Friday links 3. [UPDATE: Comments closed on this post due to harassment from a banned commenter. Looking into solutions. Reopened.]

* How long will the MSM cover up the heroics of time-traveling Ronald Reagan?

* Another take on Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, this time from the Valve, about transnationalism and the American university.

* More on yesterday's unjust Supreme Court decision on the right to DNA evidence from Matt Yglesias, including a link to this striking observation from Jeffrey Toobin on John Roberts's governing judicial philosophy:

The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

* Peak Oil, risk, and the financial collapse: some speculative economics from Dmitry Orlov. Via MeFi.

* Mark Penn's superscience proves pessimism is the new microtrend. Via Gawker.

* Freakonomics considers vegetarianism-sharing.

* Possible outcomes in Iran from Gerry Seib in The Wall Street Journal. Via the Plank.

* People power prevails. After some period of extended protest, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is shown to be a fraud, his re-election rigged, and Mir Hossein Mousavi and his forces of moderation win a runoff. A long process of changing Iran's system in which real power lies in the hands of clerics operating behind the scenes begins, and the voices demanding an end to Iran's international isolation move to the fore. Such a simple and straightforward outcome seems unlikely, but that's what happened in Ukraine.

* Mr. Ahmadinejad survives, but only by moderating his position in order to steal the thunder of the reformers and beat them at their own game. U.S. officials think it's at least possible the erratic leader decides to survive by showing his critics that he actually is capable of what they claim he isn't, which is reducing Iran's isolation. He stays in power and regains his standing with internal critics by, among other things, showing new openness to discuss Iran's nuclear program with the rest of the world.

* The forces of repression win within Iran, but international disdain compounds, deepening world resolve to stop Iran's nuclear program and its sponsorship of extremists. In other words, Iran doesn't change, but the rest of the world does.

* The protests are simply crushed by security forces operating under the control of spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, the election results stand untouched, and Iran's veneer of democracy ultimately is shown to be totally fraudulent. That makes it clear that the only power that matters at all is the one the U.S. can't reach or reason with, the clerical establishment. There is no recount, no runoff, and the idea that "moderates" and "reformers" can change Iran from within dies forever.

* There is some legitimate recount or runoff, but Iran emerges with Mr. Ahmadinejad nominally in charge anyway. He emerges beleaguered, tense and defensive, knowing he sits atop a society with deep internal divides and knowing the whole world knows as well. His control is in constant doubt. What's the classic resort of such embattled leaders? Distract attention from internal problems with foreign mischief, and use a military buildup (in this case, a nuclear one) to create a kind of legitimacy that's been shown to be missing on the domestic front.

* Mr. Mousavi somehow prevails, perhaps through a runoff, and becomes president, but he operates as a ruler deeply at odds with the clerical establishment that controls the military and security forces, and deeply mistrusted by it. As a result, he's only partly in charge, and in no position to take chances with a real opening to the West. He has always supported Iran's nuclear program anyway and now has to do so with a vengeance to show that, while a reformer, he isn't a front for the West.

Afternoonery.

* Support for renewable energy technology to fight global warming is weakening in the face of worldwide economic problems and the true scale of the carbon reductions required, a survey published today has suggested.

Figures presented at the UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland, show that climate experts have less faith in alternative energy than they did 12 months ago.

* Grist reviews 2008's most essential book on shit.

* DFW's last book will be published next year, based off the Kenyon College commence speech he gave in 2005. Devotees may recall that this speech was the basis for my MetaFilter obit post.

* Everyone's in love with this evolved Mona Lisa. More evolution fun at Pharyngula and MetaFilter.

* Everyone's in love with Macs.

* Don't miss Metallica's latest music video, a prophecy of zombie disaster originating with the Tungska Event.

I am wholly pessimistic about American society. I believe The Wire is a show about the end of the American Empire. We are all, or our kids, are going to live that event. How we end up at the end of it and where we end up and whether or not we can survive and on what terms is going to be the only question from now on.

MetaFilter has great links on David Simon and the pessimistic politics of the The Wire.

