Sex death apocalypse iPhone 4, By Mark Morford

[madokie]

There I was, calmly ogling Steve Jobs' shinyperfect new baby like a junkie rabbit at a carrot factory in SaladTown, happily swooning over its graceful industrial design and everstunned at the tiny slab's explicit lickability and amazing capabilities.

How easy to get caught up in the sheer madhouse magic of it all, the gyroscopes and voice activators, antennae and compasses, multiple cameras and 5,000 sensors designed to recognize when you might be hanging upside down from a banyan tree at midnight, suddenly needing to shoot high-definition video of a wild giraffe stampede whilst checking World Cup scores while live video-chatting with your wife in France while pricing out a flight to Singapore while doing, um, 2,000 other rather ridiculous things you could never have imagined in a million years back on the day you were born.

And I'm thinking, sweet insanity of life, what wonderful/nefarious creatures are we? How can we keep doing this in the face of all that? How is it that we can keep creating such beauty and cool wonder in the midst of meltdown and pain? What sort of desperate dance is this? Are we spinning faster and faster toward doom? Ecstasy? Both? Are they really the same thing? Aha.

I like cars. Particularly small European cars, particularly German ones, particularly those that are tight and refined and engineered like God's own Panerai, and in this personal fetish/incarnation I hungrily observe every new development in their technology, their engines, their design and capabilities and cockpits, especially all the astonishing concept cars that roll forth, how they keep getting better and weirder and wilder and usually somehow more gorgeous and fascinating, mostly. ...

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/11/notes061110.DTL&nl=fix)

[xchrom]

1. Recommend -- if only for finding a way for

Using banyan tree.

[Catherina]

2. I came to post this. Excellent article.

Rec'd of course.

There are moments when it becomes dangerously tempting to think: We're close, right? Surely with all this power and ease, we must have the major problems of the world almost licked? Energy, food production, pollution, disease? Look at all those insane inventions, all the brainiacs at work at MIT, the best and brightest tackling the toughest problems of the galaxy.

Any minute now, solar power and French fry grease, nanotechnology and organic microlending neurobiological hemp-powered oil-eating magic bacteria will take over and make it all better. Right?

And you slap yourself awake. You stab yourself in the soul with an ice pick of Now. And you remember.

We are nowhere near close. It takes no effort at all to flip the lens, to walk the street in fear, to observe, say, all the blood pouring through the streets of Mexico, the violent corruption in Africa, the drug-related shootings just down the street, the raging poverty and sickness, the wall of black death we have just unleashed into the ocean.

Which side is piling up faster, the beauties or the horrors? The refinements and miraculous advancements, or the massacres and planetary maulings? We've always existed in a constant flux of dualities and dichotomies, contrasts, pushpulls. This is nothing new. You could argue that it's within that frictive space that life happens. We contain multitudes, right? Either that, or it creates a chasm so vast and wide, we all eventually fall in and drown.

...