Archive for December 2009

RT’ing Andrew Coyne

The Short Parliament
By Andrew Coyne – Wednesday, December 30, 2009 – 59 Comments

As Canadian democracy spirals further down the drain:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will prorogue Parliament Wednesday for a two-month break.

The House of Commons and the Senate will come back in March, after the Vancouver Olympics, for a Speech from the Throne and a budget. The move will have the effect of stalling all bills currently in Parliament, including crime bills that the government had said were being delayed by the opposition.

A post-Olympic return would also shut down government committees, which would stop MPs from pursuing the Afghan detainee controversy until Parliament returned.

Question: In what other democracy is it permissible for the government of the day to hide from the legislature for months at a time? To ignore explicit parliamentary votes demanding the production of documents? To stonewall independent inquiries? Perhaps the rules allow it elsewhere, but is it the practice? Does convention not still forbid it? Is it not viewed in other countries as dictatorial behaviour, and therefore, you know … not done?

So, rather than submit himself to the inquiries of elected parliamentarians, the King will dismiss Parliament, in the grand tradition of kings past. The question is: what will Parliament do now? If historical precedent is any guide, it should meet anyway. Let those MPs who wish to do the people’s business convene on the usual timetable, and let those with other loyalties disport themselves as they may.

If MPs are barred at the doors to Parliament — and wouldn’t that be an interesting scene — let them meet somewhere else. A tennis court would do nicely.

Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous

I’m afraid of engineers

http://www.slate.com/id/2240157

"Gambetta and Hertog write about a particular mindset among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise. They might be more passionate about bringing order to their society, and see the rigid, religious law put forward in radical Islam as the best way of achieving those goals. In online postings, Abdulmutallab expressed concern over the conflict between his secular lifestyle and more extreme religious views. "How should one put the balance right?" he wrote."

Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous

This has totally been the decade of “you can’t make this shit up”.

"Expect to hear a lot about the fact that America's Transportation Security Administration is currently leaderless. Talking Points Memo says that's because Sen. Jim DeMint, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, has blocked the confirmation of a prospective head for the agency. Mr DeMint says he's blocking the confirmation because the nominee won't say whether or not he will support TSA screeners' attempts to form a union. In any case, Democrats plan to force a vote on the issue when members of Congress return to Washington next month."

–http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2009/12/wednesday_flight_253_roundup

Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous

Everyone should read this, srsly

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23519

"For the last thirty years, in much of the English-speaking world (though less so in continental Europe and elsewhere), when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad? Instead we inquire: Is it efficient? Is it productive? Would it benefit gross domestic product? Will it contribute to growth? This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition. It is an acquired taste. Consider the 1996 'Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act' (a more Orwellian title would be hard to conceive), the Clinton-era legislation that sought to gut welfare provision here in the US. The terms of this act should put us in mind of another act, passed in England nearly two centuries ago: the New Poor Law of 1834. The provisions of the New Poor Law are familiar to us, thanks to Charles Dickens's depiction of its workings in Oliver Twist. When Noah Claypole famously sneers at little Oliver, calling him 'Work'us' ('Workhouse'), he is implying, for 1838, precisely what we convey today when we speak disparagingly of 'welfare queens.' The New Poor Law was an outrage, forcing the indigent and the unemployed to choose between work at any wage, however low, and the humiliation of the workhouse. Here and in most other forms of nineteenth-century public assistance (still thought of and described as "charity"), the level of aid and support was calibrated so as to be less appealing than the worst available alternative. This system drew on classical economic theories that denied the very possibility of unemployment in an efficient market: if wages fell low enough and there was no attractive alternative to work, everyone would find a job. For the next 150 years, reformers strove to replace such demeaning practices. In due course, the New Poor Law and its foreign analogues were succeeded by the public provision of assistance as a matter of right. Workless citizens were no longer deemed any the less deserving for that; they were not penalized for their condition nor were implicit aspersions cast upon their good standing as members of society. More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-twentieth century established the profound impropriety of defining civic status as a function of economic participation. In the contemporary United States, at a time of growing unemployment, a jobless man or woman is not a full member of the community. In order to receive even the exiguous welfare payments available, they must first have sought and, where applicable, accepted employment at whatever wage is on offer, however low the pay and distasteful the work. Only then are they entitled to the consideration and assistance of their fellow citizens. […] Conversely, it is not humiliating to be on the receiving end of a right. If you are entitled to unemployment payments, pension, disability, municipal housing, or any other publicly furnished assistance as of right—without anyone investigating to determine whether you have sunk low enough to 'deserve' help—then you will not be embarrassed to accept it. However, such universal rights and entitlements are expensive. But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to 'quantify' the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify 'humiliation'? What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society? Unclear. But unless we ask such questions, how can we hope to devise answers? […] The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments."

Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous

Are Americans a Broken People?

Alternet.org

"Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials — badges of compliance for corporate employers — in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt. […] Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable. Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, 'often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults.' An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance — for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the 'disease' goes away. When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a 'passive-aggressive revolution' by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything — this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution. Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the 'Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy'. Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves — and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life. 

Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous

To be kind rather than to be cruel; a rebuttal of Kenneth Kidd

When I read this today (Oscar the cat and the science of kindness) I was indignant and dumbfounded that someone could be so fucking dense (emph mine): 

“In a world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty, why is there still empathy, sympathy and kindness? There must be some  evolutionary advantage, otherwise those traits would have long since vanished. And yet we are so often squeamish when faced with acts of kindness, as if they were soft-headed embarrassments and signs of weakness. Or worse: mere narcissism and self-interest masquerading as something else.” 


WTF?  What has been written here is psychopathic. The implication being that it is advantageous to be ‘selfish & cruel’, especially ‘genetically speaking’ – which is another way of saying the best way to reproduce is through rape. The author (Kenneth Kidd) seems oblivious to the fact that humans are social creatures, and that we appreciate those who show us kindness. I mean, reproduction does mostly occur between people who like each other at the time, does it not? I’ll grant his position is merely one of argument, and that he’s not actually as psychopathic as all this is. However …. 

He uses the cat (quoted below), and the quoted above, as a build up to stating that humans are social creatures. But he doesn’t take that as a given, rather, he quotes sources. In other words, ‘research suggests’ that humans are social creatures, but not movie nights, dating, pub rounds with friends, etc. 

There’s no reason at all for the traits of kindness and empathy to have vanished, and every reason for them to have coexisted. What should make us squeamish is that such thoughts could be expressed at all in such a manner. It takes for granted that our society is cruel, as if this is a norm, rather than the aberration. A society of ‘overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty’ is a failed society, and it used to be termed barbaric. 

Nowadays we tend to look more kindly on barbarism, obviously. 

Further on in the article, he states: 

“Are we naturally kind or selfish egoists at heart? 

Much flows from how you answer that question, how, on balance, you view human nature. 

Consider, for instance, the Christian tale of the Good Samaritan who helps out an injured Israelite, someone he doesn’t know, even though Samaritans and Israelites are long-standing enemies. 

This is arguably the pre-eminent tale of Christian kindness. It seems to imply that empathy, compassion and caritas, or brotherly love, are natural human dispositions. But then, as Phillips and Taylor note, St. Augustine happened along with a profoundly different view. Rather than being native to humans, caritas was deemed to be divine, bestowed by God. 

Without God, there could be no kindness or other virtue, because we’d lost the possibility of being naturally good with the expulsion from Eden.” 

This to me seems entirely idiotic. (An aside dear reader: I hope you and I see eye to eye, and that you are as dumbfounded as I am. If not, I am left to explain, as I am, why this is shite. But I also feel the need to explain regardless, so that there’s some documentation in  future databases that not all hearts had been so eclipsed in our time). 

It is true that the Romans were cruel; and that there was much cruelty in the past. This suggests the so called ‘genetic’ line of thought which equates optimal reproduction with rape. It was an accomplishment of Christianity (which may have its roots in Buddhism) and a legacy which we used to take for granted (before we once again became blasé about torture) that Western society became more self-consciously gentle, in its abandonment of slavery, torture, and tyrannical government. 

Christian civilization, remembering the torture of the forums, wrote their history to make the Romans cruel and inhumane. However, Christ’s story of a stranger helping anoher did not need academic analysis to be made clear to its first hearers; it was in a challenge to hardened hearts, one that Palestinian supporters aim toward Israelis today – treat everyone as you would like to be treated and expand your notion of family to include all, as we are all children of God. Though the Samaritan and Israeli were traditionally enemies, they transcended their tribalism to be brothers of a species. This was clear two thousand years ago and was written down for that reason: It was a call for early Christians to recognize one another as members of a family of God. 