First, this from the Guardian: "The escalating breakdown of urban society across the US."

I live in Baltimore, in a neighbourhood that is none of these things. I am vested in the city and its future and I can drive you to places in this city that would transform even the most devout Wire fan into a fat, happy tourist. Baltimore's charms are no less plentiful than most American cities.

And yet there are places in Baltimore where The Wire is not at all hyperbole, where all of the depicted tragedy and waste and dysfunction are fixed, certain and constant. And that place is, I might add, about 20 blocks from where I live.

That is the context of The Wire and that is the only context in which Baltimore - and by reasonable extension, urban America - can be fairly regarded. There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed. Both things are true, and one gets a sense, reading the distant reaction to The Wire, that Europeans are far more ready to be convinced by one vision than the other.

And second, clips of a recent lecture from Loyola College:

Just a few quick morning links:

* What it means to ♥ Adorno.

* Speculative fiction that explores psychology/sociology.

* Grad students strike at U. Chicago and McGill.

* 'The track we're on is a monorail with a cliff at the end.' Guy R. McPherson on the coming oilpocalypse.

3. What needs to happen to avoid a complete meltdown of the "American Empire," as you call it? And do you believe there is still time to avoid what you refer to as "the post-industrial Stone Age"?

First, let me explain Empire: We exploit humans and resources, often with extreme violence, to provide Americans with indulgences beyond belief to most people.

Had we started the project of powering down at least 30 years ago, there might still be time. At this point, I cannot imagine any steps that could allow us to avoid a meltdown of the economy or a relatively rapid transition into the post-industrial Stone Age. We depend on abundant, inexpensive oil for delivery of food, water, shelter, and health care. The days of abundant, inexpensive oil are behind us. The American Empire will soon run its course.

I am hopeful we can save a few tens of millions of Americans. But we will need to make massive changes in our entire way of life, starting immediately. We must abandon the project of globalization and its attendant indulgences, for example, and focus on saving lives.

Spoilers for the last season of The Wire are below, if you haven't seen it yet.

One of the clearest villains in the final season of The Wire is Baltimore Sun editor James Whiting, constantly instructing his reporters to uncover "the Dickensian aspect" in the stories they cover. For Whiting, prophet of the bottom-line, these appeals to Dickensian social realism are completely cynical as the rest of the management style that has eviscerated newspaper journalism in the Internet age. But there's a self-critical irony here, and possibly even a bitter self-loathing, as The Wire in its final season has never been more Dickensian, nor its characters more typological. This aesthetic is made inescapably clear as the entropy of the series winds down in its final season, with most of its main characters defeated or destroyed (often by their own hands) and new characters arising to fill their necessary social space. The players change, but the game goes on.

The musical chairs surrounding the police commissionership, the drug "connect," and various desks at The Sun are just a few salient examples of this. The Major Crimes Unit's most quiet cypher, Lt. Sydnor, quite literally steps into McNulty's shoes (and even his suit), taking up the slack as the last man standing from the unit. The most unrepentant and unsympathetic characters of the entire series, defense attorney Maurice Levy, seems to double himself twice in the final episode, taking both Herc and Stanfield on as corrupt protégés.

Most poignant for me—and even moreso for Jaimee—was Duquan's slide into oblivion, reproducing the resurgent Bubbles just as clearly as Michael's new brutality stepped into the void left by the superheroic Omar. Omar's killer, another cold cypher, the demon child Kenard, has a thousand-yard stare on his face as he is led away at the end of the season that brings to mind the brutal stoicism of Marlo Stanfield.

(That last sentence contains the three moments from the season that stick more clearly with me. The one thing for the whole season I was spoiled for was Duquan's use of heroin, so I had a few weeks to prepare for it—but it hit poor Jaimee like a ton of bricks at the end of episode 5.9. Omar's shooting was so entirely unexpected that I refused to believe it had happened for several minutes, and only really accepted it when the body was zipped up at the end of the episode. And Bubbles's final ascent from the basement to the kitchen was structurally obvious in retrospect, but totally unexpected until the moment it happened; I was nearly moved to tears.)

