June 2012

ARTICLE | Debt as Tall as Dubai, or How the Singularity Is Not a Guaranteed Phenomenon

by Tim Swanson on June 26, 2012 @ 5:30 am

Is technological growth inevitable irrespective of the economic macroenvironment?

In the mid-to-late aughts, Dubai’s political class was the darling of Davos and erected landmark creations including the Palm Islands and Burj Khalifa that ultimately bankrupted the emirate and led to it being bailed out by its northern cousin, Abu Dhabi.

Contemporaneously, in similar fashion, the political elite in notable areas such as Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Greece, and California enacted a series of social experiments (e.g., frothy benefits), which, on top of spurious real-estate bubbles, in retrospect amounted to little more than Menckenian hubris; the governments promised more guns and butter than was financially feasible. As a consequence of their extravagant splurging, taxpayers worldwide have become saddled with debt as both sovereign obligations and the financial industry across the globe have been bailed out and kept on life support.

Nearly four years ago, science fiction author Vernor Vinge was asked if the “future was cancelled” due to this financial crisis. At the time he said no and I said probably. Eighteen months ago, jack-of-all-trades Kevin Kelly suggested that “if in a counterfactual history, communism had won the cold war and microelectronics had been invented in a global Soviet-style society, my guess is that even that alternative policy apparatus could not stifle Moore’s Law.”

The problem with their reasoning is that both miss the fact that Moore’s Law and other innovation trend lines are in fact only descriptive behaviors of past manufacturing abilities.

Moore’s Law is not ironclad; it is not immutable and it is not science. It just so happens that semiconductor firms have been fortunate and currently are able to finance their insatiable appetite for plant expansion while at the same time increase the amount of transistors on a die. What began as a mere observation about manufacturing and miniaturization has turned into rank historicism that can be seen in any industry that has been disrupted internally and externally.

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ARTICLE | Ray Bradbury: Anarchist at Heart

by Brian LaSorsa on June 16, 2012 @ 1:43 am

in Articles, Featured Posts, Novels, Science Fiction

On June 5, acclaimed author Ray Bradbury passed away. I can’t say I have been much affected by the loss. My relationships with most authors typically begin and end within the pages of their books. I find that delving into writers’ and actors’ lives — specifically the components of their political beliefs — is often a disappointing venture to complete. Yet it still saddens me that our world is no longer graced by the man’s presence.

It is interesting that he descended from Mary Bradbury, a woman who was convicted and sentenced to hang in the 1600s during the infamous Salem witch trials. After such brutalities were imposed on the family, I can’t tell if it’s nature or nurture that Ray grew up to be skeptical of the way things were. Among Mary’s other descendents is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the world-renowned individualist writer who grew up to say, “The less government we have the better.” I found out a few years ago that one of my great-great-great-great- ad infinitum grandmothers, too, was prosecuted as a witch during the Puritans’ wicked trials. I can take this only as a fantastic compliment and hope that my antistate relatives were fighting the good fight with the Bradbury family, leading to the libertarian ideals I now cherish so deeply.

Bradbury’s first original book, Fahrenheit 451, is a fiery testament against the censorship of opposing ideas. He maintained repeatedly that the people — not the state — were the book’s antagonists, but the real enemy, more than the actual individuals in question, was their obsession with political correctness, which led to the shredding and burning of old literature in the first place. And as anyone will tell you, we libertarians typically have little patience for political correctness. It does nothing except dilute the true meaning of words and stupefies the population into apathy.

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THE LIBERTARIAN TRADITION PODCAST | Revisit Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

by Jeff Riggenbach on June 15, 2012 @ 12:37 pm

in Featured Posts, Novels, Science Fiction, The Libertarian Tradition Podcast

In light of Ray Bradbury’s recent passing, it may be apropos to revisit an old episode of Jeff Riggenbach’s Libertarian Tradition podcast from 2010 in which he discusses why we should revisit Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 45.

