Sir Ken Robinson on creativity

A must-see for anyone who's been dragged, kicking and screaming, through a compulsory schooling system governed by soulless morons. I'm 33 years old and I still resent my brush with formal education, up to and including my involvement with classes ostensibly designed for the "creatively talented." We need the revolution Robinson discusses and we need it now.

Techno-nature

Humans may be losers if technological nature replaces the real thing

Modern technology increasingly is encroaching into human connections with the natural world and University of Washington psychologists believe this intrusion may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our times.

"We are a technological species, but we also need a deep connection with nature in our lives," said Peter Kahn, a UW developmental psychologist and lead author of a new study exploring how humans connect with nature and technological nature.

Writing in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Kahn and two of his UW graduate students, Rachel Severson and Jolina Ruckert, look at the psychological effects of interacting with various forms of technological nature and explore humanity's growing estrangement from nature.

The "new poverty"

Cities Deal With a Surge in Shanty Towns

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root -- or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing -- in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

Robospouse

David Gibbs against robot love

At an anti-gay marriage rally Tuesday in Raleigh, North Carolina, David Gibbs III, the Christian fundamentalist lawyer who fought to keep brain-damaged Terry Schiavo on life support in 2005, publicly expressed his deep-seated fear of machine love.

Wise counsel

Jim Kunstler writes:

Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both. Among other things, contraction means that all the activities of everyday life need to be downscaled including standards of living, ranges of commerce, and levels of governance. "Consumerism" is dead.

[. . .]

No good, in fact, will come of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is exactly what the Obama program is starting to look like. In the folder marked "unsustainable" you can file most of the artifacts, usufructs, habits, and expectations of recent American life: suburban living, credit-card spending, Happy Motoring, vacations in Las Vegas, college education for the masses, and cheap food among them. All these things are over.

[. . .]

It's not too late for President Obama to start uttering these truths so that we can avoid a turn to fascism and get on with the real business of America's next phase of history -- living locally, working hard at things that matter, and preserving civilized culture. What a lot of us can see now staring out of the abyss is a new dark age.

Terence McKenna: "I think if it's out of control then our side is winning."

(Thanks: The Teleomorph.)

Terence McKenna on individuality and democracy's inherent tendency to atomize, cheapen and reject the human experience: "We have been infantilized by our cultural institutions to accept the notion of ourselves as citizens consuming these regurgitated scientific models which are then hashed through by Madison Avenue and then handed down to us by the organs of mass culture and this is supposed to be what we anchor our lives on."

6 Brainwashing Techniques They're Using On You Right Now

(Thanks: No Touch Monkey!)

Neal Stephenson Explains What's Wrong with Mobile Phones

What's intriguing is that Stephenson is saying mobiles suck not just because of their interfaces, but because of how people act when they use mobiles. Of course, how people act with cell phones has everything to do with the interface. You have to stick them against your face, or put some weirdass Cyberman-looking thing in your ear. So your body language, when you're on a mobile, makes you immediately seem rude to anyone around you.

Plus, most people still use audible ringers (as opposed to vibration), so it is essentially impossible to have a mobile without inviting a noisy, irritating interruption. What that means is your mobile doesn't just interrupt your train of thought or conversation -- it interrupts everyone's within earshot. So the mobile as we know it is perhaps one of the worst attention-shattering devices imaginable.

Your Cameraphone: a Harbinger of a Massive Social Transformation

You may not be aware of it, but the cameraphone in your pocket is the harbinger of a massive social transformation, one already underway.

This transformation could be at least as big as the ones triggered by television and by computers, as the base technology -- mobile phones -- fills a new niche, different from both of these earlier technologies.

I use my cellphone's camera far more regularly than I use the actual phone.

I recently posted a clip of Michael Stipe voicing his disillusionment with the 21st century. Specifically, he wonders why his metaphorical jetpack didn't arrive on schedule.

I'm not sure, but that clip might have inspired Chris Wren's indispensable retort:

You're Never Getting Your Damn Jetpack. Shut Up.

What, did they pass a law forbidding research into personal jetpack technology? The reason we don't have jetpacks is because the people who are whining about not having them were content to spend their 20's and 30's sitting around on their asses waiting for other people to invent them. And if someone had delivered jetpacks to these heartbroken dears on schedule, these same whiners would be screaming their lungs out about the carbon footprint of selfish, Gaia-hating jetpack users. You want the future you were promised in your innocent wide-eyed youths? Stop blubbering and invent it yourselves.

