Richard Powers summed up the Internet's socio-cultural impact in his 2006 novel "The Echo Maker" as follows:

"The Internet had hit Nebraska like liquor hitting a Stone Age tribe - the godsend every sandhills homesteader descendant had been waiting for, the only way to survive such vacancy."

YouTube is a perfect example of the evolutionary process. Everything that is non-essential is stripped away, leaving only viral videos and a long, unsorted list of meta-commentary that unravels like DNA. Like a disease from outer space, YouTube is free to grow stronger and more efficient every day, even as it bloats and distorts under its own weight.

YouTube is the freedom to watch, and to not think. It is better than tv because you get to "add value". It is evolutionary perfection.

...in this whole goddamn godless universe!!"

-Howard Beale

"Hmm, well, I, for one, am a little disappointed by the unstimulating responses to what I thought was an extremely stimulating article (my opinion, obviously). Some people found it overdramatic and pretentious."

This is the fundamental problem in having a science fiction author, whose world is science, trying to communicate with a bunch of English majors who were brought up by their Boomer parents to regard science as a threat ("Genetically engineered corn - ewwww! Burn the witches!"). Folks, words like 'monotonic' and 'pyroclastic' have precise technical meanings that, when understood in the context of Brin's poetic usages of them in this article, would make it possible for your ideology-fricasseed brains to actually comprehend what he was trying to say.

So we're talkin' about a kinda

Robo-poetry

If you will..

One that the lay person

Unversed in science

Is found lacking

In a certain specialized

amount of

Decoding skills..

"This is the fundamental problem in having a science fiction author, whose world is science, trying to communicate with a bunch of English majors who were brought up by their Boomer parents to regard science as a threat."

That is truly a load of shit!

When I was a young whippersnapper, finding information about any subject meant leaving the house and driving to a public building called a "library" where information resided in huge stacks of printed books. Because you had to look things up manually, at a relatively high cost-of-your-time per search, casual browsing was much less common than it is today. In fact, the old-style printed encyclopedias existed mainly as the one place in the dead-tree world where it was relatively easy to have a search lead to an expanding skein of other, increasingly speculative searches.

Search engines have now made it easy for us to winnow the information available online and draw conclusions from its diversity of bias. Now imagine the potential of an Internet that contained all of the information in printed libraries! What the government needs to do for us is not vainly try to outperform Google in searching and serving data, but to exercise its legal function: fix the intellectual-property mess that keeps us from putting entire libraries online. Develop, say, a simplified legal framework for giving authors an automated share of search engine ad revenues, and the techies will happily implement it.

"That is truly a load of shit!"

...is that I just struck a nerve.

I already do go to your sites. And comment there, from time to time. (Under a different handle, to be sure.)

I wrote my upthread post trying to use as many 5 dollar words that I actually understand as I could, to appear as intellectual and deep as you are. But I don't think either of us really are being particularly insightful.

Me, I just think that there is a ridiculous amount of hype out there. And I hate "futurists" (no, while you are a fair to middling sci-fi author, you aren't part of that particular club). For sure, the intertubes have changed the world, but I don't think we understand how exactly much better now than we did say ten years ago.

In any case, the world has always been new and different and on the verge of Becoming. And the Apocalypse/Rapture/End of Times is always on the verge of human consciousness. But attempts to play with that, well, they always amount to magical thinking.

The resemblances between the Singularity prophets, your debates with them, and the whole apocalyptic biblical and theological tradition, seem to me to have vast similarities and coincidences.

On the intertubes, you can go for a unicorn chaser. For a reality based chaser I recommend Thucydides. For an intellectual and theological one, that has been of great comfort to me over the years, Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun. No matter how many snake oil salesmen tell you there is.

And how dare you dis my beloved Plato (all Western philosophy a footnote too etc.)? Your take on him reminds me of the immortal dialogue in A Fish Called Wanda: "Apes don't read Nietzsche!" "No Otto, apes do read Nietzsche, they just don't understand him!"

Brother

Interracial dating

Is the ONLY type of dating for me.

I only wish more people

Could consensus wise agree.

Now THAT is something

We can all lend our

Energies to

With vigor

And joyous friction...

That my brother

Is not beyond the bounds

Of ANY science fiction.

in the sense that if enough people say something that the first couple if pages of google search answers don't find any different answer, then it must be the truth. printed material is not as amenable to clean and easy change, so that now we've paved the road to brave new world/1984.

it's also notable that, while you can get a vast amount of detail on your favorite computer game or porn star, older stuff is vanishing, literally. anyone who used to do real research; cranking through microfilm and digging through old photos in newspaper morgues, for example knows that there's a vast amount of stuff out there, and not only is it not getting digitized, let alone put on the internet, it's too expensive to be maintained so it's getting chucked.