Bruce Sterling's Final Prediction 162
In Bruce Sterling's final column for Wired, he summarizes the output of a survey of Net prognosticators conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The piece is peppered with Sterling's trademarked stop-you-in-your-tracks imagery. An example: "The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders."
Re:Batshit Insane (Score:3, Informative)
"lexus and olive tree" Is a Tom Friedman reference (Score:5, Informative)
Lexus and the Olive Tree (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the summary:
The Lexus represents modern life, aka - globalization, the internet, computers etc etc, and our love for these things and conveinces which make our lives better.
The Olive Tree is our long standing traditions, communities, churches, families, the ties that bind us to each other and to the places we live.
I have not RTFA, but from the summary, I can see this guy is a good writer... although he does lean somewhat heavily on an informed audience.
This metaphor is actually pretty good - Our modern culture is clashing with our values, and its not pretty. Video game violence legislation, computure monotiring etc etc, all of the things we rail about on slashdot... the majority of them are a direct result of this clash.
Read the book, and understand your world better.
Don't read the book, trash authors because you don't get it, and look like an idiot.
Re:Batshit Insane (Score:5, Informative)
There were a few good points in there, but all in all I think that deep down inside The Lexus and the Olive Tree there was a clear and concise essay screaming to get out and being smothered by 200 pages of ad-hoc musings that were thrown in as filler.
Wrong Bruce! (Score:4, Informative)
This is Bruce Sterling, the sci-fi author, not Bruce Perens, the OSS advocate.
Come on people (Score:3, Informative)
are slashdotters really this lazy?....wait dont answer that.
Let me introduce you all to a site you may have heard of in passing. Wikipedia, you should check it out sometime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Oli ve_Tree [wikipedia.org]
Not Batshit Insane, just better read than you. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Batshit Insane (Score:4, Informative)
While pretty much everyone agrees that the general idea of globalization is good, there's still some room for debate over whether the particulars of how its happening are actually benefitting impoverished regions or if it's just forcing them into a "race to the bottom" (and possibly dragging developed and developing nations along for the ride, too). The situation with the garment industry in Cambodia is a current popular conversation topic along this line.
I guess a (stretched) analogy would be that while it's good to let some fresh air into your house, knocking out the windows with bricks isn't necessarily the best way to do it.
Re:Come on people (Score:2, Informative)
It's nothing to do with being lazy. It's a case of having to know the answer to know there is even a question. The reference is obscure and many people will not have heard of it, and you can refer people to the source without being a smarmy git.
I'm new here, aren't I?