This link has been bookmarked by 7 people . It was first bookmarked on 13 Sep 2008, by Gerhard Stoltz.
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13 Sep 08
Todd SuomelaThe gloss of down-home authenticity - the mooseburgers, “snow machines,” and other rustic tat that figure so centrally in her instant legend. The young-Earther retreat from science and all its methods. The palpable resentment of coastal elites (even as this time around it doesn’t seem that term is shorthand, as it so often is, for “Jews”). The instinctual, immediate recourse, upon achieving even the most local and limited sort of power, to the heavy-handed suppression of free inquiry. The things that endear this onetime nowhere-burg mayor to Americans are, as clearly as can possibly be, indicators that a whole lot of people think tomorrow came too soon.
What you get when you swallow too much change too quickly isn’t a mass outbreak of twitching, hebephrenic breakdown, nor some neo-Amish wave of technological renunciation. You wanna know what it looks like? A hockey mom and former beauty queen with an upswept ‘do and a pregnant daughter in high school. Sarah Palin is future shock personified. -
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The things that endear this onetime nowhere-burg mayor to Americans are, as clearly as can possibly be, indicators that a whole lot of people think tomorrow came too soon.
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Sure, I bet it feels like the future’s one long hard slap in the face when all it means is city-killing storms and literally crumbling infrastructure and the (nonexistent, but easily enough ginned-up) specter of know-it-alls like Al Gore showing for interviews with an ITYS smirk. There’s not a whole hell of a lot your Crackberry can do about any of that - in fact, all the high-tech trinkets only make it worse, more acutely felt and harder to get away from.
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Mainstream Americans, by contrast, where they were once called to dream and to believe that their best days as a community still lay ahead, are now at war with the future. And this is one war situation that is definitely not developing necessarily to their advantage.
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different places, different polities arrive at - have to arrive at - divergent understandings about which technologies are appropriate for their given time and place.
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The gobsmacking foolishness of our national discourse, the things which now seem to signify, the very person selected to act out these psychodramas on the national stage - these are all far surer signs that the future is deeply, and I mean pants-shittingly, terrifying to many Americans. They’ve read the tea leaves, all right, they’re not in the slightest bit stupid, and they know how things are shaping up.
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Katie DayFrom the head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia: <<Maybe it has something to do with just having given a talk about the future of ubiquitously networked cities in a place - South Korea - that’s embraced this vision more p
future change technology USA politics sarah_palin world cultures imported_from_delicious
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12 Sep 08
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11 Sep 08
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Christopher RiceHoly cow, what a fantastic essay on The Future and Sarah Palin as the symbol of American Future Shock. Great quote: "In such circumstances I invariably trot out Mimi Ito’s relativist line about “alternatively technologized modernities,” and the idea that
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