Nate Cull
Speaking of the planetization of the esoteric (and aren't we all these days), I see the Internet Archive and the Schumacher Center have preserved audio tapes of the infamous Lindisfarne Conferences of the 1970s.
The birth of the Green movement and/or the Bavarian Illuminati New World Order Globalist Communist Takeover, depending on who you talk to. Maybe both!
I think Stewart Brand's in here somewhere, circa 1974.
https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/legacy/lindisfarne-tapes/
Nate Cull
William Irwin Thompson is still alive and has retired, but the Lindisfarne Association wound down in 2012. 40 years, not a bad run. But it's sad that it never seemed to train a second generation.
Nate Cull
Sorry I already borrowed the book but you can still listen to the original audio for free!
https://archive.org/details/earthsanswerexpl0000unse/page/n9
Nate Cull
a nice, down to earth astronaut like me
Nate Cull
what's a nice, down to earth astronaut like me doing in a far-out group like this
Nate Cull
huh and David Spangler was not only there plugged into it but Thompson blames him for actually getting Lindisfarne happening.
No lie, (re)discovering Spangler to me feels like picking up a quiet conversation I somehow stopped around the mid-1980s.
Nate Cull
huh and David Spangler was not only there plugged into it but Thompson blames him for actually getting Lindisfarne happening.
No lie, (re)discovering Spangler to me feels like picking up a quiet conversation I somehow stopped around the mid-1980s.
They all got so old somehow.
Nate Cull
I feel somehow like Lindisfarne, Infocom, Whole Earth, Internet Archive, Xanadu, early Creative Computing... Mastodon... all have the same soul. Something wide eyed and starry, techno-mystical. William Irwin Thompson was ex-MIT so maybe the Infocom part is not as much of a stretch as it seems.
And it's a song wired into my blood too.
But Modern Silicon Valley does not attract me one bit. Amazon and Uber and stack ranking oh hell no. No. That is NOT the future we dreamed of.
Nate Cull
William Irwin Thompson calling it, in 1997
<< When we turn our gaze to science and technology, we can see that the Internet has become an externalization and simulacrum of the Astral Plane. Everything in there is now out there. In shifting his allegiance from anarchic Apple to corporate IBM, Bill Gates in the eighties paved the way for this new baroque era of wealth. The counterculture has shifted from being avant garde to becoming apologists for MIT’s Media Lab. >>
Nate Cull
<< Think of Wired Magazine with its erotization of technology through drugs. The new counterfoil institutions are not really counter as much as charismatic embodiments of the new kairos. They are not the Farm or Lama Foundation with their cultural quotations of bib and tucker rural poverty, but grand baronial estates produced by the new culture of wealth—institutes like the Santa Fe Institute, this Fetzer Institute, or the new Ross Institute. >>
Nate Cull
We all liked to hate on Gates in 1997, and not without reason. Apple were still the cool, failed, hippie company then, the path not taken.
course, what Thompson didn't guess was that a year or so later, Steve Jobs would come roaring back in full industrial postmodernist gentrification/commodification mode to sell hipster elitism to the world and in so doing take more money and put it in one place in a gravity-warping pile than either Bill Gates or Albert Einstein put together could imagine
Nate Cull
But the particulars were irrevelant. Thompson accurately called the social dynamic.
<< To appreciate this shift from the seventies to the nineties, it is worthwhile recalling the shift from the Renaissance to the Baroque. ... the new global economy was reconstructed upon African slavery... So whether the media rich will carry on until they are guillotined by the poor will depend upon just how much history the ruling elite has studied. >>
Narrator voice: They had not studied history. At all.
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
@natecull Oh so THAT is where SimCity's Arcologies come from. Paolo Soleri:
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