Seasons four and five of the show dance to the same score, the story of how the situation of late capitalism reproduces itself along explicitly Althusserian ideological status apparatuses like the school, the mayoral bureaucracy, mass media. The city of Baltimore becomes not a character, as some have said, but in some ways the only character—a reality that is best seen in the long montage at the end of the season, which stops following the characters we know and begins to flash shots of unknown, presumably authentic Baltimoreans, as the original theme song begins to play. We're back where we started. In fact we never left.

In the face of this ideological steel trap my attention is drawn again to the few characters able to escape the grinding of the machine. The poignant, hopeful shot of Namond on Bunny Colvin's porch that ended season four—which I said somewhere or another could have been a beautiful last shot for the series as a whole—is called back by the late discovery of a Namond who is now thriving as a champion debater. Pretty to think about—until we remember Randy, Michael, and Duquan, each with the same or more potential, just unluckier.

Likewise, Poot, the last of the original Barksdale kids—not the best, not the most worthy—is able to walk away from the game. He gets a job at Foot Locker. He seems happy.

Still more complicated is the ambiguous final image of Marlo Stanfield, cut in the street in his fine suit. Stanfield, always powered by an inexorable inner drive and an interiority that has always been totally inaccessible to the audience, remains just as frighteningly inscrutable at the end as he ever was. Is he going straight, as Stringer wanted but never could? Is he unable to stay off the street, like Avon? What is he thinking?

I'm sorry these thoughts are so late and so fragmented, but the show is much bigger than a single blog post. So here are a few others:

* A shot-by-shot commentary on the final montage from New York Magazine, alongside 10 Unanswered Questions and a last long, boozy Irish wake for the show.

* The MeFi thread.

* The American Prospect's roundtable.

* The Wire and women. This is a rather important topic I didn't even get to in my ramblings above.

* Alan Sepinwall's interview with David Simon, and his end of show recap. The House Next Door's recap.

* Heaven & Here, The Wire blog.

* Kottke has a whole lot of other links, and I notice now that I'm finally going through my links that he keyed into the same doubling I wrote about above. He gets a few I didn't mention, too: Carver is the new Daniels, Kima is the new Bunk...

Great show. Perfect, almost. In the last year and a half we've lost The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood... I'm afraid the Golden Age of Television finally ended last week.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, says we're all screwed. MeFi continues its never-ending discussion about the extent to which the sky is really falling. There's something of Olaf Stapledon's wonderful Star Maker, which I think I should have more to say about soon, in the way this article ends:

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."

And of course, something of No Future as well:

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

One of the major questions we've been wrestling with over in the culturemonkey discussion group about futurity is the question of whether people consumer apocalyptic fantasy because they fear it or because they long for it. (And of course there's no easy answer to this question— we recoil in fear from apocalypse because we're afraid it's what we really want, just as the little pessimist inside all of us is eager for the inevitable disaster to just hurry up and get it over with, and so on, spiraling down and down the psychoanalytic rabbit hole. Both/and.) Just to throw fuel on this fire, a pair of Times articles out yesterday and today help shine light on why it is that end-the-world fantasy (Children of Men, Cloverfield, climate-related apocalypse, Life Without People on the Discovery Channel just this week) is such a commercially vibrant field right now:

'Voters Show Darker Mood Than in 2000'

While not universal, that tone pervaded dozens of interviews conducted over the last week with Americans of all political stripes in 8 of the 24 states that hold primaries or caucuses on Feb. 5, as well as with historians, elected officials, political strategists and poll takers. As the candidates fan out to New York and California and here to the heartland, they are confronting an electorate that is deeply unsettled about the United States’ place in the world and its ability to control its own destiny.

and probably quicker to the point in terms of locating the likely origin for this new pessimism:

'Worries That the Good Times Were Mostly a Mirage'

But it’s hard not to believe that the economy will pay a price for the speculative binge of the last two decades, either by going through a tough recession or an extended period of disappointing growth. As is already happening, banks will become less willing to lend money, households will become less willing to spend money they don’t have and investors will become more alert to risk.

