Bella English:

They are members of a small cohort: the young and unplugged. While their friends, relatives, and colleagues have every gadget known to mankind, the Kalfs have made a conscious decision not to blog, tweet, or instant message. They e-mail only when necessary. And they say they're better off without all that stuff.

"After a while, you find [that the gadgets] erode time as opposed to saving time, and time is the only thing we've really got that is our own."

"Worshiping at the church of the pixel comes at the expense of real-life experience."

"I find the whole thing very voyeuristic."

Bruce Sterling:

"Poor folk love their cellphones!"

Andy Milonakis:

Let Me Twitter Dat

Geoff Manaugh:

Ever since a friend of mine once claimed – very late and after many drinks – that "Twitter is the death of humanism," I've been regularly thinking about how a simple note-taking technology could inspire such apparent dread in so many people.

Sage Stossel:

Hu Jintao joined the group "I Bet I Can Find A Million People Who Don't Care Michael Phelps Smoked Weed."

Robert Lantham:

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories.

Wired differently

Guns are the new bubble.

The way Jay Chambers sees it, the semiautomatic weapons in his firearm collection might be the most promising investment in his financial portfolio.

If a federal assault weapons ban passes, he figures his collection could triple in value.

"A guy could easily make a lot of money," says Mr. Chambers, 47 years old, while at Autrey's Armory, a gun store about 20 miles south of Atlanta.

Flipping Guns For Dummies, coming soon to a bestseller list near you.

Recently, from Emergent Chaos:

After jokingly asking "Time to buy gold, huh?", there was a pregnant pause. Then came the response: "Buy ammunition".

Fear and Greed Have Sales of Guns and Ammo Shooting Up

Hendrik Hertzberg:

It wasn’t enough this time. But the time is coming.

From the last century:

You hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.

Freeman Dyson, from the archive (and also the last century):

That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.

It's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale.

Ethics are the art of doing that.

You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

More recently:

"You Westerners have your watches. But we Taliban have time."

Eight Is Enough

The people want to know. But at the same time, we don't.

This may be easier for some than others.

For those interested in high political theater, it will be a fascinating time.

It will not be easy.

It should be exciting.

This won't be easy.

"You have to laugh to keep from crying these days," she said as she wiped away tears.

In the long run we are all dead.

Jeff Jarvis:

Looking for Dubai, I’d made the mistake of going to the Mall of the Emirates with its hundreds of stores and infamous indoor ski slope, just because it was so over the top. But I came away depressed because it was only an extreme extension of the malling of the world that I lament ... All our stuff is now the same.

I suppose we should be flattered and relieved that a nation - especially an Arab nation, no? - chose to copy so much of America. But why did they chose as their inspiration Vegas (sans sins), malls, grossly conspicuous consumption, and Hollywood pap? I wasn’t sure whether I was sadder for them or us.

Dubai is either an act of fiction or of the future. I arrived thinking the former; I leave wondering whether it could be the latter.

From the archive:

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

Where is Dubai?

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

For many of us -- not least adolescents -- reality is now largely a virtual experience.

If only it were that easy.

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

Are you reading Anathem?

Brand: How might long-term ethics differ from ethics as we generally understand them?

Dyson: If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Brand: Do you have a list of these principles?

Dyson: No. You'll never get everybody to agree about any particular code of ethics.

Brand: But if they're going to be long-term ones, you'd better have some agreement. This is a cross-generational issue. It's caring for children, grandchildren. In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

I'm working on a project, The Long Now Foundation, to encourage long-term responsibility. Esther's on that board, too. We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed? For instance, if you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.

Dyson: I'm accustomed to living among very long-lived institutions in England, and I'm always surprised that the rest of the world is so different. At the beginning of Imagined Worlds, I mentioned the avenue of trees at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is an extremely wealthy foundation, founded by Henry VIII with the money he looted from the monasteries. He put his ill-gotten gains into education, much to our benefit. So we pray for his soul once a year. I went to the commemoration feast last March and duly prayed in appropriate Latin. Trinity is an astonishing place because it has been a fantastic producer of great science for 400 years and continues to be so. Beside Henry VIII, we were celebrating the 100th birthday of the electron, which was discovered there by J. J. Thomson. He was appointed professor at the age of 28.

Anyway, they planted an avenue of trees in the early 18th century, leading up from the river to the college. This avenue of trees grew very big and majestic in the course of 200 years. When I was a student there 50 years ago, the trees were growing a little dilapidated, though still very beautiful. The college decided that for the sake of the future, they would chop them down and plant new ones. Now, 50 years later, the new trees are half grown and already looking almost as beautiful as the old ones. That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.

Chop, baby, chop, and chop now.

Freeman Dyson's Brain, by Stewart Brand | Wired 6.02

Stewart Brand:

Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain.

Photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution.

Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone’s living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock’s mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.

A typical Burtynsky photograph showed a huge open pit copper mine. A tiny, barely discernible black line on one of the levels was pointed out: “That’s a whole railroad train.” Alberta tar sands excavation tearing up miles of boreal forest. China’s Three Gorges Dam. Mine tailing ponds beautiful and terrible. Expired oil fields stretching to the horizon. Michelangelo’s marble quarry at Carrera, still working.

“This is the sublime of our time, shown straight on, for contemplation.”

Indeed worth studying for centuries.

From the archive:

Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.

Fun history essay about Richard Feynman's computer science contributions and involvement with the origin of Thinking Machines.

A recording of a conversation between Clay Shirky and Brian Eno, musician, artist and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation.

Freeman Dyson:

I'm working on a project, The Long Now Foundation, to encourage long-term responsibility. Esther's on that board, too. We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed? For instance, if you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.

It won't be long now until the telcos start trying to pass on the cost of wiretapping to the major content providers.

Hold your breath for a long time?

The 10,000-Year Gallery

Don't get me wrong; I still live in your world. In this very house even. But now I exist between two eras: an Edwardian past and a quixotic future where dirigibles can travel through space and time.

...

Don't look so crestfallen, Mom and Dad. At least I'm not into cyberpunk.

Mom, Dad, I'm Into Steampunk.

I have often referenced this essay and people seem to ignore it, but I thought that it might make a good companion piece to Paul Graham's latest essay.

The belief that corporate power is the unique source of our problems is not the only idol we are subject to. There is an idol even in the language we use to account for our problems. Our primary dependence on the scientific language of “environment,” “ecology,” “diversity,” “habitat,” and “ecosystem” is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the very kind of rationality that serves not only the Sierra Club but corporate capitalism as well.

... Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Paul Graham says:

In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to programmers. In the first couple weeks of working on their own startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working the way people are meant to.

From last fall:

In The Culture of the New Capitalism, a book based on a series of lectures given at Yale in 2004, Richard Sennett describes how the widespread use of enterprise systems has given top managers much greater latitude to direct and control corporate workforces, while at the same time making the jobs of everyday workers and professionals more rigid and bleak.

The spread of Enterprise Systems has resulted in a declining emphasis on creativity and ingenuity of workers, and the destruction of a sense of community in the workplace by the ceaseless reengineering of the way businesses operate. The concept of a career has become increasingly meaningless in a setting in which employees have neither skills of which they might be proud nor an audience of independently minded fellow workers that might recognize their value.

On Corporate Power and Natural Living