Salon.com > David Brin

Urban planning amid the rubble

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:27:00 +0000

In the latest issue of Newsweek, President Barack Obama explains "Why Haiti Matters," offering reasons -- from moral to pragmatic -- for Americans to care about that unlucky nation where there are presently an estimated 400,000 homeless people mourning another 150,000 or so dead. While much of the Haitian economy and infrastructure has been destroyed, even day-to-day survival requires great ingenuity and enterprise.

Indeed, were it possible to wave a wand and transform that hellish place into an upward-rising land of hope, health, education, enterprise and opportunity, while replanting its ravaged hillsides, who wouldn't?

Lacking magic wands, we have another tool, money, in limited amounts. That, combined with ingenuity and goodwill, can take care of some short-term things. Stop the dying. Provide food, shelter and basic sanitation. Help the Haitians to restore basic utilities and bury their dead. Repair the ports and roads enough to get commerce flowing again. So far, no arguments.

Is the Web helping us evolve?

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:50:00 +0000

Some of today's most vaunted tech philosophers are embroiled in a ferocious argument. On one side are those who think the Internet will liberate humanity, in a virtuous cycle of e-volving creativity that may culminate in new and higher forms of citizenship. Meanwhile, their diametrically gloomy critics see a kind of devolution taking hold, as millions are sucked into spirals of distraction, shallowness and homogeneity, gradually surrendering what little claim we had to the term "civilization."

Call it cyber-transcendentalists versus techno-grouches.

Both sides point to copious evidence, as Nicholas Carr recently did, in a cover story that ran in the Atlantic, titled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In making the pessimists' case, Carr offered up studies showing that the new generation of multitaskers aren't nearly as good at dividing their attention effectively as they think they are. According to Carr, focus, concentration and factual knowledge are much too beneficial to toss aside in an avid pursuit of omni-awareness.

Why Johnny can’t code

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 12:00:00 +0000

For three years -- ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade -- he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC.

Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming.

Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization.

Oh, today's desktops and laptops offer plenty of other fancy things -- a dizzying array of sophisticated services that grow more dazzling by the week. Heck, I am part of that creative spasm.

Three cheers for the Surveillance Society!

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 19:30:00 +0000

Ten centuries ago, at the previous millennium, a Viking lord commanded the rising tide to retreat. No deluded fool, King Canute aimed in this way to teach flatterers a lesson -- that even sovereign rulers cannot halt inexorable change.

A thousand years later, we face tides of technology-driven transformation that seem bound only to accelerate. Waves of innovation may liberate human civilization, or disrupt it, more than anything since glass lenses and movable type. Critical decisions during the next few years -- about research, investment, law and lifestyle -- may determine what kind of civilization our children inherit. Especially problematic are many information-related technologies that loom on the near horizon -- technologies that may foster tyranny, or else empower citizenship in a true global village.

Typically we are told, often and passionately, that Big Brother may abuse these new powers. Or else our privacy and rights will be violated by some other group. Perhaps a commercial, aristocratic, bureaucratic, intellectual, foreign, criminal or technological elite. (Pick your favorite bogeyman.)

J.R.R. Tolkien — enemy of progress

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 17:36:00 +0000

Want to forget about terrorism and all those distracting rumors of war? Need to ignore the economy for a while? Got the holiday blues? Our culture has a sure-fire cure -- the traditional spate of post-Thanksgiving movies.

This year, despite a clamor over the latest Harry Potter film, much of the attention is going to another fantasy called "The Two Towers" -- Part 2 in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Will it succeed in distracting us for a while, conveying audiences to a world more beautiful and stirring than humdrum modern life?

Naturally, I enjoyed the "Lord of the Rings" (LOTR) trilogy as a kid, during its first big boom in the 1960s. I mean, what was there not to like? As William Goldman said about another great fantasy, "The Princess Bride," it has "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad Men. Good Men. Beautifulest Ladies. Spiders. Dragons. Eagles. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Magic. Chases. Escapes. Miracles."

In 1997, voters in a BBC poll named "The Lord of the Rings" the greatest book of the 20th century. In 1999, Amazon.com customers chose it as the greatest book of the millennium.

