CNET is celebrating its 25th anniversary with articles remembering the 1990s — including that moment “when Hollywood finally noticed the web,” calling it “a flawed but fun snapshot of the moment the internet took over the world…” “Twenty-five years ago, cinema met cyberspace in a riot of funky fashion, cool music and surveillance paranoia. It began in May 1995 with the…
Tag: dystopia
Should Colleges Preserve the Idea of Meritocracy?
“Is Meritocracy an Idea Worth Saving?” asks The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on a special forum held recently at the University of North Carolina’s Program for Public Discourse. “This discussion took place before Covid-19 changed everything. But the topics — the definition of meritocracy, the role of universities in a just society, the composition of socioeconomic class, and the real…
You Can’t Fight City Hall. But Maybe You Can Fight Google.
Faced with an array of opponents for its sensor-laden city of tomorrow in Toronto, a Google sibling has drastically dialed back plans. The critics now want the tech giant to quit altogether. From a report: The announcement was big enough for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to fly down to Toronto and deliver. A corporate sibling of Google had been selected to…
Are We Living In a Blade Runner World?
Now that we have arrived in Blade Runner’s November 2019 “future,” the BBC asks what the 37-year-old film got right. Slashdot reader dryriver shares the report: [B]eyond particular components, Blade Runner arguably gets something much more fundamental right, which is the world’s socio-political outlook in 2019 — and that isn’t particularly welcome, according to Michi Trota, who is a media critic…
Biohackers Use a Raspberry Pi to Implant a Networked Hard Drive
“Biohackers took one small but important step toward the science fiction dystopia depicted in William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic,” reports The Parallax, in an article shared by Slashdot reader Iwastheone: The Four Thieves Vinegar biohacking collective has not figured out how to precisely mimic the memory data transfer scenario Gibson conjured, but it has built a device to enable people to store…