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Rob PrideauxThe Great San Francisco Exhale: Part 1Submitted by Rob on November 17, 2005 - 00:39.
Probably the statisticians noticed it first. The hard core number crunchers that supply The Economist with it's information if not it's perspective. The ones that love numbers, see the world as numbers, see the world in numbers. And see it before the photographers and the writers and the commentators, your eyes and ears.
The men and women whose five senses are coordinately attuned to counting, who even though fundamentally there is only addition, build whirring worlds of numbers, full of continents of information, traversed by formulas complex enough to appear to you and I as magic, arcane, unintelligibly, and vaguely threatening. There is no fear there, there are no consequences. ( categories: Essays | Rob Prideaux )
The Great San Francisco Exhale: Part 2Submitted by Rob on November 17, 2005 - 00:36.
Sometimes, in the things that got made, we saw spontaneity, synergy. We saw a different way for humans to interact. We saw possibilities of collaboration and cooperation. We heard that you can't make money by allowing people to build worlds for themselves, and we let ourselves be yanked beyond the reach of these possibilities; we left them to cranks and curmudgeons, those who have given up on money and progress.
Within, who among us did not feel the lure of it in some fashion? Who did not want to be a part of it? All local humans felt the pull; some resisted quietly knowing, others attacked. Some undermined, and some succumbed. Some went willingly blindly, others fled. Some kept their heads dead and pretended neither the thing nor it's pull on them existed. alt: We bought into a dream and hoped for the best; or we refused the dream and pissed on it; or we didn't notice the dream and didn't understand how it affected us. ( categories: Essays | Rob Prideaux )
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