Category: ideas

Technological utopianism is always self-aggrandizing. “We stand at the high peak between ages!” the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote in his “Manifeste du Futurisme” in 1909, predicting, among other things, that the Futurist cinema would spell the end of drama and the book. Every other modern era has seen itself in exactly the same way, poised at the brink of an epochal transformation wrought by its newly dominant technology, which, as Carr notes, is always seen as “a benevolent, self-healing, autonomous force […] on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation.”

Sissel Tolaas has a collection – a library, if you will – of more than 6,500 odors in airtight cans as well as a “smell camera” she travels with. She’s created what she calls SmellScapes of towns as varied as Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, Cape Town, London, Kansas City, and, most recently, Singapore. Here’s how she does it.

For most people “consciousness” will have various meanings and include awareness, self-awareness, thinking in language. But for philosophers and neuroscientists the crucial meaning is that of feeling something, having a feeling you might say, or an experience. An easy way to think about it would be pain.

The first incidence of time travel in fiction (Rip van Winkle and the Connecticut Yankee notwithstanding) was H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine in 1985. Ten years later, Einstein first published his theories – and it turns out Wells’s fantasies matched up pretty well. “Time travel has been an object of fascination ever since.”

The data show Americans move geographically less. So what is the cause? “My best guess is that the greatest single factor in the great settling down was the increasing physical and economic security of US life.”

This is a truly creepy story of mysterious secrets controlled by a private cabal of gatekeepers who deny researchers for no clear reason and seem to “regard their role, in part, as guarding the reputation of the British monarchy.”

“We turned to ritual, to dance, to quiet conversations that played softly like a piano in the dark, to the old ways, to prayer, to cussing, to tears, to side eye, to righteous pettiness, to shade throwing, to memes, to each other. Increasingly, we turned to song. This was hardly by chance.”

Add the historic city of Nimrud (Nimrod in the U.S.) to the list of places ISIS has utterly destroyed. But hey, technology: “Digital scanning, robot etching and 3D reproduction can recreate these monuments, to an exactness unknown to past attempts at such reinstatement. Extrusion techniques can rebuild monuments using the dust of the ruins themselves.”

Before Alan Turing, before Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, there was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed the binary number system and the first mechanical calculators – and who envisioned artificial intelligence and even data overload.