Archive for the ‘ Entertainment ’ Category

No Being, No Suffering

The purpose of Gautama Buddha, and his movement, was to eliminate suffering. And his techniques have been used recently in MBSR to do just that. Although most people prefer to suffer instead.

It is impossible for us now to understand his time (or any ancient time, for that matter) – which was Northern India in 400 BCE.

But in our time – in the Age of the Computer – we have a new cure for suffering. Not being at all.

This has to be seen in action to be appreciated. Its foremost practitioners when I was working in Silicon Valley in the Nineties, were the young women working in high-tech who were the living embodiment of it.

They had a very active social life, which included a very active sex life. And the music of the moment was their very body and soul. They had no other life – and didn’t want one.

What they would turn into later in life, I had no idea. But I suppose their lives became a mess – just like everyone else’s. They thought – like many other people did – that a new perfect era was dawning.

But they ended up in a world of illusion that was going nowhere. Or worse.

2013
05/04
CATEGORY
Business
Entertainment
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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Lincoln

I am watching this movie (on a NetFlix DVD) and I have not been impressed by it. So many experts have so many opinions – I wondered if they were all talking about the same Lincoln.

I decided if I could look at a movie I could also look at a Wikipedia article. Which I am doing also. I have to say it is substantial, and I have read it a little at a time – while I multitask on other computer tasks. But it is not painful at all. And, needless to say, it is free.

If I were to do it over, I would read the article, and then watch the movie. And fill in the blanks in the movie (and there are many) from what I learned in the article.

2013
01/13
CATEGORY
Entertainment
History
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The form that lets the Devil sneak in is the same that lets the innocent sneak out

Poetry Magazine – Michael Lista Q&A

I wasn’t too impressed by the poems in the December issue. But this poem, the last one, is worth referring to. It’s about Canada’s most famous rapist and serial killer, Paul Bernardo.

Bernardo was a psychopath, a type of human—it isn’t an illness, and it can’t be treated, never mind cured—that was first described by a Canadian, Robert Hare. Bernardo was good looking; he and his accomplice, his wife Karla Homolka, an equally demented psychopath, were called “the Ken and Barbie killers” by the American press because they were beautiful and charming and ostensibly well put-together. When Bernardo was finally charged, the judge who presided over the case had to rule whether or not the videos of the crimes, which Bernardo had filmed, could be shown in open court. The judge, Patrick LeSage, ruled that Canadians could hear them but they could not see them.

The writer of this series of poems also noted that Early Greek Christians thought of Christ as a new Orpheus – which made me look up Orpheus on Wikipedia.

2012
12/31
CATEGORY
Entertainment
History
Poetry
Psychology
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Technology is Ideology

I don’t have many ideas of my own, but borrow them from others. One of them is Neil Postman, an amazing fellow. For your edification, here is a sample from his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) page 157:

For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?

But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption the technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.

I like that last sentence particularly, it is poetic in its flow of words.

He is our best critic of Television, the most disruptive force known when he wrote this in 1985. But he did not understand the Computer at all – the triple-whammy that laid us in the dust.

The net effect of this was to eliminate people altogether. After its Coming (note the religious parallel) technology would not just be ideology – it would be everything!

2012
12/20
CATEGORY
Entertainment
Religion
Sociology
Technology
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How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation

Harvard Business Review

Americans are ambivalent about innovation –  the idea  sounds good to them – but they are not about to go to bat for it – or much of anything else. They know behind the scenes – and not very far behind the scenes – powerful forces will slap them down if they try to be different. It is safest to stay put, and don’t do anything at all. Let someone else live dangerously, not them.

Here is one paragraph, out of many:

And finally, if you were in any doubt how deep inside the political system the system of contributions have allowed incumbents to insert their hands, take a look at what happened when the Republican Study Committee released a paper pointing out some of the problems with the current copyright regime. The debate was stifled within 24 hours. And just for good measure, Rep Marsha Blackburn, whose district abuts Nashville and who received more money from the music industry than any other Republican congressional candidate, apparently had the author of the study, Derek Khanna, fired. Sure, debate around policy is important, but it’s clearly not as important as raising campaign funds.

Bear in mind also that this is the Harvard Business Review – hardly a radical rag.

2012
12/10
CATEGORY
Business
Entertainment
Morality
Political comment
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The Consumer and the Computer

I have been trying to understand how people went from the Television world into the Computer world. I not well-qualified to do this, because I stopped watching TV a long time ago (it was more than I could cope with). When I was working, I worked in the Computer world, and now I am retired, I blog on my computer every day.

I have compensated for my lack of TV-watching experience by reading McLuhan and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman says a lot about the Television Commercial – the great gift of Television to Mankind. On page 128 he amplifies on this:

What an advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product, but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research.

The Television Commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means the business of business now becomes pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

This sounds right to me – I have never heard it put better.

