/**
 * @article	iPads and Xboxes on Obama 
 *
 * @since	May 12, 2010 
 * @package	Shortpost 
 *
 * @tags	social media,
 * 		tech culture 
 *
 */

Ta-nehisi Coates kills it as usual in his riffs (here and here) on Obama’s speech at Hampton’s graduation, where the prez warned students (and their parents) against the dangers and distractions their newfangled technology — “iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations” — pose; the fear that with new media, “information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

Comments range from betrayed (“we thought we was hip, one of us”) to cynical (“this probably plays really well to the conservative middle aged crowd”) to just sad (“it just hurts to see someone smart pretend ignorance to fit in”). But with all that out of the way, there’s a decent defense of the geek worldview in there.

/**
 * @article	Telemachus Sneezed, revisited 
 *
 * @since	May 7, 2010 
 * @package	Cultural Thoughts 
 *
 * @tags	makers,
 * 		nerdliness,
 * 		tech culture 
 *
 */

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Makers, and I was really impressed. I think I want to do a review, drawing out a couple themes by comparing it to what I think was its closest equivalent from the last century, Atlas Shrugged.

Not that Makers, or anything Cory Doctorow writes, is anything like the knee-jerk ideology that Ayn Rand put out… but then, that was always just something embarrassing I was willing to overlook in her writing. I always saw her as someone whose instincts were pretty good, and if she hadn’t had a disastrous family experience with Stalinist Russia that gave her such a harsh anti-commie bias, she probably would have come up with a coherent philosophy on her own. As it stands, the description of a creative worker’s paradise in Atlas Shrugged, of creative productive citizens being held back by the mediocrity of statism—and then fighting back—is pretty cool, and if you read it alongside, say, the Communist Manifesto or The Ego And Its Own, it can really illuminate a lot.

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