Topic 4: The Apocalypse is Upon Us

Maud: "Intelligent design" is making inroads into our public school science textbooks at the worst possible time: when the composition of the Supreme Court is shifting further to the right. I don't care what people teach their kids at home - for the record, intolerant atheists annoy me as much as intolerant religious zealots - but creationism as state-sponsored science?

If that's the way it's gonna be, I move that Twain's "Was the World Made for Man?" also be included in science texts.

Beyond that, everything's hunky-dory. (Pay no attention to the  secret international prisons, domestic spying orders, and librarians barred from joining the Patriot Act debate for fear of imprisonment.)

Alex: This was an easy one. It's my embargo story. A few days before the release of the most recent Harry Potter in July a British Columbia grocery store inadvertently sold 15 copies. 

Too bad, right? Not when we're talking about protecting the Potter-mania machine! The publisher went to court to get an injunction barring anyone (aside from the official Harry Potter public relations team) from revealing the plot or any information about the book. And Justice Kristi Gill of the B.C. Superior Court went even further, barring anyone who had bought the book not only from discussing it, but from even reading it! That's right, if you read that book you were breaking the law! Of course the whole thing was a farce (how could such an injunction be enforced?) but the fact that a publisher could go to court and actually get that kind of relief is apocalyptic.

Michael: I'm sort of enjoying the apocalypse that seems to be sweeping over publishing, the shift that's coming with the rise of everything from print on demand to Google (and others) storing and making available vast amounts of content from books to Amazon selling books by the page. I'm not sure that this will all work out for the best and I have my concerns, but anything that wrests control away from publishers does appeal to me.

Robert: As an unrepentant print journalist as well as a lover of magazines - which are now quaintly referred to as "information delivery systems" and have become adverinfotainment catalogues, I am not at all thrilled by the most recent lemming-like adoption of the newest new-fangled thingie: podcast. In fact, that would be understating my sense of doom and ire. Billionaire Bill Gates (for some reason Gates always makes me think of the line from Woody Guthrie’s "Pretty Boy Floyd": "Some men rob you with a six gun and some rob you with a pen"), who to some extent is in the Future Industry, recently remarked that we are headed towards a society where "everything is on demand."  Mr. Bill, of course, is thinking of people using technology. But I am thinking, as we drift to a disproportionately have-not society, that there will be more people making their demands with pistols and weapons of varying degrees of destruction.

Why is it a good thing for those few with the wherewithal to use their Blackberries and I pods and Tivos and whatever? It seems to me all this choice is spiraling into a world of Leibniztian monads, the ultimate solipsistic universe. Advanced post-industrial societies already suffer from multitudinous discontinuities that function as alienating engines, the Total on Demand Universe seems to go whole hog. Not to mention what happens when we run out of fuel to drive these contraptions and devices. More landfill?

But what portends even greater breakdown is what James Kunstler addresses in The Long Emergency - the end of the oil era and the current attitudes toward energy issues. That there is not an intelligent public conversation about this issue bodes, well, apocalyptic.