Bruce Sterling has made his list of ten technologies that deserve to die. He comes up with:
1. Nuclear Weapons
2. Coal-Based Power
3. The Internal-Combustion Engine
4. Incandescent Light Bulbs
5. Land Mines
6. Manned Spaceflight
7. Prisons
8. Cosmetic Implants
9. Lie Detectors
10. DVDs
Not a bad bunch of things to do away with; I'm embarassed my list would have had things like pop-up windows, DHTML ads that cover content, and a bunch of other puny web related annoyances. I need to raise my ambitions for decommisioning. Here are my top 3:
1. The School System - I can't think of a more out-moded idea than putting 30 kids in a room with one adult and requiring them to be quiet, all do the same thing, and confrom around some mean of understanding and acheivement. Total recipe for disaster that completely ignores the individuality of each student. Our schools look like factories or prisons, when they should look like artist studios, libraries, or laboratories. Read John Taylor Gatto's recent rant in the latest Harpers for a more complete argument against schools.2. Farm subsidies - Hard to think of something more wasteful and devious than taking the largesse of 1st world tax payers, pay it to bloated corporate agrobusiness interests for planting crops in climates where they don't grow economically, so that they can under-cut 3rd world farmers. Its a tax-payer funded poverty generation program and a recipe for reversing the benefits of trade and competive advantage.
3. Mass market broadcasting - Why should people watch or listen to programs according to a schedule? Fine that at the birth of broadcasting, folks had to gather around a set to consume media. Its time to move forward. Sure, most sophisticates use a PVR, a PC, or a DVD player/recorder as an alternative to setting a schedule according to the intersts of media barons, but it is an abuse of bandwidth to let TV and Radio send signals no one requests. Instead, drizzle down signals of what people actually want, and let them consume it on their own schedule. Oh, if "Morning Edition" was always queued up on my car stereo when I get ready for my commute, no matter what the hour, what a happy liberal commuter drone I could be. And I wouldn't feel like a techno-elitist for talking about Tivo with my family members.
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