The soul hungers to be treated with respect and kindness, and as such this is quenching a thirst that has gotten used to the dryness of stone hearts. Augustine, a repentant sinner, found his source of kindness in the Church, and he did not know what we know about the history of humanity: that it did not begin 4000 years ago in a garden. Augustine layered that story with a lot of metaphoric meaning, but he also was incredulous to the idea that salvation could happen without God because he himself had been a great sinner and could not understand his transformation into an asexual hermit without projecting that into this myth. Which is to say that Augustine universalized his biography and considered his early years of sinfulness to be an example of normal human life without God. 

With that clear, let’s leave Augustine out of 21st Century discussions shall we? 

Kidd’s rhetorical question appropriately answered would tell us that humans are complicated, not simple, and that we have the capacity to be both kind and cruel. That we are naturally both kind and egotists, but that we are taught to exagerate our egotism. O
ur education system – our society – encourages the later; it rewards us when we are cruel. This talk of ‘squeamishness’ is an example of how it discourages kindness. We could have a society of beautiful gentle people, but we’d have to treat our children better and forgo all this bullshit with regard to grades, sports and celebrity, and really come down hard on them when they mock fat & ugly people. An example of the season: we might stop purposefully decieving them about Santa Claus, only to chalk up their later disapointment in learning the truth as a rite of passage.

Instead we have a society that values ignorance and hatred, that glorifies militaristic discipline as honourable, assigns undue virtue to the symmetrical, and that sorts its citizens into “winners” and “losers”. 

The examples Kidd uses to argue for kindness as an achievement of civilization (rather than a repression) come from the rise of the militaristic nation state: after Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (the need to police the encouraged cruelty of a cruel society) he writes “Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith — were all fighting to restore kindness and compassion as something natural to the species.” Notice that he used the word fighting to describe their work. 

To summarize my point here: people are both kind and cruel: crueler with strangers than they are with family. Throughout the West’s recorded history, there was a tendency toward authoritarian governance which encouraged a dog-eat-dog model. Christianity was revolutionary in that it encouraged the kinder side of human nature (until it too became authoritarian). The Western model of the nation-state is militaristic, further encouraging the unkind, and now we’ve had four hundred years of that nonsense, so that it seems “natural” that the unkind is the norm, whereas the empathic is the un-evolutionary aberration. In a “world filled with overwhelming selfishness, schadenfreude and cruelty” there’s not enough discouragement of this behaviour in favor of more gentle minds. 

“[Oscar the cat] makes regular rounds, entering each room to smell and look over the patients. If all is more or less well, the white-breasted tabby moves on to the next room. If he instead snuggles up to a patient, purring and nuzzling, the nurses immediately start calling relatives. Oscar won’t leave until the patient has breathed his or her last. 

Now, the intriguing question is not so much how Oscar can make such accurate prognoses, but why he lingers, holds this vigil. Is Oscar comforting himself or the patient? If he were upset, sensing a bad situation, wouldn’t Oscar be better off elsewhere, getting petted? And if he’s not upset, why is Oscar so generous, receiving nothing in return? Oscar not only appears to feel empathy, but to act on it, to show kindness.” 

It doesn’t surprise me at all that a cat would behave in the way described. What I find surprising is that one feels the need to explain it at all, and to seek a selfish explanation for it at that.

Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous

Form vs. Content

Having done temp work for three years, I can tell you that jobs are usually only about learning a set of actions. That is, they teach you the role and the routine, and if you stay long enough, eventually you might become conscious of what exactly it is you’re doing. Permanent staff with positions of authority have that consciousness – they understand what they are doing, but for many others it’s very much about following the routine.

In this manner, work is separated from achievement, and form is separated from content. The form is what you’re taught in your first day or week. The content is optional. In fact you may actually be discouraged from asking why you are doing such-and-such, that is, seeking out the content of your actions.

John Ralston Saul, writing in his 2008 book A Fair Country states

Increasingly our elites attempt to slip into the vacuum behind other people’s actions. Worse still, they attempt to imitate the surface appearance, not the reality, or other people’s actions. (p226)

This echoes his dissection of the separation of form from content in 1994’s Doubters Companion (‘White Bread’):

White Bread Post-modern urban individuals, who spend their days in offices, have taken to insisting that she or he is primarily a physical being equipped with the muscles of a work-horse and the clothes of a cowboy. The rejection of white bread in favor of loaves compacted with the sort of coarse, scarcely ground grains once consumed solely by the poor follows quite naturally.

White bread is the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its ideological conclusion: essential goods originally limited by their use in daily life have been continually refined until all utility has been removed. Utility is vulgar. In this particular case, nutrition and fibre were the principal enemies of progress. With the disappearance of utility what remains is form, the highest quality of high civilizations.

