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Thread ID: 4969 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2003-02-13
2003-02-13 01:38 | User Profile
Rage Against the Machine
A modern-day Luddite argues that computers deaden our souls.
By William S. Lind
Russell Kirk, who may have been the only conservative in the post-war American conservative movement, forbad the importation of television sets into his ancestral manse, Piety Hill. One day, in his absence, his wife and daughters smuggled one in. Dr. Kirk discovered it, and they in turn soon discovered him, high in the tower with television in hand, pitching it off the roof.
Television, like all virtual realities, comes from Hell. (The author of this piece, having hosted several television programs, knows how difficult it is to use the medium for good; in effect, one has to do bad television.) Earlier generations of conservatives knew instinctively that machines could be Hellish, and they regarded innovative technologies with distrust.
It is perhaps a measure of how much conservatism has withered away that most American conservatives now welcome any new technology that comes along. They love cell phones, which destroy what little is left of the public space. They gush over genetic engineering, which will create weapons that bring back the Black Death. Most of all, they embrace computers and all their progeny even though, all around us, our fellow subjects of Heaven are using them to create virtual realities they can inhabit almost full-time. (Fortunately, they still have to eat.) . . . Just as intellectual chaos is normal to the information generation, so is their lowly status as humble servants to lumps of beige plastic. I will confess that a year ago, I was browbeaten by my office into putting a fax machine in my summer home in Ohio. It was more demanding than a cat. Unless I met its every beeped and coded wish, and they were many, it refused to work. (Even a neglected cat will still catch mice.) This summer, I realized I was the servant and it the master and resolved this inversion of the natural order in Kirkian fashion, by taking a sledgehammer to it. Its human replacement, a FedEx courier, does the same job with far less trouble.
[url=http://www.amconmag.com/01_13_03/lind7.html]http://www.amconmag.com/01_13_03/lind7.html[/url]
2003-02-20 22:54 | User Profile
**...and resolved this inversion of the natural order in Kirkian fashion, by taking a sledgehammer to it. **
Were that more of our problems could not be solved so simply.
2003-02-21 17:43 | User Profile
Originally posted by wintermute@Feb 21 2003, 04:50 ** Lind is right to say that television is from Hell, and may well be right about 'all virtual realities'. I myself often refer to the telescreen as 'The Devil's Lantern'.
But the analogy doesn't apply to computers, which enable discernment, information retrieval, and community formation. I offer this board as only one example.
I would not be surprised if an innocuous but widespread 'Kill your Television' movement in the West marked the deathblow to ZOG. We can play that crypsis thing, too.
Oh yeah.
Wintermute **
Quasi-ditto, of wintermute... the problem with tee.vee is, as has been pointed out decades ago... the medium is the message... so the "message" of t.v. is "Watch & be TOLD"
that's from hell, even G-d doesn't ask that... rather, you have freedom within a design... experience, listen, think, act...learn, Enjoy, be, become, proceed... in short the experiential reality of a world... NOT a virtual world... and especially not one whose inevitable message is "watch & be TOLD..."
interesting that wintermute should quote gore vidal... I once brought him to the Sticks, (where I was pondering the 'universe' at the time), as a speaker... gosh we tied one on... I don't remember his talk, so it must have been good. P.S. oh, wait...that's why the internet is GOOD! at least it's real time...and we speak... as the late great mini-Pearl once said: "HOWDEEE !"