The future as projected by American advertisers of the 20th century was of course bright and sparkling. But what gadgets and appliances made that possible? And were they "automatic" as advertised? What the hell do we mean when we say that word?
Over at Gizmodo, they ask the million-dollar question: what does "automatic" mean? It's safe to say that mid-century advertising culture didn't invent the concept and that it was, in some fundamental sense, an instantiation of a wider twentieth century fascination with with the automatic in its many guises. What is advertising, after all, but an attempt to generate reactions from consumers automatically. Edward Bernays, the "father" of public relations, explained the goal of PR and advertising this way: “Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism.”
An iPhone application containing 100 of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's speeches has become the second most downloaded item in Italy, it emerged today.
The application, called iMussolini, is available on Apple’s on line store for 79 euro cents (59p).
According to Italy' Apple iTunes store, it has been downloaded more than a hugely popular video game based on blockbuster film Avatar.
It is second only to an X-ray machine app that 'allows you to see your friends naked'.
I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I think I would enjoy this article about the hi-tech search for a missing da Vinci painting hidden behind a mural in Florence's city hall if it weren't for Dan Brown. That bastard ruins everything.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Awesome: Kansas City artists creating "nerdbots," robot sculptures made out of old junk. Must visit. Located on 9th St. in downtown KC.
"It's the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated," Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project, told CNN last month.
Hold on to your butt. The future is here, and you've been converted to pure data. For your own protection, of course. (Don't blame Bush; blame the terrorists for forcing totalitarianism upon us.)
A. Mitchel Fraas passes along a link from the Washington Post which suggests, once again, that Robots spoon-feeding the elderly is the solution to all our problems. (Either that, or the xenophobic fear of immigrants is fueling a boom in Japanese science fiction.)
Demographic Crisis, Robotic Cure?
TOKYO -- With a surfeit of the old and a shortage of the young, Japan is on course for a population collapse unlike any in human history.
What ails this prosperous nation could be treated with babies and immigrants. Yet many young women here do not want children, and the Japanese will not tolerate a lot of immigrants. So government and industry are marching into the depopulated future with the help of robots -- some with wheels, some with legs, some that you can wear like an overcoat with muscles.
I have to admit that I've never really understood toothpicks. Sure, I'll pick one up every now and then, but I've never had the uncontrollable postprandial urge that would make me buy them for daily use. For use in baking, sure -- but for a little after-meal help, never.
But I'm coming around to appreciate the toothpick. The American has a piece up about the history of the toothpick, which is kind of interesting, in part because of the totally outrageous marketing of America's toothpick pioneer, Charles Forster, who lifted the idea from Brazil.
Forster was soon making toothpicks in Boston, but people there did not see much point in buying quantities of what they could whittle themselves. To sell his product, Forster devised clever schemes. He hired employees to visit stores and ask for wooden toothpicks, which retailers were not accustomed to carrying. Soon after these disappointed customers left, Forster himself would come in peddling his wares wholesale. As soon as the storekeepers had toothpicks in stock, Forster’s shills would return and buy them. These were then returned to Forster, who recycled them to the trade.
In another scheme, he engaged Harvard students to eat at local restaurants and ask loudly for wooden toothpicks, which the restaurant managers soon felt obligated to provide. Having established a market in the Boston area, Forster moved his fledgling manufacturing operation to Maine, where white birch grew in abundance. With the help of Charles Freeman—a Sturtevant employee who had been assigned to develop the toothpick machinery—Forster’s mill was soon turning out toothpicks by the millions daily.
In 1918, long before George Jetson commuted to Spacely Space Sprockets, the U.S. Patent Office issued Felix Longobardi the first patent for a vehicle capable of both driving on roads and flying through the air. But given all the impractical prototypes built since Longobardi's original whimsy, history suggests that any vehicle design combining these two modes of transport will be a commercial failure: aero-auto hybrids always seem to result in a compromise that serves both functions poorly.
Now a group of MIT alums believe that they are on their way toward overcoming this problem. Founded in 2006 and called Terrafugia, their startup, based in Woburn, MA, recently produced the first automated folding wing for a light sport aircraft. (A light sport aircraft is a type of airplane deemed by the Federal Aviation Administration to be easier to fly and hence more accessible than regular private planes.) The wing, however, is just the first step toward an aero-auto hybrid that the company plans to call the Transition.
I'm sure that my generation was not the first to be promised marvelous technological splendors in the future. It may be that blithe speculations on coming advances (and nay-saying apocalypticism) is a constituent feature of technologized society.
Fine. But I don't think that lets my 5th grade science teacher off the hook for absolutely assuring us that we'd be both traveling and living in outer space within my lifetime (there's still time, I suppose). And it certainly doesn't let Weekly Reader off the hook for promising me that in the future (i.e. by the time I'd be able to drive) we'd all have self-driving cars. I can distinctly remember illustrations of a kid and an adult playing chess in their auto-automobile. Wow, I thought. That's going to be AWESOME!
And now, in my bitter mid-twenties, I know what a ruse it all was. There never was a self-driving car, and there never will be.
Listen to this rubbish: "You might buy a car that has a special button called an 'auto-chauffeur' button. You push it and it drives you home and wakes you up in your garage ."
Of all the youtube videos I have seen in the last two years, the one that shook me the most was the one that captured UCLA police officers repeatedly tasering a student in their library last November. In part, my response to that video was conditioned by witnessing a similar scene of police brutality six months previous, when four friends of mine were pepper sprayed and arrested (one was tased twice) because they were verbally confrontational with a cop who had pinned a man down , handcuffed him, and then pepper sprayed him. Naturally, all four were acquitted of the piddly little crimes there were supposedly arrested for. At least in Albuquerque, such behavior by police is a form a crowd control since it is virtually impossible to hold an officer responsible for wrongful arrest, use of excessive force, or any other type of misconduct.
So when I saw this morning that skateboarders in Arkansas got photos of a cop strangling one of their friends, and video of the same cop brutalizing and arresting a few more, my heart beat immediately began to quicken. What were the skateboarders doing? Well, you know, skateboarding. And being a worried about their friend who had just been strangled by a law enforcement officer. That's a crime, you see.
This video is not nearly as brutal as the UCLA one, and I'm glad for that. But it's a good reminder for me about the potential good cell phone cameras contain. I have a general ambivalence about the proliferation of cameras in public and the extreme ease with which we are all potentially broadcast. Ambivalent because such a proliferation could portend an Orwellian surveillance state (it's not as hyperbolic as it may sound), and yet the power seems to swing both ways, since the ability to capture true acts of injustice can, and does, happen. I don't know, ultimately, whether we are better off with this technology, but I am glad that it helps keep people who brutalize others human beings in check.
Since the UCLA incident, I have been feeling the need to acquire a camera phone. I see it as a way to protect myself, and my friends, from the police, odd as that sounds. I wonder now how things would have been different if I had had one last year when my friends were arrested.