And whenever form presides, it replaces ordinary content with logic and artifice. The North American loaf may be tasteless but remains eternally fresh thanks to the efficient use of chemicals. The French baguette turns into solidified sawdust within two hours of being baked, which creates the social excitement of having to eat it the moment it comes out of the oven. The Italians have introduced an intriguing mixture of tastes – hands towels on the inside and cardboard in the crust. The Spanish managed to give the impression of having replaced natural fibre with baked sand. There are dozens of other variations. The Greek. The Dutch. Even the world of international hotels has developed its own white roll.

In each case, to refine flour beyond utility is to become refined. This phenomenon is by no means limited to bread or even food. Our society is filled with success stories of high culture, from men’s ties to women’s shoes.

In his entry on Property Development, the last two definitions contain the same theme:

6. The managers who run the large deposit banks have a taste for big buildings. They have wasted large amounts of capital by constructing remarkable headquarter buildings and imitative towers in every financial centre around the world. The only function of these palaces is to warehouse a non-productive managerial class.

7.Every society needs housing and work space. A civilization mindful of its future makes sure that everyone has a bit of property. An evolved civilization attempt to ensure that both private and public buildings are of the highest possible quality. Architecture at this level is an ethical expression of the society at large. The sign today we are merely involved in speculation is that our buildings relate less and less to any primary use or need.

Inasmuch that postmodernism began as an architectural concept, I find Fredric Jameson’s suggestion (in his 1992 Postmodernism architecture chapter) that the architecture of the period seemed to be designed to be photographed relevant. Along with film, this enabled the conceptualization of form away from content. In short, we all began to perceive ourselves as actors within the movie of our lives. So Shakespeare’s ‘all the world’s a stage’ became for us an article of secular faith.

And from this follows the idea that we enact roles, and thus only need to be taught how to act the role. How to act the role of consumer, office worker, smoker, drinker, seducer … all lessons learned from the role-modeling provided by actors enacting roles with fashionable haircuts and fashionable clothes in movies and television. So, after almost sixty years of television, we all know how to embody stereotypes if we so chose. This is most remarkable in terms of music – the folksy crooner who dresses according to what Bob Dylan wore in the 1960s, the punk dressing according to late 1970s photographs, and of course the vast plaid marketing campaign that was Grunge.

The semiotics of Michael Jackson’s aesthetics

Today’s Huffington Post links to a Nypost article on “the creepy painting” of Michael Jackson in Michelangelo’s David pose, surrounded by cherubs. We are told that it was commissioned in 1999 from the artist David Nordahl.

This painting was glimpsed in the 2003 documentary by Martin Bashir, and from which I took the screencaps to compose the piece (below) I had in Zsa Zsa Gallery’s The Michael Jackson Show show in Toronto, and which closed on Michael Jackson’s 45th birthday.

As I stated in that peice, he had delusions of godlihood. I do not know if the Nordahl work has a title, but I’d imagine it acquiring the name ‘The Apotheosis of Michael Jackson’, and considering the default longevity of oil and canvas, it may become a type of Mona Lisa image of the 26th Century – something most people are familar with, but it will be few who will have actually looked up the surviving electronic documents to see the videos. 

CNBC has a slide show of work from his collection. This dates from last March, when Jackson was planning an auction to gain some cash for his troubled finances. As I’ve known about the apotheosis painting for almost seven years (Bashir’s documentary aired in January of that year) it doesn’t surprise me that Jackson’s taste was so bad. What I was surprised by were the other paintings wherein he’s a king, or a knight. I find this one (also by David Nordahl) most alarming:

And this robotic head reminds me of the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

I found the slide show through a search  for “David Nordahl”. The thumbnail for the following made me think he was a Mormon artist responsible for the type of images of white-Jesus amidst tanned-white-people Indians as seen in their texts. On clicking I see that instead it’s a very Socialist Realism depiction of Jackson that wouldn’t stand out from a collection of Maoist images from the Cultural Revolution. I would like to think that Nordahl is savy enough to have put Jackson in a red shirt for this reason – consider this painting “The Nordahl Code”. Herein lies coded images depicting truths about his interaction with this disturbed man, but I’ll leave that to the thriller novelists of the future.

Frank Herbert, in his last novel Chapterhouse Dune, wrote of a Van Gogh painting which had survived the millenia and was a reminder to that cohort of humanity of an element of wildness in the human imagination. It is an eloquent passage about the importance and lasting effects of artwork. Jackson in turn stands as a testament to the WTF? element in the human, but this message speaks most clearly to us, the present living who shared the world with the living figure, but a century from now, these paintings, stripped of the context that we take for granted, will be a mess of mixed messages. By this I mean that we know that Jackson’s thing for being depicted as a king comes from his marketing as ‘the king of pop’. And that the associated art is tasteless and ignorant.

