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terrorism and the linked future
For a long time now I've been eyeing A Year With Swollen Appendices, the published version of Brian Eno's 1995 diary. I'd always hedged on buying it before, but I saw a used copy available on Amazon for around three bucks and decided to go for it.
I'm enjoying it immensely. (I can't figure out why I delayed, exactly—I've always been very attracted to the way Eno looks at the world, and I love the diary form in general.) Every page contains some little handy epigraph or interesting observation or mental tool, and it is difficult for me to resist annotating the entire book here. But I just reached a passage written after news of the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks broke, and I thought Eno's thoughts on terrorism then bear some relevance to our current situation:
"It struck me forcefully (again) that the more 'richly connected' we make our world the more vulnerable we make it. Empowerment cuts both ways: as the complexity of things increases, so does the ability of an increasingly minute people to destabilize it. This, it strikes me, is the real limit on development—that we will accept the threat of terrorism as a limit on how complex we make things. So the Utopian techie vision of a richly connected future will not happen—not because we can't (technically) do it, but because we will recognize its vulnerability and shy away from it.
So I expect a limit to be reached, a sense of pulling back from what is possible. And this will be followed by waves of nostalgia for the future-that-could-have-been. Country songs that say 'we could have had it all,' etc., etc. A sense of disappointment with ourselves—perhaps like the sense that pervaded Europe on the failure of the League of Nations."
Labels: networks, war_on_terror |
Sunday, September 29, 2002
12:24 PM
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