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| Friday, April 29, 2005 |
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Flattening out 
| | There is much eloquence and fun in the backlash against the book and its author. For a taste, follow the links in these two posts by Teresa Nielsen Hayden. All seem to agree with this comment by Felix Deutsch in response to my Part 1 essay. An excerpt: |
| | Friedman is a terribly shallow and lazy thinker, always looking for new ways of fellating the corpocracy or jumping on a (clue)train that has left the station years ago; look no further than here for more evidence. |
| | Most of what I write in Part 2 isn't about Tom Friedman. It's about the boat anchor we call the bell curve, and why continuing to shape kids with it is The West's worst handicap in a flattened world. |
| | In case you haven't noticed, my life has been one long fight against the bell curve. I recount some of that in the piece as well. |
Checking teapots for tempests
| | ...this Virginia Postrel person's revised opinion of the iPod because of its rechargeable battery. It's a bad design because of the battery! She writes, "They're beyond terrible, and Apple won't replace them." It's clear she didn't even read the FAQ she pointed to, because that's patently false. Apple should sue her! (Doc Searls links to this tripe because Postrel is an A-Lister (and a media elite), and because she offers something disparaging about the iPod, one of Doc's latest pet peeves. "Silos bad. Flat world good.") Of course Postrel is wrong about Apple not replacing the battery, and the video she links to is so last year, in addition to being just wrong. All rechargeable batteries fail eventually. The virtue of rechargeable batteries is that they don't fill up landfills as quickly as disposable ones do. One wonders what Postrel thinks of the design of her vibrator and its disposable batteries? (Am I allowed to say that about an A-lister?) Oh, wait, yeah, she's okay with disposables, as she tells us. What car of the Clue Train do you suppose she's riding in? |
| | Actually, GD is just as wrong about why I linked to Virginia's iPod item as she is (or was) about the iPod's batteries. Not that it matters. He's still a fun read: |
| | Nevertheless, the old strategies remain and are often employed to good effect even by those who are shameless in their self-worship. One of the oldest and most universal of these is the identification of enemies to warn against and damn. This one is exploited almost universally in the "blogosphere," where the range of dangerous threats to progress, security, equality, and good taste covers the spectrum of human behavior. |
| | So-called "mainstream media" or "old media" or "journalists" have been a favorite enemy of the attention-seeking, hierarchy-climbers for some time. This was an inspired choice because it allowed the attention seeking to exploit the attention-directing mechanisms of the very thing it railed against to attract more attention to them. But social organisms are learning organisms and many of them have learned, "If you can't beat 'em - join 'em!" |
| | By the way, I like the iPod, in spite of the fact that it's a silo. Just as I like lots of things, in spite of other things. |
| | Makes me want to go read Wealth Bondage, which I haven't visited in awhile. Alas, there I find this: |
| | In any case, I am thinking of shutting, or downsizing, WB for awhile and trying something that is more difficult, too difficult for me to have done earlier, without the practice I have had here. |
As I said...
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