Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
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Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
"LOVE LOVE LOVE your futorological brickbats! Love them! You are in fine company with Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary with these." -- Paulina Borsook
"Devoted to highly rhetorical nitpicking, but it is fun to read." -- Chris Mooney
"Rather close but correct reading." -- Evgeny Morozov
"Mean, but true." -- Annalee Newitz
"Dale Carrico's skewering of the salvific pretensions of Silicon Valley's soi disant savior/founders never disappoints." -- Frank Pasquale
"Pretty breathless, but I guess it had to be said." -- Bruce Sterling
"An essential reality check for those who are too entranced by transhumanism to notice the sordid reality behind the curtain." -- Charlie Stross
2 comments:
Most certainly I would NOT hurt a widdle kittie! I agree with William Burroughs that willingness to hurt a kitten is the firm foundation on which one grounds a proper philsophical understanding of evil. But the thought of the bioconservative freakout occasioned by the very notion of eroticizing a cloned kitten in a beaker proved to be, well, catnip.
That is an almost unutterably depressing photo.
The fact that the kitten is sitting in a beaker
highlights its total dependency on human whim
(and the fact that its whole species, like the
domestic dog, was shaped by interaction with
humans for **human** purposes). It looks (and is)
quite, quite lost.
I am extremely ambivalent about the whole notion
of **pets**. I don't own any, and won't ever own one.
I very much enjoy fussing over friends' animals,
and I have something of a reputation among my
friends for being someone whom their animals like
to see, but I just don't like the thought of
having that much power over (or responsiblility
for) another living creature.
(Of course, **some** SF writers imagine that the
best the human race can hope for is to end up as
the pets of our successors. Iain M. Banks makes
that seem quite attractive, at least on the surface,
but there's a dark, dark undertone to his Culture
novels that I think a lot of his >Hist fans miss.)
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