Futurecasting
Science fiction writer Frederik Pohl said that a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. // Culture and impact
“I’ve never been very happy about the world,” he confessed in a 2018 video interview for the Lower East Side Biography Project. “So what makes me tick is this obsessive need to figure out what isn’t here that I want to be here. I make plays — or whatever you want to call them — to try to fill that great big void.”
NYT, Richard Foreman obituary
“If technology is making the illusion of participation feel more potent, it’s not by overproducing the means of human connection but by creating the conditions in which endless, aimless discourse has no phatic component. […]
Who could possibly believe that an interaction with an AI model is (1) a conversation and (2) that it warrants evaluation in t
... See moreIn 1995, when he was 58, Mr. Foreman received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, popularly known as the “genius grant.” The foundation praised him for his “original vision and commitment to developing new theatrical vocabularies” that influenced the direction of American avant-garde theater.
NYT, Richard Foreman obituary
The shock we’re experiencing now can’t be summarized as present shock, which happens when we become blindly obsessed with the present moment. Nor is it a form of future shock, which happens when we feel that change is taking place too quickly. Instead, the shock we’re feeling today is an affront to our most basic understanding of reality. And the m... See more
🏡 Shock and Awe
“But as more tech folks jump aboard the progress train, I’d suggest that they go one click deeper in illustrating what kind of society we’re hurtling toward. Which technologies they’d like to see in abundance, and which they’d prefer stay scarce. And put away the cyberpunk for a second: What about our relationships to each other? The kind of “good
... See more“In place of occasional experiences of depth that renew and satisfy us,” I observed, “we are simply given an infinite surface upon which to skim indefinitely.”
L. M. Sacasas • What You Get Is the World
Ideas related to this collection