Welcome to the new moderation.

I love how mere "moderation" is figured in and of itself as a kind of disaster.

Still, I can't ignore this link from Bldgblog which Ryan left in the culturemonkey comments, which shoots past mere longing for the end of the world to bring us to a very Ballardian understanding of apocalypse as a kind of pornography—and the problems this death drive causes when you're trying to motivate people to change the way they live:

As it is, we're being told that we should worry about climate change... because it resembles one of the most exciting tropical adventures ever to befall the human race.

Who's going to get upset about that?

Needless to say, I think this is an exceptionally good point.

I'm going to try and watch the Democratic candidate debate tonight—I've avoided these things so far, because they're almost always unwatchable, but there comes a time when you can no longer run—so if anything interesting happens I'll be around to blog about it. In the meantime, though I have a few more primary links for those of you who aren't totally sick of this topic yet:

* The new ARG poll, previously favorable to Clinton, now shows Obama clobbering her 38% to 26%.

* Inevitable "Worst Person in the World" Bill O'Reilly got accosted by the Secret Service today after making a scene at an Obama rally. If the party alignment were switched he probably would have been arrested, but for now I'm content just to see the guy continuing to make a complete ass out of himself.

* Pictures from an Obama rally this morning show the huge numbers of people who are turning out to see him speak. I believe this particular rally had over 2,500 people attend—they packed two gyms. Marc Ambinder, though apparently a Clinton supporter, has a nice post that recognizes the sheer magnitude of what is going on here, and what it means for the Clinton campaign going forward.

* This cartoon comparing the greatness of two Illinois politicians with limited "national experience" is very cute, but even it returns us inevitably to the current paroxysm of fear gripping many in both the African-American community and the progressive left, before and after Iowa, my endlessly pessimistic self included: What if the worst happens, again? I don't fear violence after either an Obama victory or loss, as some on the right already claim to; all I fear is that at some point in the days and months and (hopefully) years ahead the country will once again be made to suffer its best and brightest hope being snatched away. I've felt this fear intensely since immediately following the news of Obama's Iowa victory, and I suspect I'll keep feeling it on some level or another until Jan. 20, 2017. I admire the hell out of the man just for risking that alone; talk about the audacity of hope.

Up until now I've avoiding watching wonderingmind42's climate change videos on the grounds that I didn't really need convincing on the subject—but after they got Ze's seal of approval yesterday I decided to finally give them a look. As is so often the case with this sort of thing, the best thing about them is also the worst thing about them: I think they provide a useful framework to try to reach out to global warming skeptics and disbelievers, which is good, but at the same time very frustrating insofar as the debate around this and other important issues continues to reduce to the problem of communicating information to people who very pointedly refuse to learn anything about anything. As such it's hard to imagine this video having all that much of a real-world impact, though it's been fairly popular, and has maybe even changed a few minds.

Regardless of my hopeless pessimism, however, of course Greg should be highly commended for the effort. Maybe he'll reach those doubters yet.

Here's How It All Ends, the risk-management approach to global warming in a nutshell.

And here's the index of all the "expansion-pack" responses he's made to the original video in an effort to address objections.

My friend R. Vu bids adieu to Utopia. (Warning: he drops bombs. F-bombs.) I'll probably write more about this later, but this:

So give up utopia, give up hope. Give up the gods, finally. What then? I submit the following declaration, appropriately vulgar:

We Are Fucked.

Fucked: there will not be flying cars and foie gras for everyone. Fucked: the revolution will always take place somewhere else. Fucked: even self-righteous victimhood is incoherent, because there is always someone more fucked than you, and your pet huddled masses. Fucked: death is unavoidable, and you are not going to heaven for ’saving’ future generations. They too are fucked. The ‘we,’ used without reservation, without respect to age, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation, unites us all.

reminds me of studies that show that merely mentioning death tends to make people more conservative, as well as the increasingly commonplace assertion that environmental pessimism makes people less likely to care about the environment. (If we be fucked, I guess people say, make the most of it.) Can there be a mass philosophy of "abject humility" that doesn't reduce to "nasty and brutish"? Doesn't the multitude need some Imaginary to believe in and work for, even if it's endlessly denied and perpetually preempted?

