A brilliant historical artifact, and the irony that macOS has been Unix for most of the Mac's existence, and that Windows has included POSIX and/or Linux for most of its existence, is not lost on me.
The Dennis Ritchie anti-forward makes it even better:
> The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred.
Absolutely amazing. American TV was a desolate landscape with occasional stuff so good you couldn’t believe the oasis wasn’t a mirage. Max Headroom was in that category. And of course it didn’t start in the States.
At least not necessarily in the way that this is generally meant, i.e., a timeless classic that more or less transcends the historical context that produced it and, probably most importantly, does not require the audience to know or grasp that historical context to appreciate it (even if understanding the context would add to the appreciation.)
However that doesn't mean it can be no less entertaining and interesting, just that it probably requires some context. This isn't an uncommon issue for popular media which, by definition, is a product of and for its time. Humor/comedy is especially notable for this. In my experience, very little comedy is truly timeless.
However, relevance can of course resurge (and I would make a distinction from more cyclical trends as is seen in fashion, for example.)
And thus I'd say Max Headroom was very much a product of its time and, aside from "ha-ha-old-tech!", you'd most likely need to have at least some knowledge of the social and political landscapes of the time to understand what and who it was satirizing.
But also, sometimes—often?—it's just capitalizing on the cultural moment.
This depends almost entirely on the type of comedy. Things like reference, satire, or shock are obviously dependent on the specific context of time in which they were made and of course become less meaningful as times change.
But comedy is not inherently less "timeless" than any other art. Who's on First is genuinely still funny almost a century later.
The little bits of surviving ancient comedy may seem trite but being simple does not make the jokes less "timeless".
Indeed. In the same vein, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" has made me laugh out loud more than a century after it was originally written.
That said, Shakespeare's humor, as an example, lands more flat with me. English idioms and grammar have changed quite a bit since the 16th century, and though I can intellectually approach his plays and recognize the humor, I rarely laugh out loud to it because there's additional mental load required just to understand what's been said. I suspect that may be true of "Who's on First" in another couple of hundred years, too. I'll report back in 2224 and let you know!
I tend to agree that Who's On First is a exactly the sort comedy that will lose its pithiness in time, moored as it is to the cultural context of baseball and contemporary English wordplay.
One of my favourite lines is from Three men in a Boat: "George has a cousin, who is usually described in the charge-sheet as a medical student, so that he naturally has a somewhat family-physician way of putting things".
not really, culturally the 70's was more desolate where the 80's was a rebirth.
The 80s spawned Cheers, LA Law, Hill Street Blues, Dynasty, Dallas, The Cosby Show, Murphy Brown, The Golden Girls, Family Ties, The Wonder Years, The Facts of Life, St. Elsewhere. I didn't watch all of them, but you can't sneer at so many shows with such tremendous production values, appeal, and staying power. A number of the actors have continued to be popular up to the present day.
and that's not even including my personal favorite, ALF. You want edgy? try making a show today with a star who eats cats
I found The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O'Connor really helpful. It gave me a frame for why grief is a necessary part of our brain processing the loss. It made it much easier to move through the pain.
I think it’s important to remember (and buttresses the upthread points)—the volatility isn’t a coincidence—it’s a direct result of the discovery of the oil and the crucial role it played for imperialism and capitalist expansion.
Before oil was even a thing that region was incredibly volatile. It is the cradle of civilization after all, so I guess it was always bound to be a powder keg.
It has only become volatile after the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Was quite stable and safe before. It's just they didn't have nations before, were colonised and controlled by Ottomans while in Europe we had nation-states and nationalism since ~17 century and had enough time for cleansing to organise mono-ethnic, cohesive states. While even that, was only finished decisively by post-WWII "population transfers" (which was nothing but ethnic cleansing sold as a good thing).
Ethnic states are a things, albeit quite debatable since ethnicity is an entirely contingent and subjective construct. Monoethnic states are the dream of genocides, not ever a reality on the ground (doesn't matter how you define ethnicity).
