Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain.
Photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution.
Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone’s living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock’s mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.
A typical Burtynsky photograph showed a huge open pit copper mine. A tiny, barely discernible black line on one of the levels was pointed out: “That’s a whole railroad train.” Alberta tar sands excavation tearing up miles of boreal forest. China’s Three Gorges Dam. Mine tailing ponds beautiful and terrible. Expired oil fields stretching to the horizon. Michelangelo’s marble quarry at Carrera, still working.
“This is the sublime of our time, shown straight on, for contemplation.”
Indeed worth studying for centuries.
From the archive:
Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.
A recording of a conversation between Clay Shirky and Brian Eno, musician, artist and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation.
Freeman Dyson:
I'm working on a project, The Long Now Foundation, to encourage long-term responsibility. Esther's on that board, too. We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed? For instance, if you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.
It won't be long now until the telcos start trying to pass on the cost of wiretapping to the major content providers.
Don't get me wrong; I still live in your world. In this very house even. But now I exist between two eras: an Edwardian past and a quixotic future where dirigibles can travel through space and time.
...
Don't look so crestfallen, Mom and Dad. At least I'm not into cyberpunk.
I have often referenced this essay and people seem to ignore it, but I thought that it might make a good companion piece to Paul Graham's latest essay.
The belief that corporate power is the unique source of our problems is not the only idol we are subject to. There is an idol even in the language we use to account for our problems. Our primary dependence on the scientific language of “environment,” “ecology,” “diversity,” “habitat,” and “ecosystem” is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the very kind of rationality that serves not only the Sierra Club but corporate capitalism as well.
... Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.
In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.
Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to programmers. In the first couple weeks of working on their own startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working the way people are meant to.
From last fall:
In The Culture of the New Capitalism, a book based on a series of lectures given at Yale in 2004, Richard Sennett describes how the widespread use of enterprise systems has given top managers much greater latitude to direct and control corporate workforces, while at the same time making the jobs of everyday workers and professionals more rigid and bleak.
The spread of Enterprise Systems has resulted in a declining emphasis on creativity and ingenuity of workers, and the destruction of a sense of community in the workplace by the ceaseless reengineering of the way businesses operate. The concept of a career has become increasingly meaningless in a setting in which employees have neither skills of which they might be proud nor an audience of independently minded fellow workers that might recognize their value.
An excerpt from the 1958 "Disneyland" TV Show episode entitled "Magic Highway USA". In this last part of the show, an exploration into possible future Transportation technologies is made. It's hard to believe how little we've accomplished on this front since 1958, and how limited the scope for imagining such future technologies has become. Witness an artifact from a time where the future was greeted with optimism. Note the striking animation style here, achieved with fairly limited animation and spectacular layouts.
I like how suburban sprawl is anticipated with such glee!
From a technology standpoint, it spans a wide range; some ideas are pure vision, with no sense of reality (cantilevered, fully air-conditioned sky-ways through beautifully desolate mountain ranges?), while others are quaintly myopic (punch cards as storage media for your navigational unit?). Still, a lot of fun.
From Nat Torkington, chair of OSCON and co-author of the Perl Cookbook:
Nebraska High Schooler Makes Ethanol Breakthrough: Emmett Jordan, a high school student in Nebraska, successfully demonstrated high-efficiency production of cellulosic ethanol by a genetically engineered bacterium during the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, beating out biotech giants to the prize. This step signals a major milestone in what Freeman Dyson calls the domestication of biotechnology.
Federal government agrees to use version control for all legislation: Following a suggestion made here on Radar, Nancy Pelosi today announced that the U.S. House of Representatives is deploying version control for all legislation, allowing the public to see who made changes to any bill, just like they can do with Wikipedia. The Senate is expected to follow suit. Virgil Griffith, creator of Wikiscanner, announced LawScanner within two hours after Speaker Pelosi's declaration. The Register writes up the story: Code is Law, but Law is Sausage.
A: Well, I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I'm pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social networks conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.
Everybody is still banging rocks together, while bragging about the colors. Meanwhile, half of the tricks that human beings normally use, in real world conversation, have never even been tried online. In my book Earth, I forecast a near future when people are empowered by their tools to learn rapidly from their own mistakes and the mistakes of others. It could still happen.
Although he is often presented as a glorifier of technological progress, Marshall McLuhan painted a subtle, sometimes disturbing picture of the future. In one striking sentence from Understanding Media, he offered a dark view of the commercial exploitation of electric media:
The Idols of Environmentalism | Curtis White | Orion magazine
Topic: Futurism
8:20 pm EDT, Jul 16, 2007
I found this essay in the latest issue of Harper's. It appeared first (though in slightly different form) in the March/April issue of Orion magazine. See also part two, The Ecology of Work, from the May/June issue. It is worth reading in full, but I will pull a few quotes to draw you in.
ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION proceeds apace in spite of all the warnings, the good science, the 501(c)3 organizations with their memberships in the millions, the poll results, and the martyrs perched high in the branches of sequoias or shot dead in the Amazon. This is so not because of a power, a strength out there that we must resist. It is because we are weak and fearful. Only a weak and fearful society could invest so much desperate energy in protecting activities that are the equivalent of suicide.
... The belief that corporate power is the unique source of our problems is not the only idol we are subject to. There is an idol even in the language we use to account for our problems. Our primary dependence on the scientific language of “environment,” “ecology,” “diversity,” “habitat,” and “ecosystem” is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the very kind of rationality that serves not only the Sierra Club but corporate capitalism as well.
... Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.
... I AM INEVITABLY ASKED AT THIS POINT in my argument just what exactly it is that I am proposing that people do. What would I put in capitalism’s place? In reply, I am always tempted to quote Voltaire’s response to the complaint that he had nothing to put in the place of the Christianity he criticized. “What!” he said, “A ferocious beast has sucked the blood of my family; I tell you to get rid of that beast, and you ask me, what shall we put in its place!” Unlike Voltaire, I would also suggest that what has the best chance of defeating the “beast” is spirit. In accepting science as our primary weapon against environmental destruction, we have also had to accept science’s contempt for religion and the spiritual. This is the unfortunate legacy of science’s two-century-old confrontation with what it has always called “religious dogma and superstition.” But this attitude is myopic; it is science at its most stupid.
