Meat the future

This is a brilliant column on the Second Life phenomenon: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-stein23jan23,0,3223924.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

I have long predicted that virtual worlds would swallow up the real one... that digital reality was far more flexible, interesting, and eventually more compelling and powerful than the real one. Actually, this was even the subject of an 8th grade project of mine! -- we were asked to write a history of a made up civilization in a Social Studies class (Kurt Rosenberg was a fabulous teacher, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto -- where are teachers like that today?) and I wrote about a future society where everyone "lived" in tiny cells, hooked up to feeding and breathing tubes, sensory apparati, brain extensions, and instant communications.. so you can see that this view of mine goes pretty deep.

For the record, I'm not a fan of this development, but it's so obvious that I wonder why more people aren't noticing it.

Of course, this is only a blip on the way to "the system" realizing that it actually doesn't need the human appendages, and the humans agreeing -- as long as they're absorbed into the network and given a "second life".

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

Have you ever noticed how your thoughts and opinions change when you tell them to people, or even when you think with the intention to speak aloud, or to write? One’s private opinions, intended only for the cavernous solitude of one’s own reflection, are one thing, while thoughts intended for public view or public defense are quite another. In the privacy and safety of my personal mental universe, my thoughts can form at the deepest, most honest, most holistic level, but when I allow the light of social intercourse to interact with my reflections, they squirm and shift against my will, taking on a kind of acceptability that I can’t avoid. Apparently, I am neither honest nor strong enough to “put myself out there” unreservedly – and I can feel the very shape of my mind moving against my will.

Of course, I am not famous. I can only imagine how much worse this pressure is in the light of a truly public exposure. One can easily imagine being essentially insane under those circumstances, having transformed into a kind of vessel of acceptable views, a conduit for an established pattern of thought, an ideology.

I often wonder why politicians and public figures are so boring, so hopelessly wooden, so unable to respond and think spontaneously. It is remarkable that almost nothing that is done in public is honest, and when the stakes are high – big issues, big publicity – the level of stupidity, of phoniness, of caricature is so outrageous as to be comical, except that it actually affects our lives.

We need some new categories

I'm pretty sure I agree with every word in this post (I have to go back and re-read to be sure, so there's my out just in case):

http://www.reformationtheology.com/2007/01/quotes_on_culture.php

And yet I'm essentially an atheist; at least that's the category that seems most accurate among the ones I'm aware of. There's a disconnect somewhere. I'll admit to some incoherent and inconsistent views, but it seems to me that we need new categories. The political ones are useless (Demo and Repub indeed -- what hogwash!); maybe the religious ones are too.