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As the author of the Introduction, Richard T. Gray, explains, the collection's title is purposefully ambiguous. The "inventions of the imagination," he writes, should be understood in both senses of the phrase -- that is to say, the imagination as both inventor and invented (3). The more philosophical essays seek to understand the imagination as inventor, and thus investigate the workings of the imagination and its role, above all, in knowledge and interpretation. The more literary essays are concerned with explicating the actual inventions of the imagination -- the literary works. However, several essays cross disciplinary boundaries and accomplish both tasks.
"Yes, new tech have recently given us each more options, but this is mainly because new tech tends to make us each richer. Wealth gives options. If our descendants are, as I suspect, much poorer than we, they may well have fewer options than us. And eventually economic growth and tech innovation must slow to a crawl. Our finite universe simply cannot continue our exponential growth rates for a million years. For trillions of years thereafter, possibilities will be known and fixed, and for each person rather limited."
"One of the things that I’ve found most stunning, that in certain ways I somewhat regret, is my claim that fictions are real. Now there’s something about me that seems to create a ruckus wherever I go– and that’s been above all true of my pronouncements on this blog –but there have been few things I’ve said that have generated more heat than this thesis."
"Jobs’s saintly genius is a carefully orchestrated performance by Apple, tech journalists, venture capitalists, and MacBook fanboys to create an illusion that we are blessed to be typing away on technologies of such holy grandeur. As this narrative grows so does Apple’s stocks. Social imaginaires like that which circulate around Jobs are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves with real impacts in the world.
Apple products are great, I’m using a couple right now. But the spiritual intonations describing Jobs’s role in the production of these easy to use, trendy, flashy, and expensive devices is overstated for a purpose. The auteur visionary, who throws off tradition, rises from the ashes and returns, and kills a rigid bohemoth (Gates) are all narratives that help to sell products and stocks. These stories encase the casings of Macbook and iPads with a genius virus that users mistakenly think is contagious."
Project run by Philip Zimbaro - "The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) is a nonprofit organization that advances everyday heroism. At HIP, we believe everyone has the potential to transform the private virtue of compassion into the civic virtue of heroic action, and we are dedicated to helping individuals internalize and express their “heroic imagination” in service to humanity."
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After a while one does grasp the pattern. Africans, Jews, Mexicans, same-sex lovers, women. Hmm, after a certain period of time somebody says: well, actually, they’re not that different from anybody else, they have the same capacities, I don’t like all of them, some of them are geniuses, etc. etc. The revelations are always in the same direction. We learn about one group or another the thing that actors quickly learn in relation to themselves when they become actors: people are more than they seem to be.
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I’ve sometimes noted that many people in my generation, born during World War II, are obsessed, as I am, by the image of the trains arriving at the railroad station at Auschwitz and the way that the S.S. officers who greeted the trains would perform on the spot what was called a “selection,” choosing a few of those getting off of each train to be slave laborers, who would get to live for as long as they were needed, while everyone else would be sent to the gas chambers almost immediately. And just as inexorable as were these “selections” are the determinations made by the global market when babies are born. The global market selects out a tiny group of privileged babies who are born in certain parts of certain towns in certain countries, and these babies are allowed to lead privileged lives. Some will be scientists, some will be bankers. Some will command, rule, and grow fantastically rich, and others will become more modestly paid intellectuals or teachers or artists. But all the members of this tiny group will have the chance to develop their minds and realize their talents.
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Conceptions of Robert Johnson’s work highlight the context dependent nature of notions of originality. Originality is yet another characteristic of copyrightability that is not always easy to delineate in actual contexts of creation.
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explains that the prevailing view of an author as the originator of new works is a relatively recent phenomenon arising out of the Romantic Movement and its view of an artist as someone uniquely inspired. This view of authorship stands in stark contrast to an older view becoming new again in today’s remix cutlure — a view that creative endeavors are derivative and collaborative, that originality is not the product of isolated genius but of, well, remixing:
As it turns out, the way that the human brain goes about the task of “remembering the past” is actually very similar to how it goes about “imagining the future.”
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So, what, specifically, do I mean by "Star Trek socialism"?
Nothing.
I mean nothing specific.
I mean it as an invitation to imagine, not as a definition to impose.
Such is the nature of utopia--it is, above all, an exercise of the imagination, which is a core part of what makes us human. By using the term "Star Trek socialism" I want to indicate and help re-establish an alternative viewpoint that is not just valuable in itself, but also for the sorts of discussions it can generate. The viewpoint is that which we can see embodied in the United Federation of Planets, and how we can imagine ways to "Make it so," as Captain Picard would say.
But even though I don’t think anyone would really dispute any of that, we don’t just do that stuff. Instead, we’re trapped in a frustrating circle of passive acceptance of the idea that we just have to live in a country where public services are ill-funded and poorly delivered. And it’s not just that conservatives block reforms — progressives have let their horizons slip incredibly low. A country that once built transcontinental railroads and sent people to the moon has decided that for some reason it’d just be impossible to solve our current social problems.
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