R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe: "Where's my jetpack?"

Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable

Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses, aggravated by tightly coupled networks that create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries.

What emerges is a less complex society, organized on a smaller scale or that has been taken over by another group, and loss of our hard-earned knowledge.

Possible solutions include distributed and decentralized production of vital goods like energy and food and adding redundancy to the electrical grid and other networks.

I've never considered civilization anything more than a passing phase. It seems essential because it's all we know, but when we look at it squarely we find at least as many inherent flaws as benefits. I say it's time to venture out of the womb and look around.

Two eye-catching items from the always-interesting Reality Sandwich:

Broadcasting the Third Kind

For the past 60 years, UFOs have invaded our culture through the speculation of conspiracy theorists and the fantasies of Hollywood cinema. Yet under the rationalist constructs of a post-Enlightenment world, an avowed belief in alien life is generally regarded with snide contempt. Such things are the stuff of idle entertainment, goes the dominant view, and do not warrant serious discussion.

This view, however, is suddenly changing.

Zombie Apocalypse

The zombie trend is a celebration of fear -- a way to paradoxically act out the suffocating effect that the blanket of information noise has in our Westernized, late capitalist existence. When you're dead there aren't any more expectations -- there aren't any more goals, just endless in-between time spent hanging out and eating. While online one just "sits there," doing nothing. There's definitely a punk rock aspect to zombies -- an anarchistic refusal to work or follow rules.

"We are in a world that is becoming increasingly atomized . . ."

I found these photos of modern-day hobos both astonishing and deeply troubling. I kept asking myself: could I live like this? And to my own chagrin, I couldn't arrive at an honest answer.

(Hat tip to Dr. Menlo.)

Apocalypse? Mmm, bring it on

The reason for the relish is partly obvious: humans find accidents fascinating: the bigger the spill, the bigger the thrill. Something else, however, lends to the Apocalypse a spice absent from even the most cosmic of motorway pile-ups: a sense of justice. Mankind, we are told, has brought this upon itself. After hubris will come nemesis. As we sowed, so shall we reap. Our chickens are coming home to roost, or sins returning to haunt us. How awful. How delicious.

(Via J. Orlin Grabbe.)

Nothing J.G. Ballard couldn't have told you about.

Count on Mondolithic Studios to rouse me from my general pessimism and cast the future in a hopeful new light:

My Kind of Environmentalism

30 years from now, we're going to look back and wonder why we ever thought that it was going to be so hard to change. We're going to look at the new fortunes made by new industries and wonder why we ever thought that going green would bankrupt our society and sound the death knell of capitalism. We're going to see the resurgence in local manufacturing, local ownwership and self-employment and wonder why we ever thought we needed to ship cheap underwear and crappy lead-laced toys across oceans in shipping containers. We're going to see the garden home ghetttos and lonely McMansions replaced with communities and wonder how we could have stood with living so isolated from each other. We'll see the cooperative adaptive energy network that replaced our obsolete power grid and wonder what took us so long to get our act together. We'll see the skies above our cities cleared of smog, and wonder why we ever listened to the desperate lies of corrupt leaders and corporate shills when they told us that reorganizing our society was going to be too difficult, too expensive, and would destroy our way of life.

It won't be easy, of course, but ultimately we might not have a choice.

Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking -- and nearly hopeless -- dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

(Via Reality Carnival.)

I don't especially want to agree with this analysis, but I do. If you find the author's fears unwarranted, visit your local suburb.

More good stuff from Daniel Pinchbeck:

The Almighty Amero

These days I feel lost in the immense suffering and madness of our world. Something has snapped in the spirit of the time; events have gone beyond human capacity to control, predict or even conceptualize. Those who insist they know what is happening are merely pretending, or dissembling. When novelty arises, when old structures disintegrate before new patterns reveal themselves, there are no experts.

Perhaps the best oracles we can consult are systems analysts like Erwin Laszlo. Laszlo studies chaos theory and believes global civilization is a few years away from what he calls "the chaos point." According to Laszlo, we are at a "crucial decision-window" of instability. "When we reach the point of chaos," Laszlo tells us, "the stable 'point' and 'periodic' attractors of our systems will be joined by 'chaotic' or 'strange' attractors." These "strange attractors" will propel us, like booster rockets, to evolutionary development or entropic debauch. In other words, we should prepare ourselves for the unknown and inexplicable.