#charliestross (7 links)
American SF from the 1950s to the 1990s contains all the raw ingredients of what has been identified as the Californian ideology (evangelized through the de-facto house magazine, WIRED). It's rooted in uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick. Libertarianism and it's even more obnoxious sibling Objectivism provide a fig-leaf of philosophical legitimacy for cutting social programs and advocating the most ruthless variety of dog-eat-dog politics. Longtermism advocates overlooking the homeless person on the sidewalk in front of you in favour of maximizing good outcomes from charitable giving in the far future. And it gels neatly with the Extropian and Transhumanist agendas of colonizing space, achieving immortality, abolishing death, and bringing about the resurrection (without reference to god). These are all far more fun to contemplate than near-term environmental collapse and starving poor people. Finally, there's accelerationism: the right wing's version of Trotskyism, the idea that we need to bring on a cultural crisis as fast as possible in order to tear down the old and build a new post-apocalyptic future.
- Dear Google, am I pregnant? - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
The system PA uploaded your personal hospital records to is said to be Google BigQuery. It supports one-click database sharing with any other Google account, and is hosted on servers outside the UK (and possibly outside the EU, in breach of the EU Data Protection Directive). And what they uploaded was the entire shooting match—full personal medical records indexed by NHS patient number—with enough additional data (post code, address, date of birth, gender) to make de-anonymizing the records trivial.
- CMAP #9: Ebooks - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
"There is no topic in the publishing industry this decade that is the source of as many misconceptions, superstitions, lies, plausible untruths, and idiocies as ebooks". Worthwhile reading for anyone working in the ebook arena.
- Reasons to be Cheerful - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
"An acquaintance asked, somewhat grumpily, if anything good had happened in the past decade". Always look on the bright side...
- Charlie's Diary: Jeff Bezos Eats Kittens antipope.org
Today's big news is that Amazon are going to start selling Kindle ebook readers world-wide. Let me explain why I think this is very bad news for writers.
- Charlie's Diary: Merciless antipope.org
There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board.