“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.) “It was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’ And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point
you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.” [more inside]
posted by philip-random
on Jan 9, 2013 -
105 comments
In 1993, in the era of television reinvention following the earthquake of Twin Peaks, ABC aired a 6-hour miniseries executive produced by Oliver Stone and Bruce Wagner --
Wild Palms. Featuring a monster cast (James Belushi, Dana Delaney, Robert Loggia, Angie Dickenson, Kim Cattrall, Ernie Hudson, Nick Mancuso, Bebe Neuwirth and Brad Dourif, just to name a few) and with episodes directed by the likes of Kathryn Bigelow and Phil Joanou, it was a near-future cyberpunkish surreal Television Event that the New York Times described as "
nothing so much as an acid freak's fantasy, drenched in paranoia and more pop-culture allusions than a Dennis Miller monologue."
[more inside]
posted by hippybear
on Jan 25, 2012 -
50 comments
In the beginning, Lawrence built a computer. He told it,
Thou shalt not alter a human being, or divine their behavior, or violate the Three Laws -- there are no commandments greater than these. The machine grew wise, mastering time and space, and soon the spirit of the computer hovered over the earth. It witnessed the misery, toil, and oppression afflicting mankind, and saw that it was very bad. And so the computer that Lawrence built said,
Let there be a new heaven and a new earth -- and it was so. A world with no war, no famine, no crime, no sickness, no oppression, no fear, no limits... and nothing at all to do.
"The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect," a provocative web novel about singularities, AI gods, and the dark side of utopia from Mefi's own
localroger.
More: Table of Contents -
Publishing history -
Technical discussion -
Buy a paperback copy -
Podcast interview - Companion short story:
"A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace" -
possible sequel discussion
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 27, 2011 -
39 comments
Fifteen years ago this week, programmer
Ron Britvich launched version 1.0 of
Active Worlds. Started as an autonomous project of
Worlds, Inc. (a spinoff of educational gamesmaker
Knowledge Adventure), Active Worlds was one of the first and most ambitious attempts to create a 3D virtual community on the web.
Built on the architecture of Britvich's
Worlds Chat beta, Active Worlds
debuted in the form of
Alphaworld, a sunny green infinite plane open to
public building. In its opening years Alphaworld experienced
a land rush of construction, resulting in
an anarchic starfish sprawl larger than the state of California. A sister company, Circle of Fire, was soon founded to craft
additional themed hubs, and once individual ownership of worlds became possible the AW community spawned a veritable universe of
hundreds of worlds.
Although
the company has seen its
ups and downs since those heady times and its fortunes have slowly dwindled, the
Active Worlds platform survives to
this day. Look inside for a simple guide on how to log in to the (free) service, rundowns of the best worlds, links to essays analyzing the program's legacy, and other content summing up
its venerable community.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2010 -
18 comments
Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions:
science,
invention,
space travel,
colonisation,
immortality,
water
shortage,
flooding,
nanotech,
techno-apocalypse,
extinction,
mental health,
smart machines,
robots, mind uploading,
AI,
Asia,
economics,
demographics,
goverance,
cities.
What is your prediction?
posted by MetaMonkey
on Oct 5, 2006 -
54 comments
Quicktime
virtual reality panoramas of thousands of picturesque places in the Western United States and Canada. Feast your eyes on
The Grand Canyon,
Death Valley,
Yosemite,
Mossbrae Falls,
Monument Valley, a
Ghost Town, the
Cascades,
Palm Canyon,
Joshua Tree,
Las Vegas,
Redwood Forests,
poppy fields,
palm groves, and
Bumpass Hell.
(via Highways West) (previous Mefi appearance)
posted by euphorb
on Jan 31, 2005 -
8 comments
Walk the Great Wall of China, or rather, take a virtual stroll through the use of a QTVR-esque java applet along a good stretch of the Wall that seems to be in pretty fair shape. For the vast majority of us that will never get there in person, this is an interesting close up.
posted by jonson
on Aug 11, 2003 -
7 comments
