http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2009/06/the-decline-fall-and-hopefully-reinvention-of-a-giant.html
"stop the bleeding, cultural transformation, compelling vision"
*Man, *if only* our hapless technocrats had enough culture to transform their culture, and enough vision to envision anything compelling. I pondered this screed, and then I looked up at the television screen to see that crowd at the G-8.
*They do seem like intelligent people (the great majority anyway), and I'm sure they would read an article like this Wladawsky-Berger thing and kinda nod sagely, but... "cultural transformation and compelling vision"? Them? Us?
*Maybe Lula. I can almost imagine Lula stomping around in his Havaiana flipflops and some chic guy in some favela declaring, "Hey I can feel ths! Wow! Brazllian culture has truly been transformed! We're finally and effectively tackling our society's real problems, and Brazil has become a planetary lighthouse of contemporary democratic culture!" Order and progress, brother, finally it's there on the plate right next to the fried bananas.
*Maybe I'm demanding rather more than is actually needed. After all, this article isn't declaring anything more than the simple fact that IBM is still in business, and that IBM successfully escaped the morbid fate of its darker titan brother, GM.
*Maybe we could just kinda gothic-high-tech ourselves up, and escape the general fate of General Motors, without having to get all City on a Hill about that. It's a 3step process, see. You stop doing the stuff that was visibly killing you, you pretend you're not that kind of guy any more, and you find something new to productively occupy your time. Is that too much to ask of 21st-century mankind?
*Being a science fiction writer, I kinda like my "compelling visions" to be gaudy scenarios that you mess with for a couple of weeks before gratefully turning your attention to some exciting new toy. If you're a science fiction writer in the grip of any truly "compelling vision," it's commonly the sign that, at long last, you're sliding headlong into saucer-nut territory.
*You know what would be really great right now? Some gigantic, lumbering thing that was pretty much like 20th century science fiction, only it was actually doing something useful. Sounds like hard work though, doesn't it? I dunno... Let's see what's on Twitter.
