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<DIV><FONT face="Palatino Linotype">The newspaper story is a scream, it's
wonderful and rare to match a good, creative writer with such a complex,
human-frought (and yet harmless, even trivial) event. Horrible as it was, this
was not a high-speed collision of packed passenger trains, absolutely no First
Responders were required. The worst medical symptom was the unending sensation
of fingernails on a blackboard.<BR><BR>But the event.<BR><BR>To contort GG into
this thread, nobody loved leading-edge electronic hi-tek gizmos more than he,
and his studio pioneeering of the latest tech were his tools to achieve his
aesthetic dreams.<BR><BR>But what hath God wrought?<BR><BR>The nightmare of this
event isn't that idiots and fiends and yahoos and yobbos and hools and hoons and
Flaming Youth can use these machines to bother the public, horribly and
with multiple victims.<BR><BR>The real nightmare is how much damage to the human
soul these gizmos can do when used by mature, educated, decent, well-meaning,
responsible -- even classical music-loving -- adults. How much damage we have
chosen to inflict on our true Wonder of Civilization -- our modern western-style
prosperous ultra-convenient urban life.<BR><BR>On this list we revere not only
human musical artists, but the very recent technology that has so lovingly
recorded, preserved, and cheaply mass-distributed so much beautiful music.
<BR><BR>We have invited, even welcomed enthusiastically into our lives an
inescapable swarm of robotic nanognats whose harms and annoyances open
societies try to control and diminish by legislative fiat, treaty and
ukase. But nearly all our organized efforts fail dismally. (My
Massachusetts USA now has a law that no teenager can use a cell phone while
driving. It's still theoretically legal to text or Tweet and drive. There
are ghastly news stories about a young person's final ASCII characters: omg
or rofl or lmao.) <BR><BR>And we invented these inescapable and infuriating
nanognats, and are promising to make the swarm thicker and far worse, and
far harder to escape with each passing year. The CES / Consumer Electronics Show
is now on in Las Vegas for a peek at the first buzzings of the next gen of the
nanobots.<BR><BR>I can stand on a chair and see a time where even fleeing into
the wilderness will not shield us from the pervasiveness of the gizmos. The
future is careening our way with communications satellites, and soon no point on
the surface of Earth will be free of the gizmos, their marimba ring tones, their
pocket vibrations, their unsolicited offers to book us a vacation paradise
weekend, their robot entreaties to vote for the best candidate for the
upcoming election.<BR><BR>Do any of you foresee a quieter, gentler, more private
and undisturbed future?<BR><BR>Very likely your community has been filling its
streets and sidewalks with more and more closed-circuit television cameras
(CCTV) for the last 15 years or more -- and not exactly doing it in secret, but
very low-profile. Now your every stroll to the market is taped and stored
indefinitely, and your movements can be scrutinized in detail by a variety of
government agencies. Warrants or your permission aren't required because you
chose to venture into public spaces, and in so doing voluntarily relinquished
your right to privacy.<BR><BR>It's for our own safety. Who can object to that?
And it's a "soft" kind of violation that you can be in denial about, you can
ignore ... you can tell yourself you're not being violated at all, you can tell
youself nothing perceivable or measurable is being taken from you.<BR><BR>One of
Freud's titles is "Civilization and Its Discontents / Das Unbehagen in der
Kultur" (1930). The better and safer and niftier we build our civilization, the
more the Inner Human has to gripe and bristle about.<BR><BR>I'm sure
there's a government agency to which you can write an irate e-mail to
complain about ring tones at live concerts. Let me know how they respond to your
complaints.</FONT></DIV>
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