What is the panic encyclopedia?
"It's a frenzied scene of post-facts for the fin-de-millenium. Here, even the alphabet implodes under the twin pressures of the ecstasy
of catastrophe and the anxiety of fear. From panic art, panic astronomy, panic babies and panic (shopping) malls to panic sex, panic perfect faces and panic victims, that is the post-modern alphabet. Not then an alphabetic listing of empirical facts about the modern condition, but a post-alphabetic description of the actual dissolution of facts into the flash of thermonuclear cultural "events" in the
postmodern situation." Courtesy the
Way New Leftists.
NY Times on Microspeak
Who needs old words when you can just upgrade to new ones every six months?
Bruce Sterling : Future Schlock
"There were 16 major political parties now, divided into warrior blocs and ceaseless internecine purges, defections, and counterpurges. There were privately owned cities with millions of "clients" where the standard rule of law was cordially ignored. There were price-fixing mafias, money laundries, outlaw stock markets. There were black, gray, and green superbarter Nets. There were health maintenance organizations staffed by crazed organ-sharing cliques, where advanced medical techniques were in the grip of any quack able to download a surgery program. Wiretapping Net-militias flourished, freed of any physical locale. There were breakaway counties in the American West where whole towns had sold out to tribes of nomads, and simply dropped off the map."
The slashdot kiddies ask : What is art?
"After all if everyone could do it, it wouldn't be art, would it? It would be just another craft. And if everyone could appreciate good code the way I appreciate the Impressionists then it would be 'Classical' (read 'Dead') Art." Stick to writing code, buddy. You don't want to touch the arts vs. craft debate with a ten foot pole.
CBC : Cockroaches don't like catnip