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Bruce Sterling's Final Prediction
In Bruce Sterling's final column for Wired, he summarizes the output of a survey of Net prognosticators conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The piece is peppered with Sterling's trademarked stop-you-in-your-tracks imagery. An example: "The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders."
It made perfect sense to me. "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" isn't that obscure a reference. Wasn't this book a bestseller?
Thomas Friedman used this visualization in a book I read about 4 years ago on Globalization. Wikipedia it.
This refers to toms friedmans book ' Lexus vs the Olive Tree ' or close, look it up - its a good book.
Here is the summary:
The Lexus represents modern life, aka - globalization, the internet, computers etc etc, and our love for these things and conveinces which make our lives better.
The Olive Tree is our long standing traditions, communities, churches, families, the ties that bind us to each other and to the places we live.
I have not RTFA, but from the summary, I can see this guy is a good writer... although he does lean somewhat heavily on an informed audience.
This metaphor is actually pretty good - Our modern culture is clashing with our values, and its not pretty. Video game violence legislation, computure monotiring etc etc, all of the things we rail about on slashdot... the majority of them are a direct result of this clash.
Read the book, and understand your world better.
Don't read the book, trash authors because you don't get it, and look like an idiot.
It was a book on globalization that came out several years back. The book-a-minute version I'd give for it is, "You can't stop globalization, but that's OK, because might makes right." The author tries to argue that the modern incarnation of free-market capitalism is a Good Thing, basically a remix of the old "rising tide that lifts all boats" combined with the pollyannaish implication that it must be good simply because it's happening.
There were a few good points in there, but all in all I think that deep down inside The Lexus and the Olive Tree there was a clear and concise essay screaming to get out and being smothered by 200 pages of ad-hoc musings that were thrown in as filler.
This just in: there are >1 persons named Bruce.
This is Bruce Sterling, the sci-fi author, not Bruce Perens, the OSS advocate.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
are slashdotters really this lazy?....wait dont answer that.
Let me introduce you all to a site you may have heard of in passing. Wikipedia, you should check it out sometime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Oli ve_Tree
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization was a book by Thomas Freidman.
I should clarify. The book was, more or less, trying to argue that the whole globalization package - not gust the general idea of the world opening up, but all of the details of how it is happening right now - is optimal.
While pretty much everyone agrees that the general idea of globalization is good, there's still some room for debate over whether the particulars of how its happening are actually benefitting impoverished regions or if it's just forcing them into a "race to the bottom" (and possibly dragging developed and developing nations along for the ride, too). The situation with the garment industry in Cambodia is a current popular conversation topic along this line.
I guess a (stretched) analogy would be that while it's good to let some fresh air into your house, knocking out the windows with bricks isn't necessarily the best way to do it.