Except a lot of anarchist theory rejects scientific socialism as a methodology. Is there any mainstream anarchism that is rooted in dialectical materialism?
I recently read Contact(the book by Carl Sagan, still need to watch the movie), which features a tech billionaire who built his wealth doing exactly that. He developed a chip that could block TV commercials, and later one to filter televangelists as well.
For a book that was published in the 80s and set in the late 90s, it’s prescient in a few very specific ways. We weren’t exactly communicating by Portable Telefax in 1999, but adblockers were not far away either.
It’s not a device that Sagan goes into much detail about, aside from it being a new and less-than-reliable technology in the early parts of the story. I always imagined it as a laptop-sized, wireless fax machine using cellular networks to share data. Characters mostly use paper documents throughout the book, and while there are some sci-fi technologies like holographic displays that advance throughout the story, Sagan never describes anything like portable computers or smartphones. Even the internet(or its closest approximation) never goes beyond a rudimentary data-sharing network for astronomers, never open to the public.
A quick google search tells me EFax would probably work over that network, sending documents from a desktop straight to someone’s Portable Telefax like an email, so you’re not far off.
He also wrote (in the non-fiction 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World), “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
“See how you can call people with your telephone? It’s like that, but you can send text messages instead. All telephones have a little screen to display the message.”
I don’t think people from the 80s would have much trouble understanding sms, tbh.
Or, and hear me out, you could say “portable fax” and be done with it. YOU are making it complicated by not being culturally acclimated to the timeframe when it was written. Everyone knew what faxes were, no explanation was necessary.
Portable fax: thing that sends and receives messages
Portable Fax IS how you describe SMS in the 80s.
I dont mean that your understanding is unimportant, but that you inherently understand what’s being described to a degree that to hear it described differently than you expect you reject what you hear in favor of assuming the folks in the 80s needed more than “portable fax” to understand what you are on about.
Pagers were in somewhat common use in the 60s, by 1980 wide area paging was on the market offering the ability to send text messages to portable devices anywhere in the country - I’d describe sms as two way pagers.
Vegans really like beans and Lemmy also really likes beans. But not in a began way so they started fighting. There were some riots and a lot of beans were murdered. It was sad.
And that “no poop challenge” that was everywhere on lemmy about a year ago. Not sure whether that was a lemmy thing or wider, as I don’t use anything besides lemmy.
I’m glad a local culture is growing here naturally, but I didn’t expect it to be beans, jeans and no poop
I’ve been here the whole time and I don’t know what the fuck is going on nor have I seen much of it. Now people complaining about it happening? Oh yeah, I’ve seen heaps of that.
This is the result explicit, aggressive and longstanding propaganda by the State of Israel and its foreign agents like AIPAC.
They want there to be no conceptual space between the State of Israel, the Jewish religion, and the Jewish people around the world, so they can turn any criticism of Israel into antisemitism and therefore a hate crime.
Exactly: As your Google search result shows, the state of Israel putting the star of David on their flag was a brilliant propaganda move, much to the detriment of non-Zionist and ant-Zionist Jews. Zionists work very hard to have us conflate anti-Zionism with anti-semitism.
loved mine should never have sold it they were eons ahead of their time way more advanced graphically than anything at that time in the console market and the internet play I never could try as it was totally uneconomically viable, but had SEGA hung on and survived and the online side took off they’d probably be king at this point and still pumping out new true next gen console hardware instead of Android and IOS apps and re-boot mini consoles of the original megadrive and so on? Damn shame they flopped with the Dreamcast, but I loved mine had it a a week after release day I think it was.
I received a chain e-mail saying that If I mail the person who sent me this $1 and forward the e-mail to all my entire contact list, I will be a millionaire. There are hundreds of email addresses in the body of this email from all the forwards that have happened before it was forwarded to me. How cool! Unrelated: how are all these spammers getting my email address? I only gave it to all my friends and family. And my friends/family only send me cool chain emails and funny jokes. e-mail is a new technology, so surly they will fix this spam problem by the year 2000.
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