Matthew Henry John Bartlett

EVENT: White Lines East are playing this Thursday at Bodega at 9pm

In Firefox 2, Ctrl+Shift+T opens the tab you accidentally just closed

My favourite author, Kim Stanley Robinson, answering the question “what comes next?” in a recent panel of science fiction authors who went to UCSD [Gvideo]:

I don’t think you can predict the future at all except in the most trivial sense, even tomorrow, but i do … it’s a question of what the carrying capacity of the earth is, and we’re in the midst of a kind of global environmental crisis. We think science, or at least it’s commonly held, that science or technology will work our way through this or get us out of it, but we can’t make topsoil. There’s things we can’t do that we’re ignoring — there could be severe problems. So I do think we’re at a kind of choke point, and looking at a nasty century indeed of problems. And half of the world’s population exists on two dollars or less (as the president of the world bank noticed in suprise recently). I think of science as a kind of unconsious utopian system. That science is already a kind of politics by other means, and that what you usually think of as neutral aspects of the scientific method, like falsifiability or peer review, or Occam’s Razor even, are actually political methods, in human relations. It’s not just to find out how nature works, it’s also how people interact with each other. Now this beautiful utopian system that’s a few hundred years old is living in a late feudal world controlled by fundamentalists who pretend that economics makes sense. They call it capitalism, but lets call it ‘late feudalism’ to point out the aspects of it that still exists from the time when the few powerful people… These two, like giant puppets in a Punch & Judy show are siamese twins, and yet battling it out, and so I back science full force in this battle, and say down with the late feudal aspects of our current economic system, because it’s wrecking the earth.