Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, June 11, 2012

Singularity = Black Hole


Tony Robbins? Peter Diamandis? Singularity University? TED Talk? In a single tweet? Perhaps there really could be so dense a concatenation of self-promotional con-artistry in one place that it really would start sucking the whole world into its voracious ego-maw...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Tony Robbins? Peter Diamandis? Singularity University? TED Talk?"

I know, right! The very existence of those events/people/organizations! Their perfidy and foolishness is so obvious that you can just fairly assume that everyone reading this blog is up to speed and just start insulting them without looking even slightly reactionary and childish.

Dale Carrico said...

The words "self-promotional con-artistry" already indicate the contours my critique might take, even for newcomers to the blog -- at any rate if they know how to read.

Presumably you would prefer if I never made recourse to snark or assumed a readership already acquainted with my assumptions so that every post, devoted to however passing an observation, recapitulated every premise on which its negative judgments depend? You wouldn't then roll your eyes at my verbosity and dismiss my patient elaborations as tl;dr? (I can only assume you read twitter in a state of incandescent rage -- all those one-liners assuming everybody already knows stuff! I rather sympathize with your ire there, I must say.)

A few minutes at the google tapping at the search terms "amor mundi" and each of the terms on which you seek elaboration yielded: TED Squawk, More Righteous TED Squawk Pushback, Robot Cultists Getting Two NICE By Half, Jim Fehlinger's Futurological Meta Formula, Schlock and Awesome; Or, the Futurologists Are Worse Than You Think, Let's Find Ten Terminally Awful Ideas in One Futurological Sentence, Accent the Negative. There, was that so hard? Take a swim in my perspective and see if it has anything to offer you.

Let me add, I do ridicule the ridiculous by my lights, I don't pretend I am at a tea party with folks in the Tea Party or Robot Cultists or the comparably conned or conning. I am sarcastic and satirical in temper, and it shows: some people appreciate that and some people don't. I enjoy Socrates, Cicero, Shakespeare, the Restoration wits, Wilde, Twain, Dorothy Parker, and many acerbic others your criteria would declare reactionary and childish (and thereby expose your foolishness in this little public fit of pique of yours). Maybe you don't. You'll be missing something, but everybody does, that's life.

jimf said...

> > Their perfidy and foolishness is so obvious that you can just. . .
> > start insulting them without looking even slightly reactionary and childish[?]
>
> The words "self-promotional con-artistry" already indicate the contours
> my critique might take. . .

"[P]eople are. . . complaining about 'nasty comments' and 'rude comments'
and getting huffy that skeptics would have the effrontery to expect better
analysis. . . [than t]his sloppy Newage shit-slurry of ingenuous gullibility. . .

Now **that’s** rudeness."

(-- P. Z. Myers
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/02/06/dear-jezebel/ )

> Tony Robbins? Peter Diamandis? Singularity University? TED Talk?
> In a single tweet?

Oprah? Ray Kurzweil? Suzanne Somers? In a single article? ;->

https://fistfulofscience.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/what-distinguishes-ray-kurzweil-and-susan-sommers/