From John Gray’s “Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern”:

“For Saint-Simon and Comte, technology meant railways and canals. For Lenin it meant electricity. For neo-liberals it means the Internet. The message is the same. Technology – the practical application of scientific knowledge – produces a convergence in values. This is the central modern myth, which the Positivists propagated and everyone today accepts as fact.”

I’m about a third of my way through. It’s compact [120-odd pages?] and it’s a cracking read so far.

For someone who works in technology, and has perhaps would be characterised as vaguely-progressive-but-healthy-sceptical liberal view of it’s beneficial effects; it’s a very challenging but valuable viewpoint to be exposed to.

With all the hoo-haa about the New York Times, the part that blogs played in the upheaval there, the constant bickering about blogs by pro/am journos etc; it’s fantastic to see that not all parts of the media are being forced to wise up to their ‘former audience’.

The caption below proceeds each weekly showing of “The Daily Show” on CNN Europe; accompanied by a thunderous James-Earl-Jones-type reading the text in voice-over:

It’s so patronising it makes me giggle very time. Often I wonder whether Jon Stewart and his crew of merry pranksters didn’t insist on it in their distribution contract. It’s half-disclaimer, half-comedy-warm-up.

Perhaps other scandalised big media should follow suit…

How many of you, like me, had shelves full of books full of images of suburban life being enjoyed on the edge of plexiglass toroid in geostationery orbit?

You can relive the optimism of you childhood when you thought the future would be “spandex jackets, one for everyone” at NASA’s “Space Colony Art from the 1970s” page!