mix of Google, The New York Times’s website, pop-up ads for Russian pornography websites….All this information and more has overtly, osmotically, or perhaps inadvertently damaged a collective sense of time that has been working well enough since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle classes. This “timesickness” is probably what killed the economy, and God only knows what it’s up to next….People are now doing their deepest thinking and making their most emotionally charged connections with people around the planet at all times of the day. Geography has become irrelevant….Time speeds up and then it begins to shrink. Years pass by in minutes. Life becomes that strange experience in which you’re zooming along a freeway and suddenly realize that you haven’t paid attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you’re still alive and didn’t crash. The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be “you.” Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing.”

This is such a good description of how it feels to be caught up in the Internet now—to feel irrevocably bound to the instantaneous, to feel as if your response time is always too slow, to feel immediately irrelevant because you didn’t publish your gut reaction right away and immediately nostalgic about an experience because the act of documenting every event separates you from the direct knowledge of unmediated experience. You have to “keep up” with your feeds, your media consumption, the news, music, and everything else that might have happened today-this minute-that-minute, because you feel obligated to. We feel the need to make a decision about whether to share any thought we might have. This is a new feeling, and it isn’t a good one. Most of the time it feels like dread.

Douglas Coupland, from Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! buy here.

[blakechastain]

The Long Quotation, 02/04/2013

“What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think that much that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless? It is by its content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity—happy times and sad times, the time the rabbit bit your finger, the time you had your first taste of bananas and cream, the time you were crying yourself to sleep when somebody came and lay down beside you in the dark for comfort. Childhood’s time is Adam & Eve’s time before they left the garden for good and from that time on divided everything into before and after.”

Frederick Beuchner, <i>The Sacred Journey

[blakechastain]

The Long Quotation: 1/7/2013

“Of all the sacrifices we make when we devote ourselves to the Internet as our universal medium, the greatest is likely to be the wealth of connections within our own minds. It’s true that the Web is itself a network of connections, but the hyper-links that associate bits of online data are nothing like the synapses in our brain. The Web’s links are just addresses, simple software tags that direct a browser to load another discrete page of information. They have none of the organic richness or sensitivity of our synapses….the Web’s connections are not *our* connections—and no matter how many hours we spend searching and surfing, they will never become our connections. When we outsource our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and even our identity. William James, in concluding his 1892 lecture on memory, said “The connecting *is* the thinking.” To which could be added, “The connecting *is* the self.”

. -Nicholas Carr, *The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” 2010.

[blakechastain]

The Long Quotation, 07/05/2012

"Where, for the Greeks, techne always had two complementary but never completely separable aspects--the increasingly self-aware originating and the outer result--our technology has become so much gadgetry and wiring and abstract protocols and transistors in one physical state or another. We have forgotten the crafty inner origin and essence of the techne that once served our ancestors so well. And so we reconceive the interior space within which Odysseus hatched his plots and secured his name, telling ourselves that it is merely filled with mindless brain mechanisms, more gadgets like the external ones we are so adept at making. In other words, the techne that devises is being co-opted by its own devices. Odyssesus was on his way to being a true contriver; we seem content to be mere contrivances. Compare Homer's man of many devices with Silicon Valley's man of many gadgets, and you will immediately recognize a reversal of emphasis within techne. Where the individual's consciousness of self once became more vivid through the experience of his own capacity to objectify his inner contrivings in the outer world, today the objects as such have engulfed us, threatening the originating self with oblivion."

-Steve Talbott, Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, 2007.

[blakechastain]

The Long Quotation 04/09/2012

"There is a world of difference between the modern home environment of integrated electric information and the classroom. Today's television child is attuned to up-to-the-minute "adult" news--inflation, rioting, war, taxes, crime, bathing beauties--and is bewildered when he enters the nineteenth-century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up with its inventories and assembly lines. The "child" was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense. Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice." Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, 1967.

