My perspective about the excessive level of consumption we’ve established in the modern world, especially in the West, has typically been informed by collateral issues including unsustainability, demographics gone mad, ecological destruction, commodity culture, advertising (programming, actually), and the sheer absurdity of manufacturing, buying, and consuming so much stuff, much of which we don’t need. [...]
Archive for July, 2007
We humans love efficiency: maximum output in the minimum time. In economics, that translates into fortunes made (and lost) overnight and considerable volatility. It also translates into a culture of change. Rapid change, actually. The world of 1880 looked substantially like the world of 1900, whereas the world of 1980 changed significantly in the years [...]
I’m breaking one of my self-imposed rules: no writing about myself (in a chatty tone, no less). This entry and the two before it are about me, which break from my usual focus away from myself. So sue me. I’ve never been a fat slob and fully put away my athletic gear like lots of [...]
I was tagged recently by a blogger friend (as in “tag, you’re it”) with the so-called Thinking Blog meme. The source of this meme is here. I presume that if you’re reading this blog regularly and aren’t merely surfing by then you know what a meme is, so I won’t bore you with theory. Here’s [...]
A friend of mine reactivated her mostly dormant blog and put up a list of 20 things to do within the next year. I thought it was an interesting idea but might be too many things. Strangely, though, none of the things on the list seem especially grand, challenging, or difficult. But they got me [...]
I’m approaching the end of Curtis O. White’s book, The Middle Mind. Lots of good ideas in there. This bit from page 178 struck me: “… if there is to be a global culture — and telecommunications and digital technology have made that appear inevitable (if also inevitably unequal) — that culture will be understood, [...]
The Spiral Staircase has a radically short blogroll by blogging standards. Several reasons inform that fact. Political and pop culture blogs are too many and too ubiquitous to enhance the focus of this blog. Even more significantly, many bloggers simply don’t write well enough for me to endorse (a significant consideration of mine). So if [...]
There ought to be an expiration date on some institutions. The life cycles of many of our current institutions have been extended well beyond their effectiveness date and they frankly need to be scrapped and created anew. Examples include public education, corporations, the electoral process, perhaps even capitalism. Calls to scrap public education began back [...]
