[NewMusic] david cope, technology etc

[Tim Perkis]

i posted this a few days ago, but it somehow didn't appear.  I know the 
conversation has moved on a bit, but I  still hate to waste a perfectly 
good rant.

don't take it to personally, barry -- I actually admire yr enthusiasm 
for the  artistic possibilities of gaming... but yr post did provoke a 
pet peeve or two of mine...

T


barry threw wrote:
>
> You seem to think that people that build technologies are a bunch of  
> naive wide eyed hippies that somehow think we are going bring about a  
> utopia. Well, we aren't idiots, actually, tech people are some of the  
> most cynical I have met. It takes a lot of thought and planning to  
> make this stuff happen, where do you get off inferring that we don't  
> think about things before we do them? Everyone had bright thoughts  
> about how things in the last 70 years, specifically the internet,  
> would change the world. Many of them came true. But few were dumb  
> enough to think it would be perfect.
I'm sorry, Barry, but it's completely unconvincing that there has been 
much (if any) serious,
empathic, clued-in-to-human-reality social or political thinking behind 
the technological juggernaut --
there just has not been. Or, rather, the social thinking that has gone on
in the milieu of the vacuous and hyper-privileged world of technological 
"visionaries" is
worse than no social thinking at all. It's a context pretty much without 
any
historical, cultural  and political consciousness at all, and virulently 
a- or anti-political. A place where it is beyond any of these genius's 
imagination to see  how a groovy invention
that, say,  lets me know which Starbucks my friends are currently 
hanging out at  just might have
a sinister use in hands outside the R&D department. A place where 
everyone conveniently ignores that the
conclusions they are reaching just happen to be in perfect harmony with 
the hand that feeds.

As someone who has been gagging down the Koolaid long enough to build up 
a pretty strong immunity,
it's scary to me that clueless technology addicts really are defining 
the world we're living in,
and that they're excited all the way about how amazing and wonderful it 
all is.