Names that live in infamy

Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Now it's "Buford Furrow," another name we'd much rather not know. By firing 70 bullets toward a bunch of defenseless children, he seized our attention and far more than his fair share of our collective memories.

In the recent spate of highly visible hate crimes -- from Texas and Illinois to California and Washington state -- the emerging pattern seems to be less about specific hates, racism or anti-Semitism than frenzied, bloody tantrums staged by a string of losers with a common goal -- to grab headlines. "The reason they are doing this is for their moment of glory," says Marvin Hier, who has studied the subject intensely for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, "when they feel the whole world is stopping to take notice of them."

This trend isn't limited to hate crimes. In the chilling story of Cary Stayner -- the Yosemite killer -- we saw how one man's penchant for brutality can be sharpened by an appetite for publicity. Soon after he confessed to murdering four women in Yosemite National Park, Stayner told San Jose reporter Ted Rowlands, "I want a movie of the week." Though he admitted having murderous fantasies since childhood, Stayner may also have been propelled by a jealous wish for notoriety equal to his brother Steven, whose escape from a pedophile in the late '70s was indeed dramatized for TV.

“Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists

Tue, 15 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Well, I boycotted "Episode I: The Phantom Menace" -- for an entire week.

Why? What's to boycott? Isn't "Star Wars" good old fashioned sci-fi? Harmless fun? Some people call it "eye candy" -- a chance to drop back into childhood and punt your adult cares away for two hours, dwelling in a lavish universe where good and evil are vividly drawn, without all the inconvenient counterpoint distinctions that clutter daily life.

Got a problem? Cleave it with a light saber! Wouldn't you love -- just once in your life -- to dive a fast little ship into your worst enemy's stronghold and set off a chain reaction, blowing up the whole megillah from within its rotten core while you streak away to safety at the speed of light? (It's such a nifty notion that it happens in three out of four "Star Wars" flicks.)

Anyway, I make a good living writing science-fiction novels and movies. So "Star Wars" ought to be a great busman's holiday, right?

One of the problems with so-called light entertainment today is that somehow, amid all the gaudy special effects, people tend to lose track of simple things, like story and meaning. They stop noticing the moral lessons the director is trying to push. Yet these things matter.

A note on the Enlightenment, Romanticism and science fiction

Tue, 15 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

It's been said that Western civilization has spent the last hundred years trying to resolve a deep cleavage in our culture -- a continuing struggle between the 18th century and the 19th, between prescriptions offered by the Enlightenment and those of the later Romantic movement. For generations, a vast majority of writers, artists and academics have sided with Romanticism, from Keats and Shelley to nearly every modern musician or movie star. Seizing every opportunity to extoll emotion and put down "cold" reason has become as natural as breathing. George Lucas expressed this reflex when he said, "I'd say the primary word for me is Romantic. I like the aesthetics of the Victorian age."

With nearly all of society's most expressive and persuasive voices raised on the Romantic side of this old struggle, it is a wonder that notions of cooperative progress and confident pragmatism survive at all. Even science fiction has grown much more cynical, with noir cyberpunk images replacing much of the can-do spirit of earlier tales. In how many popular films does a skillful nerd prevail over the romantic loner? Values like competence and egalitarian advancement are seldom defended in media. And yet they remain popular at a deep level -- perhaps out of gratitude for the real life-improvements wrought by people like Franklin, Edison and Salk -- and in part because citizens sense the underlying themes of inequality and egotism that drive so much of the Romantic movement.

What's wrong (and right) with “The Phantom Menace”

Tue, 15 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

First off, let me say that I think the film looks gorgeous. George Lucas was able to hire the best. He took advantage of advances in computer graphics to portray many old sci-fi favorites in vivid ways. The costumes are just spiffy, the sword fight scenes zesty. Great aliens, too (except for Yoda, who's still a rubber oven mitt with two facial expressions: patronizing and condescending).

I actually quite enjoyed the first part of the film -- Jedis running around
on the Trade Federation mother ship, jumping and slashing, leaping and
blasting. My hopes started to rise. But then -- well, let me list just a few
items:

Clichis

Underwater cities? A city that covers a whole planet? Where've we seen
those before? Well, they may be clichis, but Lucas stole them fair and
square, and served them back with loads of panache, so he's forgiven. On
the other hand, there are other clichis that make you moan aloud. For
example: