I was introduced to the band Beauty Pill by Roman Mars on his podcast 99% Invisible. They have this song called “Cigarette Girl from the Future.” For the longest time, when listening, I imagined a movie from the 1940s with a nightclub scene. The Cigarette Girl walks in and out of the scene, she's never the hero of the story, but she's the subject of this song. When the cigarette girl appears, she's both fascinating and dangerous–much like a cigarette.
And then I was in the car listening to the opera channel on SiriusXM and they were playing Bizet's Carmen. Carmen is a cigarette girl from the future. She works in a cigarette factory and she knows that the daily grind of making cigarettes isn't her future. Strange connections.
Somehow I've always thought about Samuel Beckett like this. Along with the profundity, the sadness and the humor–there was at bottom, the detective.
The theme music is from the classic television show “The Streets of San Francisco.” It was composed by Patrick Williams and features a killer lead saxophone by Tom Scott. This is what television sounded like in 1972. It's worth listening to the whole thing.
Milton Glaser has designed a graphic representation of our biosphere. The first thing I noticed about it was that the darkness seemed to be spreading from the top down. The second thing was how little green is left. In 1700, seven percent of the world's land was used for farming. That number is now more than fifty percent. Ecological awareness is beginning to interupt the conversation about Capital, optimization and the possibility of infinite growth that we've been having with ourselves for the last couple hundred years.
Technology writer and venture capitalist Om Malik opens a recent blog post on big data and big responsibility with the following paragraph:
“You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but to someone who is not from this landmass we call Silicon Valley or part of the tech-set, that comment is about the futility of their future.
Malik goes on to explore the idea that, aside from some half-baked libertarian ideology, the big technologists don't really have a moral vision of the future. He doesn't come out and say it, but the powerful technology that will have a profound influence on what you see and buy is under the control of 13-year-old boys (in the bodies of adults). This technology may very well create the boundaries of your imagination and make you its plaything within them. Malik is too timid to speak truth to power, he makes vague gestures about how somebody oughta do something or some sorta bad thing might happen. He deserves some credit for bringing the issue up, but none of the titans of technology are going to lose a wink of sleep over his blog post. In the old days, we'd call his post tomorrow's fish wrap.
Imagine instead someone a hundred years in the future looking back on this moment. Think of it as a moral thought experiment. That future that Brin spoke of, a dominant Orwellian consumer-oriented big data cultural hegemony, has become the air we breathe. It's our everyday prison house.
We often talk about what we would do if given access to a time machine. A typical response has been a plan to go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler prior to his rise in Germany, thus changing the course of history, and possibly saving millions of lives.
Looking back on our day from the future, at the moment when Sergey Brin talks about the global networked computing machines that Google is in the process of building, do we think: we should have stopped it right then and there. Malik seems to think Brin and Page are “really smart guys,” but they aren't smart enough to pull the emergency break and take a good hard look at what they're doing.