PODCAST: Play in New Window | Download (Duration: 15:55 — 4.7MB) | Embed

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) — (died June 5, 2012)

You can also read the transcript below:

Ray Bradbury celebrated his 90th birthday this past Sunday. He was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, a medium-sized town of around 20,000 people about midway between Chicago and Milwaukee on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Bradbury has depicted Waukegan fondly, even idyllically, in his fiction, most notably in his 1957 novel Dandelion Wine — even though the Waukegan conjured up in that book, which is set in 1928, is a bit larger than the Waukegan Bradbury was born into in 1920. The town’s population grew by more than 50 percent during the ’20s. By the beginning of the Great Depression, there were more than 33,000 people who called Waukegan home. The Bradbury family was not to be among these people for much longer, however.

They had already spent a year in Tucson, Arizona in the ’20s, for reasons having to do with Ray’s father’s employment. Tucson was where Ray attended first grade. And in school year 1932/33, when Ray was 12, they were back in Tucson again. Then, after a few months cleaning up loose ends in Waukegan, not long before Ray’s 14th birthday, they moved to Los Angeles, where they remained. Ray Bradbury himself is there to this day. It was in Los Angeles that he went through high school and in Los Angeles that he launched his extremely successful career as a fiction writer.

It is common to hear Ray Bradbury described as a “science-fiction writer,” but this is misleading at best. Only a minority of Bradbury’s total production is science fiction by any normal standard, and at least half of it is straightforward realistic fiction like Dandelion Wine. The fact is, however, that Bradbury’s second, third, and fourth books, his first three books to come to widespread attention —The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) — were works of science fiction, or, at least, were widely believed to be. Bradbury was typecast early, you might say. He came to fame as a “science-fiction writer,” and a “science-fiction writer” he will therefore forever remain.

For our purposes here, on the other hand, Bradbury’s most important book is undeniably the third of those titles I just listed: Fahrenheit 451, his short novel about censorship, one of the most influential libertarian novels of the 20th century, first published nearly 60 years ago. And of all Ray Bradbury’s books, Fahrenheit 451 is probably the one most entitled to be called “science fiction.”

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MOVIE REVIEW | Prometheus

by Matthew Bruce Alexander on June 9, 2012 @ 12:32 am

in Featured Posts, Film, Reviews, Science Fiction

One cannot help but notice that, cinematically speaking, director Ridley Scott’s best days seem to be behind him. They were glorious days, though short lived; nothing after Blade Runner could compare to his second and third films. One might also note that he left his best days behind at precisely the time when he left behind science fiction. It is understandable, then, if one supposes that a return to the genre that made him might also be a return to form. Alas, it is not so. Scott’s latest feature, Prometheus, is a disappointment even for one whose expectations were not that lofty.

Prometheus returns us to the universe of Alien, that sublime work of sci-fi horror that remade an entire genre. This time, it is the late twenty-first century, a few decades before Ripley, Dallas, Parker, and the rest will land on LV426. Cave paintings all over the world, and from many different millennia, have been found to depict a giant gesturing to the stars as smaller, human forms worship him. Through means not satisfactorily explained, two scientists, Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), determine that this is an invitation from a race that created our kind. Not only that, but they are able to pinpoint the star system to which we have been beckoned. The infamous Weyland-Yutani corporation bankrolls a scientific expedition to the system and danger ensues.

A strange approach to the movie is taken, one which is a peculiar fit for a prequel to Alien. Whereas the original started when the story started, introduced us to believable characters whom we slowly came to know only by how they acted and interacted, and got down to the business of slowly creeping us out before scaring us senseless, Prometheus attempts a good deal more. It begins with an ill-advised prologue in which we see one of the mysterious beings, instead of discovering them for the first time with the crew later in the movie. After the prologue we see the prelude to the expedition, the scientists discovering one of the cave paintings, something rendered entirely unnecessary when they explain it all to the crew anyway after coming out of hypersleep. They even spend some time with character back story.

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