Now I am asking myself “How does the Computer fit into this?” At the unconscious level, everyone else was asking themselves the same thing. People expected the Computer to carry on the work of the Television. Which it could not, because it was not the same thing at all.

What happened? People still wanted to be entertained (the greatest need in their lives). So the computer user interface was quickly improved to do just that – in one of the greatest design efforts of all time – and one whose social impact has never been properly appreciated.

People got used to the new Graphical User Interface (GUI) which was more interesting than Television – because the communication there was two-way – the Computer could do what the user wanted it to do!

The user became all-powerful (at least in that little corner of his world)! No therapy was required, because this had always been Mankind’s ardent wish – to be a demigod!

And with the new hand-held devices he was just that.  He did not have do anything, they would do everything for him! And he could be a perfect moron.
—
Now I have written this, I am not sure what to do with it. Its basic insight is astonishing (if I do say so myself). Perhaps others will find it useful.

2012
11/26
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Entertainment
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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Cheerful Stuff from TED

David Binder: The arts festival revolution

Handspring Puppet Co.: The genius puppetry behind War Horse

Hannah Brencher: Love letters to strangers

Now for something cheerful – as well as clever.

This is in contrast to my usual pessimistic stuff (and I really think I have became a pessimistic as it is possible to be.)

2012
11/17
CATEGORY
Entertainment
Technology
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There is no Meaning

“No meaning to what?” You may ask. The answer is “No meaning to anything!” Stated this way, it is clearly not acceptable. But making it acceptable is easy – and is done all the time.

I am re-reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. And marveling how easy (even entertaining) it is to read. And marveling at how easily it has been ignored. The chapter about news shows should have won him a Pulitzer Prize. Because it about the lack of meaning in the News.

It amazes me how much people like their News. When I mentioned once to a co-worker once that I didn’t watch them, she was shocked. “Don’t you want to know what is going on?” She said.

I said nothing, because there was nothing to say. TV watchers believe in a fantasy world they think is real. And nothing I can say will change that.

And the News has one implicit message “There is no meaning to any of this!” A message its viewers accept without question. It has made acceptable the unacceptable (very easily) by the simple procedure of showing a series of unrelated videos in rapid succession. The viewers just sit there, with their mouths wide open – amazed by what they see – with no time to think at all. Having learned nothing – but convinced they have learned everything.

In their minds, they are the same thing.

2012
11/05
CATEGORY
Entertainment
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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The World is Defective and Must be Abandoned

The world I am referring to is the Human World – the rest of the world could easily get along without us, and go its merry way, as it has for millions of years.

Our world, however, is a mess that cannot be fixed – and, at an unconscious level we realize this. And are in the process of leaving it.

You might ask “Where are we going?” And the answer is “To a world of our own, where we can ignore reality. An imaginary world, where everything is exactly the way we want it to be.”

This world has been in the making for some time – beginning with the novel, that became a movie, that become Television, that became the smart phone and Facebook. All fantasies.

You may object that the Computer and its offspring – Software, the Internet, and Wireless – are not fantasies. And you would be right, in a way. But I am speaking of their effect on people. They perceive them to be wonderful new worlds where they can escape from the real one, and its problems.

I see gringos trying to do this by making Costa Rica their Promised Land. It doesn’t usually work – even when heavily reinforced with alcohol. They come up with a fantasy, all right, but pretending that it is working is a emotional strain they may not be able to live with. But let me return to America – or any other place in the real world.

None of these countries (or all of them put together) is working – for a host of reasons. In theory, these problems are not insurmountable – in themselves. Except for one thing – they seem insurmountable to the vast majority of the people involved.

The reason for this is simple – but completely ignored. Mass man (himself the product of the Industrial Revolution) is now in control – or more exactly, is being controlled by the fantasies he believes in. And the people who control these fantasies are the rich and powerful.

And we are returning to the  traditional, highly-stratified society we came from. But with greatly enhanced technologies that only make the situation worse.

2012
09/25
CATEGORY
Entertainment
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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Hype About the Power of American Business

I was really going to limit my posting today – but too much stuff is clamoring for attention, and all of it about the miracle of American business. A subject Americans never seem to tire of.

Some of it is legitimate – for example the book The Fish That Ate the Whale, about the Banana Business, which showed how ruthless American business could be in its dealings with banana republics. My father, as a Marine (1930-34) was part of an American occupation of Haiti to keep it safe for American business.

Just today Amazon wanted me to buy Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power. Which is mostly hype.

But this posting on Open Democracy Bain & Co. solves Middle East crisis does the perfect job of showing how much hot air is in Romney’s Bain.com. Check it out – they look wonderful!

The last company I worked for in Silicon Valley had a site that looked much like this – like it was owned by God himself. I worked beside the geek who made the site – a perfect nobody. The company, which was only hot air, eventually faded – but not before it fooled a lot of people.

The Open Democracy link is the best for those with critical minds. All you need is a clothes-pin for your nose.

2012
08/22
CATEGORY
Business
Entertainment
Morality
Philosophy
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