[blakechastain]

The Long Quotation 1/21/2012: Sallie McFague

“One critical issue is the motivation to act.  We must realize that the “problem” is in our heads and hearts as much as it is in the policies of governments and of multinational corporations.  As Monibot points out, “In fighting climate change, we must fight not only the oil companies, the airlines and governments of the rich world; we must also fight ourselves.”  We are the enemy: our beliefs about who we are and what we are entitled to are as much at fault as the institutions that control trade and make war.  In fact, our beliefs and institutions are secretly connected.  As Monibot notes, governments know that the electorate wants them to fail with regulatory measures, for otherwise we would have to change—and  “we can contemplate a transformation of anyone’s existence but our own.”  It is this connection between the personal and the political that makes change so difficult, for in a democracy the basic beliefs of citizens ultimately control the actions of institutions, both business and government.  A change of heart will not save the planet, but the interconnection of the personal and the political must be acknowledged.”  Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, The World, and Global Warming, 2008.

[blakechastain]

The Long Quotation, 3/24/11

E.F. Schumacher was an economist who studied under John Meynard Keynes and had considerable influence in economic policy in the United Kingdom.  As he continued to develop his economic theory, he went further afield from his Keynsian roots, and would be considered a "heterodox" economist from a neoliberal perspective.  His most well-known book is Small is Beautiful (published in 1973), where he introduces and explores his concept of "Buddhist Economics," as well as the idea of "technology with a human face."  Similar phrases/concepts attributed to Schumacher is the idea of "appropriate technology," meaning technology sufficient to its designed purpose and not overwrought or environmentally destructive.  

As much as I appreciate macroeconomics and economies of scale, I am also considerably drawn to the idea of humanity's economic activity taking place within nature, and not apart from it.  The following quotation is from the first chapter of Small is Beautiful, entitled "The Problem of Production," which broaches the idea of considering natural resources as "capital."   

One of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that "the problem of production" has been solved.  Not only is this belief firmly held by people remote from production and therefore professionally unacquainted with the facts--it is held by virtually all the experts, the captains of industry, the economic managers in the governments of the world, the academic and not-so-academic economists, not to mention the economic journalists.  They may disagree on many things but they all agree that the problem of of production has been solved; that mankind has at last come of age.  For the rich countries, they say, the most important task now is "education for leisure" and, for the poor countries, the "transfer of technology."

That things are not going as well as they ought to be going must be due to human wickedness.  We must therefore construct a political system so perfect that human wickedness disappears and everybody behaves well, no matter how much wickedness there may be in him or her.  In fact, it is widely held that everybody is born good; if one turns into a criminal or exploiter, this is the fault of "the system." No doubt "the system" is in many ways bad and must be changed.  One of the main reasons why it is bad and why it can still survive in spite of its badness, is this erroneous view that the "problem of production" has been solved.  As this error pervades all present-day systems there is at present not much to choose between them.

The arising of this error, so egregious and so firmly rooted, is closely connected with the philosophical, not to say religious, changes during the last three or four centuries in man's attitude to nature.  I should perhaps say:  Western man's attitude to nature, but since the whole world is now in a process of westernisation, the more generalised statement appears to be justified.  Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it.  He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.  Until quite recently, the battle seemed to go well enough to give him the illusion of unlimited powers, but not so well as to bring the possibility of total victory into view.  This has now come into view, and many people, albeit only a minority, are beginning to realise what this means for the continued existence of humanity. 

The illusion of unlimited powers, nourished by astonishing scientific and technological achievements, has produced the concurrent illusion of having solved the problem of production.  The latter illusion is based on the failure to distinguish between income and capital where this distinction matters most.  Every economist and businessman is familiar with the distinction, and applies it conscientiously and with considerable subtlety to all economic affairs--except where it really matters: namely, the irreplaceable capital which man has not made, but simply found, and without which he can do nothing.

A businessman would not consider a firm to have solved its problems of production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital.  How, then, could we overlook this vital fact when it comes to that very big firm, the economy of Spaceship Earth and, in particular, the economies of its rich passengers?