Well where in a state there's no word in a language to differentiate between a citizen and someone of a title ethnicity, i can call it an ethnostate. Say Armenian or Polish: there's no 2nd word in their languages for that. Because there are so few citizens who aren't of title ethnicity, and they are so marginalised and subject to such a quick assimilation, there isn't even a need to bother inventing a word.
If there is such a word say, "Kazakh" vs "Kazakhstani" or "Russkiye" vs "Rossiyane", existence of such a word shows that this state is an empire.
Sometimes the "ethnic" word simply doesn't exist, say in "Canadian" or "American" for U.S.: it's only citizenship, there's no ethnicity at all - neither the word nor substance - showing a "melting pot" country.
That's as simple as having vs not having a title ethnicity in the country. If there's no title ethnicity it means there's just citizenship, no one subjugates another: it's a melting pot. Kazakhstan in particular, in any case, is moving towards an ethnic state, as every other ethnicity except Kazakh has very low birth rate there so in a few generations it will become homogenous.
This seems super cool but is this like battery breakthroughs? Don’t get excited until we are much closer to it being manufactured at scale/appearing in clinical settings? This is a real question—I’m not clear on the significance of these kinds of press releases.
The challenge with new battery technology is that they have to compete with mature existing technologies and their optimized manufacturing pipelines.
This breakthrough though has no real competition so far. The alternatives are skin transplants, either from one's own body (good compatibility, but limited availability) or from tissue donors (the usual immune system compatibility issues). And TA indicates that the results of those are far from perfect.
The technology also builds on multiple technologies that have been developing for some decades now, for example 3D printing of cells. It also finds applications for other tissues and organs of simple enough structure. Skin is fairly complex, therefore this breakthrough is significant.
The only issue I see are the usual regulatory overhead before it can be rolled out.
It seems kind of crazy to me that they've jumped so quickly to full skin layers.
From examples where people heal without scarring like in minor wounds, it always seemed to me like a goo of accepted but useless cells frequently replaced would be sufficient to confuse where scar tissue should form while gradual healing from adjacent skin eventually occurred.
While not that cheap, you could go to Space Camp for adults (over a weekend). Among other things, you get to run simulated missions—both from Mission Control and in a “space ship.” https://www.spacecamp.com/space/adult/academy
As were Marx and Engels, 175 years ago in the Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”
This was written in the context of European society moving from a relatively settled period to one of rapid change. Had they been writing during the Wars of Religion they would have made similar observations about "uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation", and "All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify".
You can point to a lot of periods in history where everything changes rapidly for at some points a couple of centuries before settling down again. It's hard to say if the modern period is unique or just another period of tumult between long stretches of calm. I'd caution against the notion that history is a science.
> It's hard to say if the modern period is unique or just another period of tumult between long stretches of calm.
Nobody can know the future, but some things are clear:
1. We are a lot more interconnected than in the past (every human civilization that wants to interact with others can do so... or was even forced do it, not very long ago).
2. We are a lot more self-aware than in the past, en masse.
3. We are a lot more structured in our large scale scientific approaches, and we have a lot more science centers working in parallel, widely distributed around the world.
Assuming peaceful conditions and no Venus-style global warming, things will stay hectic for the foreseeable future.
I'm not sure how you would measure something like self-awareness.
I don't think interconnectedness presages rapid social change. We could just as easily settle into a sort of long quiet period where people are more or less accustomed to the way society is organized and institutions have been reformed to adapt to present day issues. After the industrialization of the 1early 9th century there was a fairly stable social arrangement until WWI swept everything off the map. It isn't impossible to imagine a situation where WWI didn't happen and the Belle Époque stretched for a long period of time.
I’m not looking at it with any judgment positive or negative. I’m just saying it is imaginable that the institutions of the period could have persisted had WWI not happened.
Marx wasn’t writing during the late 19th century. The Revolutions of 1848 were the backdrop of their work.
> You can point to a lot of periods in history where everything changes rapidly for at some points a couple of centuries before settling down again. It's hard to say if the modern period is unique or just another period of tumult between long stretches of calm. I'd caution against the notion that history is a science.
