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"Whatever turns the soul inward on itself, tends to concenter its forces, and to fit it for greater and stronger flights of science." (Edmund Burke, preface to the second edition of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1759)
2 comments:
My friend Patrick said the other day his theory on the Apocalypse was that it already happened, like 10 years ago. This is Post-Apocalypse.
It's like the cartoon coyote running off a cliff and managing to run through the air for a minute before plummeting. The grounding is taken away but the imaginative event continues. For a while.
I think that's a kind of typical Marxist line--that the disaster's been going on for a long time, and is maybe just starting to catch up with the middle class. (It's not that the "world" is ending--it's a question of whose world.)
If a climate-related crisis occurs in, say, 2013, it certainly won't have been caused in 2013.
I think of my dad coming home with the first Macintosh in 1984. I don't know if we have any photos from that time with the computer in them, but it would be shocking to see that machine already planted in our world. You know the scene in 2001 where the two astronauts are worried about Hal, so they go into the escape pod to talk in secret, and suddenly you see Hal's camera-eye on the wall and you realize he's reading their lips through the porthole? I feel that way about our old computer, like it was infiltrating our world, way before we could imagine how quickly it was accelerating that world's destruction. Science-fiction scenarios of computer horror, built around self-conscious or self-replicating or nano-sized computers, kind of miss the point.
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