Does Schopenhauerian resignation make people act like Schopenhauer?

The real pessimism is quietism - not doing anything because nothing can be changed, argues Bauman: "Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better. [My role] is to alert people to the dangers, to do something. 'Don't ever console yourself that you have done everything you could, because it's not true,' says the philosopher Levinas, who believed that you recognised a moral person as someone who does not think he or she is moral enough. That is also how we recognise a just society - a just society castigates itself that there is not enough justice in our society."

I was quite taken this weekend with a chapter from Zygmunt Bauman, whom I'd never read before. Here are a few quick links to get your own Baumania started:

* 'The way we define the poor is a reflection of the kind of society we live in, argues Zygmunt Bauman'

The sight of the poor (or at least the portrayal of poverty, for the poor themselves are increasingly swept out of sight, to the periphery of cities, to ghettos and estates) keeps the non-poor at bay and in step. It thereby perpetuates their life of uncertainty. It prompts them to tolerate or bear placidly the unstoppable ‘flexibilization’ of the world and the growing precariousness of their condition. The sight incarcerates their imagination and handcuffs their will. They do not dare to imagine a different world; they are much too chary to try and change the one they have.

* 'Haunted house: the `work ethic' was bad enough, says Zygmunt Bauman. But its ghost is even worse'

We have two worlds, at opposite poles, which are becoming increasingly out of touch with each other -- much as the no-go areas of contemporary cities are carefully fenced off and bypassed by the traffic lines used for the mobility of well-off residents. The inhabitants of the First World, the relatively affluent and employed, live in a perpetual present. These people are constantly busy and always `short of time'. People marooned in the opposite world are crushed under the burden of abundant, redundant and useless time they can fill with nothing. In their time `nothing ever happens'. They do not `control `time -- but neither are they controlled by it, unlike their clocking-in, clocking-out ancestors, subject to the faceless rhythm of factory time. They can only kill time, as they are slowly killed by it.

*'The self in a consumer society'

But you can tell one kind of society from another by the dimensions along which it stratifies its members, and, like all other societies, the postmodern, consumer society is a stratified one. Those “high up” and “low down” are plotted in a society of consumers along the lines of mobility—the freedom to choose where to be. Those “high up” travel through life to their hearts’ desire and pick and choose their destinations by the joys they offer. Those “low down” are thrown out from the site they would rather stay in, and if they do not move, it is the site that is pulled from under their feet. When they travel, their destination, more often than not, is of somebody else’s choosing and seldom enjoyable; and when they arrive, they occupy a highly unprepossessing site that they would gladly leave behind if they had anywhere else to go. But they don’t. They have nowhere else to go; there is nowhere else where they are likely to be welcomed.

* 'Searching for politics in an uncertain world: Interview with Zygmunt Bauman'

Marx also explained why it is imperative for human survival to reform the capitalist way of running human affairs: that way passes no efficiency and morality tests. It is wasteful of natural and human resources and blind to the suffering it causes. Nothing has changed since Marx passed his verdict - though both the waste and the suffering have now acquired global proportions. Finally, Marx also suggested the reasons why running human affairs the capitalist way was both uneconomical and unethical. It was, he said, because our tools of action were by their capacity and their consequences social, while their management was private. We may say that today the wastefulness and immorality of the new world-wide capitalist disorder comes from the fact that our tools of action are by their capacity and their consequences global, but they are managed locally.

I've put up another depressing culturemonkey post that functions as a kind of follow-up to last week's, thinking about the way 1973 can be seen as the high-water mark for production-oriented capitalism. That year exposed the physical limits to production that our society will someday confront, perhaps best symbolized by the closing of the frontier with the last manned mission to the moon in Dec. 1972. The growth and technological magic of the last thirty years has been fueled by debt as much as by innovation, with the evacuation of futurity and long-term planning replaced by the endless now of the credit card. This is what consumer society is—and like anything else, it can't last forever.