Whether history is or isn't a science is completely orthogonal to how unique a period is.
The modern period is unique due to the amount of resources being exploited per capita being unprecedented compared to any other time in human history. Although in the future it's possible that that number will trend down, for the time being our current prosperity is only enabled by copious amounts of energy spent on modern conveniences, particularly infrastructure, appliances and utilities.
The ability to turn raw materials into resources and to generate energy is certainly unique so far, but it may turn out to be basically the norm going forward.
If we need progress, and we do, because nobody wants to die (of disease, old age, whatever) and everyone wants a good life (not one doing backbreaking work or even doing dishes), then that means trying to progress is an inevitable aspect of being human, not a an aspect of the "bourgeois epoch".
It's not the bourgeoisie doing stuff, it's just us, humans.
So if we are progressing and we build upon progress, then progress accelerates, it's only natural, since we have more stuff to build on top of.
That's what's actually melting social conventions and perceived stability.
And I don't think anyone has a solution to this problem, yet.
"It's not the bourgeoisie doing stuff, it's just us, humans."
I think this is misunderstanding what Marx was trying to say here. Marx saw the bourgeoisie (fancy word for "owners", that's all) as a product of forces, not a cause.
The cause is the specific form of economic management / ownership in the current era -- capitalism. The structure of private property, or ownership of production by private entities; which unleashes the profit motive. Which rewrites and restructures everything in its path. Workers and owners are just doing what's required of them to keep feeding this furnace -- and their tummies.
Yes it's humans doing it. But they're doing it in the context of filling their stomachs. The point is that the way that they filled their stomachs changed. With consequences, good and bad.
Disagree strongly with this phrase "we are progressing"; this is value laden, and hand waving. There is definitely a motive force driving things -- profit extraction -- but the word "progress" implies inevitability and a singular direction as well as a positive aspect. I think we can be more scientific than that.
And yes, agreed, nobody has a solution. But I think Marx is among many who have a line of useful analysis about what this is.
I think about this quote -- especially the "melts into air" part -- often.
I do feel like Marx "slips up" a bit there with the "senses his real conditions of life"; this feels like "Younger Marx" of Manifesto/German-Ideology era and not older, mature, cynical Marx of "Grundrisse" and "Capital". I think the latter recognized that at no point are the "real conditions" visible or confronted, and that all is 'obscured' by ideology and the pursuit of market domination and exploitation.
The words of "Younger Marx" there were easily twisted and exploited by people with awful motives and means and brutal simple minds. Later Marx ... they didn't understand.
There's actually very little written by Marx or Engels on any kind of proposed "cure". Marx himself reacted very negatively to the idea of "writing recipes for cook-shops of the future." He didn't think it possible, nor desirable, to draw up plans.
The "cures" in the 20th century were on the whole written by people with far simpler minds and uglier motives. Their actions don't take away from the value of Marx as an analyst and critic of capitalism.
What little they did write in the Manifesto did plenty of damage all on its own, and it served as a step-by-step guide for most of history's failed communist states. (Particularly the bits of making "despotic inroads" on the existing systems)
I don't disagree, but I also think much has been lost in translation between 19th century phrases and language and conventions vs now. Context of the time was revolutions in the context of a mix of brutal 19th century monarchies/dictatorships, proto-capitalist/mostly agrarian economies, and brutal badly regulated industrial capitalisms.
The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" in particular has a very unfortunate history and ... interpretation.
This is horrific. I immediately thought of Puerto Rico, where women were forcibly sterilized for decades (until the 1970s), often after giving birth.
(This is part of the importance of talking about reproductive rights, not just abortion rights—the right to control one’s body to have or not to have a baby should be a fundamental human right.)
Many of the same US states that are currently eagerly restricting abortion rights, and are even casting covetous eyes towards birth control, had loads of forced sterilizations in previous decades.
As one of our marching calls goes, “Not the church, and not the state, will tell us how to procreate!”
