Posted here Saturday, December 04, 2004 at 10:51:11 AM 
This is a sign. Ten years ago I raised the question, why doesn't China buy Sun Microsystems? I wasn't thinking big enough.
Dec. 3--NEW YORK -- International Business Machines Corp. is negotiating with Lenovo Group Ltd. to sell its personal computer business to China's largest PC maker, the New York Times reported Friday.
In Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano of 1950 (!!) the world is divided between managers, machines and unneeded prols. A Saudi prince keeps asking "who are those people?" and after answers like, "employees going in to their office building" he says, "slaves!". We need to de-link the good life from dependence on marketing and consumer identity. We need an economy but not by making slaves of most of the population (including the managers). That connection between life style and a cancerous economy to benefit a very few (who both have high incomes and understand the trap) and to give the appearance of benefiting many, has got to be decoupled - and replaced with a milder version that honors the people, the needs of governance, the need for an economy, and the environment.
As I wrote much earlier
“My own hope is that the full promise of technology can be seen as something which enhances the whole human community and its context rather than being a mechanism for the transfer of wealth to a few. A brilliant technological future that is entrepreneurial, diverse, geographically dispersed, with regional and local focus and ownership could emerge.”
Bono plans lifelong poverty fight. Rock singer Bono pledges to spend the rest of his life trying to eradicate extreme poverty around the world. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]
Interesting things can happen. Now, if we all did this.
Spent the day reading Phil Agre papers (http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/). Mostly on technology and society, and the way computers are layered into existing institutions, affecting and affected by what is, making it more complex. Computational folks stick with the decartian view that the mind is a machine and so is the computer, but rel life practice keeps undermining this, and all real thought is both internal and embedded in a context.
Most important is his essay
The Practical Republic:
Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship
Philip E. Agre
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/republic.html
Where he argues that we live in a republican democracy and it requires skills to form relationships, analyze issues and participate, and there is no good theory of those skills.
I was very moved by a review of some Chekhov
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041213&;s=siegel
Imitation of Life by LEE SIEGEL
The Complete Short Novels
excerpts..
Chekhov's acheful, unsparing eye; his unforgiving yet gentle irony; his characters' dignified pathos and their pathetic attempts to dignify themselves with big theories of how to live in this world; and the writer's uncanny evocation of their self-delusion as simultaneously ludicrous and heartbreaking.
The honest core of Chekhov's art is the acknowledgment that even art is helpless in the face of life.
His own, private, untransmittable experience of life is, and will always be, the only truthful description of life that he will ever know. Somehow, Chekhov's art manages to transmit the untransmittable.
In other words, the only reality is fragile human life: meaningless except for the meanings we deluded and deluding people keep projecting onto it.
And yet it never stops being a parasol; it never becomes "literary." It carries meaning for the reader only because it has accrued the very same meaning for the characters. Unlike, say, D.H. Lawrence's famous rocking horse, the parasol is not a privileged communiqué over the characters' heads between the reader and the writer. It belongs to the characters.
It's as if these parentless children came into life already prepared for the fact that, as Laptev puts it, "there were no firm, lasting attachments." Their future lies in their beginning; they are pre-saddened.
If orphanhood is a pre-sadness, for Chekhov it is also a state of grace.
"Life is given only once," says Vladimir Ivanych, speaking for all of Chekhov's protagonists, "and one would like to live it cheerfully, meaningfully, beautifully." The best of Chekhov's people surrender their illusions and try to endure life's inherent limitations and disappointments. And for this sober honesty they are rewarded with a substitute for the cushioning mediations that they've given up. They learn to forgive themselves and to forgive other people; they learn to be kind. "Kindness" is a word that occurs over and over again in Chekhov. It is a mode of being rather than a big idea about how to live, a quality of experience rather than a mediation of experience. It is cheer, meaning and beauty self-created from within.
But the real struggle is between Laevsky and his lover, Nadezhda; and even more than that, between each one's perception of the other and the actual other. Laevsky has grown tired of Nadezhda. Stifled, bored, constantly irritated, he makes plans to leave her, but feelings of guilt and pity keep him stewing in misery by her side. What he doesn't know is that Nadezhda, vain and coquettish, has been slowly drifting away from him and impulsively, even innocently, conducting affairs with two other men. She also is mired in pity and guilt.
The boat is thrown back...it makes two steps forward and one step back, but the oarsmen are stubborn, they work the oars tirelessly and do not fear the high waves.... So it is in life.... In search of the truth, people make two steps forward and one step back. Sufferings, mistakes, and the tedium of life throws them back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Maybe they'll row their way to the real truth...
Rather than issue a thunderous Tolstoyan judgment or proclamation or conclusion, which perhaps reminded him of a cruel father's tyranny, Chekhov finishes his tale with the stubborn facticity of the parasol. Its last sentence is: "It began to drizzle." What makes Chekhov so inestimably precious is that he is a writer who lets life have the last word. Which it does anyway.
It is this kind of reflection, tolerance, kindness, that is one of the gifts of our great writers.
********
|
