A Very Strange Thing Has Happened
Tom Friedman actually wrote something somewhat interesting today. I know, it’s shocking because he hasn’t written anything worthwhile since he covered Beirut in the ’80s, but bear with me.
Tommy’s normal schtick is to travel to some faraway place like India or China and marvel at how neat it is that formerly swarthy people in those countries can now work and communicate with rich white guys in America and Europe. But this time, Tommy was hanging out in a Peruvian rain forest where there was no wireless Internets connection or cell phone service. And remarkably, he concluded that this wasn’t such a bad thing because people were spending time talking with each other face-to-face and doing things outdoors- things that Americans don’t do very much of anymore:
What struck me about our Preuvian rain forest guide… was that he carried no devices and did not suffer from continuous partial attention deficit disorder. Just the opposite. He heard every chirp, whistle, howl or crackle in the rain forest and would immediately stop us in our tracks and immediately identify what bird, insect or animal it was… He was totally disconnected from the Web, but totally in touch with the incredible web of life around him. I wonder if there’s a lesson there.
What makes this so remarkable is that for perhaps the first time, Tommy is acknowledging that the flattened globalized flat world of global worldwide flatness he’s enthusiastically endorsed for the past decade might not be as good as advertised. In fact, he seems to almostkindasorta acknowledge that such a world could be a very lonely and desolate place. A quick glance at modern America bears this out– we’re increasingly becoming a nation of suburban and exurban homebodies who spend lots money on goods designed to keep us in our houses, such as laptops, flatscreen TV’s and iPods. This sort of self-imposed isolation is not a healthy thing, since it produces weirdos like the Ole Perfesser, whose end goal in life is to have his brain transplanted into a robot body so he can fly away on a rocket ship to escape the coming onslaught of grey goo.*
I guess my point is that if Tom Friedman can see the downside of techutopianism, then there’s hope for everybody.**
*Incidentally, I’ve been thinking of setting up a PayPal account dedicated to raising money to give the folks at the Lifeboat Foundation their wish by launching them into space. You think I could raise enough money?
**Almost everybody. Jeff and the Perfesser have eaten too much paste to ever return to Earth.
OT … sorry.
Is anybody here having any trouble with sadlyno’s rss feed? I can’t get anything more recent than ‘Drunken Vainglory’. I’m on WindowsXP, using Firefox 1.5.0.4, and Sage 1.3.6 for my rss manager…
tia,
matt
a minor fine point – ipods are meant to insulate you once you leave your house.
a minor fine point – ipods are meant to insulate you once you leave your house.
True. And I admit I’m always listening to music in the subway, since I’m the sort of guy who seems to attract the crazy people who want to tell you about their theories of time travel, or their plans to escape the grey goo by using their robot bodies to fly into space.
Brad R. Sorry, didn’t know you weren’t interested in all the “grey goo” stuff. I’ll leave you alone on the subway from now on….
Brad, you must have read the old story ” The Marching Morons” by C.M. Kornbluth.
A very neat, self selecting solution. I heartily endorse it. I’ll pitch in a sawbuck to launch Cal Thomas.
Awesome. I think I just watched a middle aged white guy with lots of toys explain that it’s globalization’s fault he doesn’t pay attention to his wife and kids.
“He was totally disconnected from the Web, but totally in touch with the incredible web of life around him. I wonder if there’s a lesson there.”
The sad thing is that Friedman’s probably not being sarcastic. If Moustachio Tom decided to get in touch with the incredible web of life around him, or just reality, we might have one fewer nutcase advocating for preemptive wars, the greater good of employing children for pennies a day, and other wingnuttery.
This is just a more exotic variation on those “I just got back from vacation and I didn’t even look at a newspaper the whole time” columns. It’s usually just an excuse for the columnist to empty their metaphor notebook and bash people who pay attention to the news and read their columns.
Those columns have always pissed me off.
“He was totally disconnected from the Web, but totally in touch with the incredible web of life around him. I wonder if there’s a lesson there.”
And it seems he doesn’t ‘wonder if’ for very long, now does he?
“whose end goal in life is to have his brain transplanted into a robot body so he can fly away on a rocket ship”
You’ll get us started on Hans Moravec next… this will be a change from ranting about Drexler and Ray Kurzweil, but it may not necessarily be an improvement.
It really bothers me that Tom Friedman is still being considered seriously at all. I dismissed him when I saw him on Oprah shortly before the Invasion. Oprah? No serious journalist would ever agree to appear on fucking Oprah.
It’s usually just an excuse for the columnist to empty their metaphor notebook and bash people who pay attention to the news and read their columns.
But not Friedman– his metaphor notebook is utterly infinite in its depths. Seriously, it’s almost as if it were an epic version of Boccab’s Blessed Book or something.
GuinnessGuy, thou art nerdier than I. I am in awe of that metaphor. And here I was just going to say that Brad’s basically echoing Bad Religion’s “State of the End of the Millenium Address”:
He heard every chirp, whistle, howl or crackle in the rain forest and would immediately stop us in our tracks and immediately identify what bird, insect or animal it was…
How does Friedman know this is true? If I were a rain forest tour guide, and Friedman was on my tour, I would SO be bullshitting him about everything. ‘Oh, did you hear that Lesser Blue-Eared Hornswoggle? Here, just step off the trail, never mind the ooze, and crane your neck and look straight up into the very top of that tree…Oops, sorry about that!’
But then, I’m a heartless bitch.
I had the same thought gentlewoman did. The guy was fucking with him.
I think people who listen to iPods on the subway are more sociable than people who read on the subway. The latter will never make eye contact with you. (I do both, depending on whether my stack of unlistened-to CD’s is taller than my stack of unread magazines.)