Category: ideas

The debate over privacy vs. security has been raging in Washington and across the country recently, thanks to the controversial surveillance tactics being used by the Bush Administration. But in such a globally connected world, what is privacy, anyway, and can we really afford it? Bruce Schneier says the issue is far simpler than many people make it sound, and the obvious conclusion is that we can’t afford not to make privacy a priority. “We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.”

Want to strike it rich? Write something. At least that’s what an awful lot of people seem to be thinking about these days. They are writing the screenplay – or, since Harry Potter, the children’s book – that will overnight, pay off the mortgage, free them from the job, allow the kids to have a great education and pay for the rest of their lives to be lived in tasteful but significant luxury.” Trouble is – your chances of that ever happening are about the same as winning the lottery…

“The unprecedented success of technology in the last 50 years may have also created an expectation that failure should be anticipated and eliminated in all aspects of life. This leaves less and less tolerance for its inevitable persistence; very little margin is left for error. That is understandable in deciding whether bolts or welds should be used in a skyscraper (as became an issue in the Citigroup Tower in New York); large forces hinge on such small decisions. But that absolutist approach also entails unexpected sacrifices in other aspects of life, particularly when avoidance of failure and accident becomes the guiding principle for future design and behavior.”

That’s the dream of armies of copiers, working to digitize the world’s libraries. “The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world…”

“We need to wake up to the fact that people are now asking basic questions. Why are we musical? Why did people write symphonies? Why do we have the string quartet? They seem child-like, these questions, but they’re there to provide us with the opportunity to enthuse and explain and demonstrate the answers we first stumbled upon in our musical journey and which encouraged us to make that journey in the first place. Figure out our answers to those questions, and it will help us tackle some more simple, yet more terrifying, questions: why should the state spend money on the arts, why do we have opera and why is it so expensive, why should we have so many orchestras in London?”

“The first written record comes from ancient Greece. At the annual Festival of Dionysia in Athens, playwrights competed to determine whose tragedy was the best. When the democratic reformer Cleisthenes came to power in the sixth century B.C., audience participation came to be regarded as a civic duty. The audience applauded to show its approval and shouted and whistled to show displeasure.”

“If the Internet was once ungoverned by etiquette, those days are gone; MySpace and its siblings, by many accounts the future of the Net, are rife with discussions of good manners versus unforgivable faux pas. There isn’t an aristocratic class, just yet, but you can see the lines forming in the sand, renegades and bad boys posting bulletins pell-mell, uploading risque pictures, collecting “friends” as if it’s all some big popularity contest — while mannered netizens look on disapprovingly. Screw up and you just might get dumped, online and off.”

To judge from the furor raised by conservatives last week when a group of Latin recording artists released a Spanish version of The Star-Spangled Banner, you would have thought that America was on the verge of losing its very soul. Ariel Dorfman says that we’d better get used to it. “This Spanish is not going to fade away as Norwegian or Italian or German did during previous assimilated waves… If this prophecy of mine is right, and America will sometime in the near or distant future be articulating its identity in two inevitable languages, then the question looms: how will the citizens of the United States react to this monumental challenge?”

The older we get, the more we like to reflect on the importance of “life experience,” and how the passage of time can give human beings an expertise in their chosen field that raw talent never can. But how important is experience, really? After all, talented athletes now begin their professional careers as teenagers, and don’t appear to suffer from a lack of life experience. Could the same be true in politics, music, or art? Is it possible that all the talk of seasoning and maturation is nothing more than our fear of those younger than us?

It lasted for only a year in the late 1920s, and only 15 issues were ever printed, but Georges Bataille’s controversial and provocative magazine, Documents stands as one of the most influential publications of the 20th century. “Conceived as a ‘war machine against received ideas’, Documents drew in several dissident surrealists such as Leiris, Joan Miró, Robert Desnos and André Masson. As, in his own words, surrealism’s ‘old enemy from within’, Bataille was uncompromising in his disdain for art as a panacea and a substitute for human experience, his problem remaining ‘the place that surrealism gave to poetry and painting: it placed the work before being’.”