Over at Kottke is the following remaindered link, to an article by Bruce Sterling for MIT's Technology Review titled Ten Technologies that Deserve to Die. The technologies?
Nuclear weapons, coal-based power, internal combustion engines, incandescent lightbulbs, land mines, manned space flight, prisons, cosmetic implants, lie detectors, and DVDs.
I must admit that I was a lot more interested in this piece before I read it than I found myself when I finished. I like Sterling's work quite a bit, and I'm even willing to buy into the whole futurist thing he's been futzing with--I shelled out $25 for Tomorrow Now willingly.
At the same time, most of these entries, which range from the obvious to the trivial, left me nonplussed. Don't get me wrong here--I don't disagree with what Sterling has to say about each one. But some of them are basically symptoms of larger problems--I'd feel a lot better about figuring out how to deal with the cultural conditions that lead to cosmetic enhancement, for example, than banning one of the shortcuts that people use to satisfy said conditions. The quality of DVDs (and CDs, for that matter) are a reflection of the virtual monopolies in our entertainment industries, a societal fetish for new, shiny tech, and retro copyright laws.
There's an implied determinism to this discussion, the idea that an entire cultural, social, legal, political ecology can be distilled into a specific technology or technologies, that leaves me ambivalent, I guess. I couldn't quite get into the spirit of this piece, any more than I can get into the idea that there's a new technology or medium that will solve our problems. C'est moi.
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