Jackson as a knight, or as a king … a schoolgirl of 2110 will have no reason to think that the man depicted there was not those things. Also, these works are a reminder that while painting we call ‘contemporary’ has become a blotchy mess of shapes, colour and tube turds, there remains this underground of figurative realism that ‘tasteless’ celebrities hire for their own personal propaganda. The tradition of Queen Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Napoleon (ancient figures from a pre-photographic world shaping their image for the present and future generations) continues for the celebrity-royalty of today. The truly wealthy and powerful (billionaires) just support the museums and keep the industrial scale works they purchase in secret storage somewhere.

All of this came together in the late 90s for his History album, which included the construction of 10 statues, one of which was floated down the Thames. That he seemed to take this idea seriously is part of what made him so abhorrent. 

What is fortunate is that Jackson’s megalomania was somewhat harmlessly channeled into a career as a song & dance man. In the history of celebrity, Jackson is perhaps unique in the use of the cult of personality, and someone attached to his organization must have studied its long history, from Rome through to Stalinist Russia. Had he been a political figure, it seems certain he would have been the worst kind of monster, a Caligula with a harem of boys. Consider how this video depicts (part of the 1997 History campaign) some kind of Roman Emperor Soviet Russia fantasy:

Michael Jackson was not a healthy man in any sense of the word. Those of us who take art seriously can see in it just how ill he was, and we can also recognize the depth of ignorance amidst his fans. That people have gotten tatoos ‘in memoriam’, that people leave glowing comments on his YouTube archive, is just another example and evidence of a failed education system. The art will echo down the centuries as a reminder that in the late 20th Century, Western soceity was totally fucked up.

Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous

Video Phones

Science-fiction has been the avant garde of industrial design since the 1939 World’s Fair, if not earlier. It has been a medium to market strange ideas (aliens from outer space, our minds being computer generated delusions), to forewarn of us of potential dangers (the computers take over, the robots nuke us), but through the pragmatics of using experimental design ideas to build unfamiliar worlds, it serves as both a promotional vehicle and fertilizer of new markets. Science fiction envisioned how computers might be used, which in turn taught us how we might be able to use them, which in turn inspired engineers to make them that way, which led to us using them the way we do. A video-phone in late 20th Century science-fiction television and movies becomes early 21st Century Skype. 

While the idea of a ‘videophone’ is both old-fashioned and going nowhere as a device, ‘Skyping’ is alive and well. We are living with ‘videophone’ technology but it is just is not being mediated by landline telephones that sit on our desks; instead it is being mediated by our computers. Further, the ubiquity of cellphones means that there’s currently no market for ‘video phone booths’ as depicted in 1968’s 2001:A Space Odyssey when Dr. Haywood calls his daughter from the space station. 

Or the scene in Blade Runner, when Deckard called Rachel at the bar. This scene defines the concept of the ‘videophone’ that I grew up with. In the context of 1982, this is a video-phone call. 

In 1989’s Back to the Future II, Marty gets an AT&T mediated video-call from his colleague Needles (played by Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s bassist Flea) on his flat-screen television. Interestingly, the flat screen tv seems the only thing that came true from that projection twenty years ago. (Since 1989, we have not developed flying cars nor a highway system for them, nor are we using fusion reactors for our vehicles, and hoverboards still aren’t happening. Nor do we have holographic cinema billboards.)

Back to the Future II was set in 2015, and imagined the fax machine would have much more prominence that it attained, replaced by computers and heldhelds with their killer-app, email. Blade Runner was set it a post-ecocidal (if not post-apocalyptic) Los Angeles of 2019, where no one had cellphones and CRT televisions printed out Polaroids of their screen-capture.

One thing of note is that all video-phone scenes filmed in the 20th Century included ‘end credits’:
2001
Blade Runner

Back to the Future

(AT&T of course is the network that runs the (20th Century futuristic) iPhone in the United States.)

With regard to video-phones, it is not inconceivable to me now that by 2019, (that is, within ten years) you could have novelty Skype booths set up in bar, and for a few coins (“$1.25”) or a credit card swipe, make video-calls to girls you just met and invite them out for a drink. Deckard’s phone call may not being as unrealistic as it still seems.

In the meantime, we are already carrying video-phones in our pocket, allowing us such activities as described in this song by Beyonce:

Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous