The Future Can Be Evenly Distributed … If We Want It To Be

by M. Christian

The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. –William Gibson

I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote.  Like a lot of people, I first interpreted it as the father of cyberpunk making a statement against income, and technology, disparity: that only the wealthy could afford the future.

But then I began to rethink that supposition.  First of all, how could the future be here, in the present?  Making this subjective, I like to think of a present future as being a current environment where someone from the past would find few places of reference: a place where old, and flawed systems have been replaced with new perspectives.

it can’t just be just about technology.  After all, everyone has friends or relatives who can afford the newest [fill in the blank] yet are clueless in how to use it to affect their lives for the better.  

Home automation falls squarely into this camp.  Yes, the wealthy can spent serious bucks getting their intelligent personal assistant to do everything from turn on their lights to play their favorite music, but does it make any real shifts in how they live?  At it’s core this tech is basically just a more elaborate way of flipping a switch or scrolling through a playlist.

This means that for many people with too much money to spend on technology they are still basically living as they have been for decades.   Read more “The Future Can Be Evenly Distributed … If We Want It To Be”

Who Made The Nazis… Cry?

“If they knew something about human evolution, they’d know that everyone’s earliest human ancestors were African. They’d know that our skin color is a statistically arbitrary outcome of lots of genes cooperating to express themselves.

by Woody Evans

How to respond to the Nazis?  They have rebranded, they are active, and they are moving into our civic spaces. They are recruiting.

My place of employment was recently vandalized with Nazi propaganda — stickers and posters glued onto windows and recycling bins directing folk (or what they might think of as some kind of volk) to join their little shops of terror. I won’t mention the particular flavor of Nazi (the attention might only encourage them), but it was a small outfit (only 22 Twitter followers), and they seem to have struck in the dead of night.

Imagine a half a dozen young white boys crunk up on Monster energy drinks and vandalizing property in the middle of the night. What might be their aims?  What might they be trying to avoid?

First, they are young and inexperienced (or, if aged, immature). They likely haven’t travelled. Perhaps they only socialize with other kids in the “Youth Ministry” of their conservative megachurches. They don’t know much about people who seem different from them, and they’re not yet interested in getting to know others. They claim to be working and fighting for their “culture” and their “history”, but they really don’t know all that much about geography, they don’t know languages, and they don’t know their own genealogies.

Santa Claus was from Turkey, Et Cetera

Jolly ol’ St. Nick

If they knew something about history, they’d know that America was Spanish before it was French, French before it was English, and that North America was dominated by the “Paleo-Indian” Clovis peoples and their variants and descendants for some 13,000 years before the Spanish showed up. There is no basis for a Nazi claim to America as an historical ethno-nation for whites. Europeans crashed this party late.

If they knew something about human evolution, they’d know that everyone’s earliest human ancestors were African. They’d know that our skin color is a statistically arbitrary outcome of lots of genes cooperating to express themselves. If they knew their own genealogies, they would have to square their whispered family stories of a darkly complexioned great-great-great grandmother with the fact that American whites are actually pretty genetically diverse — as are all Americans. Read more “Who Made The Nazis… Cry?”