External Reality Is Sort Of An Affectation

Here’s A Current Example Of The Challenge We Face. At The Height Of Its Power, The Photography Company Kodak Employed More Than 140,000 People And Was Worth $28 Billion. They Even Invented The First Digital Camera. But Today Kodak Is Bankrupt, And The New Face Of Digital Photography Has Become Instagram. When Instagram Was Sold To Facebook For A Billion Dollars In 2012, It Employed Only Thirteen People. Where Did All Those Jobs Disappear To? And What Happened To The Wealth That All Those Middle-class Jobs Created?

The Nerd Flavor Of Masculinity Has Overwhelmed The Macho Kind In Real-life Power Dynamics, And Therefore In Popular Culture.

America's Facebook Generation Shows A Submission To Standardization That I Haven't Seen Before. The American Adventure Has Always Been About People Forgetting Their Former Selves - Samuel Clemens Became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac Went On The Road. If They Had A Facebook Page, They Wouldn't Have Been Able To Forget Their Former Selves.

Back In The 1980s, When The Internet Was Only Available To A Small Number Of Pioneers, I Was Often Confronted By People Who Feared That The Strange Technologies I Was Working On, Like Virtual Reality, Might Unleash The Demons Of Human Nature. For Instance, Would People Become Addicted To Virtual Reality As If It Were A Drug? Would They Become Trapped In It, Unable To Escape Back To The Physical World Where The Rest Of Us Live? Some Of The Questions Were Silly, And Others Were Prescient.

Governments Oppress People, But So Do Mobs. You Need To Avoid Both To Make Progress.