Today's moment of existential dread from Nietzsche at Harper's. Delightfully ironic imagistic juxtaposition via classic internet meme The Nietzsche Family Circus.

In some remote corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever animals invented Recognition. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but in any event it was never more than a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and thus the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how pathetic, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary is this human intellect from the perspective of nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when the story of humankind and its intellect has gone to its end, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it seriously–as though the world’s axis turned in its midst. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn sec. 1 (1873) in: Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 3, p. 309 (K. Schlechta ed. 1969)(S.H. transl.)

Tim Burke has an article in the latest minnesota review about academic freedom and in particular the way that tenure can work to stifle the very open debate it exists to protect.

In particular, the system of tenure, allegedly the cornerstone of academic freedom, often acts perversely in the opposite direction. The tenure system sometimes suppresses rather than enhances autonomy and freedom among graduate students and junior faculty during their most crucial period of professionalization. Moving outside of established consensus views of topics and methodologies as a junior scholar creates a very serious risk to an academic career. Junior scholars are encouraged to be original but often only within very narrow paradigmatic definitions of originality. While both academics and non-academics have heard tenure "horror stories" in which clearly qualified candidates have been punished for perceived non-conformity or unorthodoxy, the real problem is subtler. Senior scholars who break cover and exhibit open brutality towards junior faculty are at least slightly unusual. More important by far are the small, pervasive, and sometimes unconscious ways that tenured scholars are able to direct or channel the intellectual labor of untenured scholars.

He may be right, but he'll get my imaginary tenure out of my cold, dead hands.

Via The Valve, where elsewhere Smurov presents the "Little Nell" school of criticism in all its glory:

1. Convene the PTA on the docks.
2. Call up to the clipper’s captain: “Does Little Nell yet live?"
3. If “yes,” deem the book acceptable. If “no,” start the bonfire.

And to complete our Friday night depression triathalon, I bring you this Ask MetaFilter question: What would you say is essential reading or viewing for anyone wishing to stay conscious of the problems of modern civilization, remind others, and seek out root causes?

It amazes me that smart people still take the singularity seriously. All indications are that we're facing a mass die-off of a previously inconceivable scale due to either energy pressures, self-inflicted environmental hazards, or a combination of both, within the lifetimes of people now alive—not some sudden Rapture into technosuperparadise.

If the singularity does happen, we should just be happy that we dodged the bullet, regardless of the form "human nature" (whatever that means) takes in the brave new whatnot.

"Carnac the Jaded," at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

CARNAC: The novel as an art form; God; our nation's idealism in the face of disaster abroad.

ED McMAHON: The novel as an art form; God; our nation's idealism in the face of disaster abroad?

(Carnac opens the envelope and pulls out the card.)

CARNAC: Name three things that are dead forever.

ED McMAHON: Yes. Absolutely. That is absolutely right, Carnac.

Bill Simmon at Candleblog has a pair of posts responding to yesterday's Salon piece on futurism, arguing that the "the future really is here and it's mostly better than the past." This is, certainly, true in many important ways—but the question of the sustainable grounding for all this technomagic is more than just a footnote to our prosperity, it's the elephant in the room. If we've really hit worldwide peak oil, or will in the next few years, the elixir than drives the digital paradise is going to start becoming scarce, and we haven't found a suitable replacement.

The other, related issue with Utopia-is-now technocratic optimism, of course, is who it leaves behind. Class divisions are being increasingly exacerbated within this country and even more dramatically worldwide—that the present might seem like a paradise to us is largely a function of our incredible wealth, vis-à-vis everybody else. (Likewise, the progress made in racial and sexual freedoms is largely tied to these same class differences.) Cribbing again from Jared Diamond, there's good reason why he called agriculture the worst mistake in the history of the human race.

I'd like to agree with Bill here, but Utopia can't be a ticking clock or Fritz Lang's Metropolis—it's got to be for everyone and it's got to be able to last. The older I get, the more the techno-optimism of my youth evaporates into a growing sense that neither will happen.