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Old 12-03-2009, 04:15 AM   #225
Slite
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Posts: 2,837
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Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Mölnbo, Sweden
Device: Kobo Aura 2nd edition, Kobo Clara HD
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman View Post
A Further Response To His Mobile Read Critics From Alan Kaufman, Author of 'The Electronic Bookburning” (Evergreen Review #20)
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html


STATEMENT:

Hi-tech does not increase your brain capacity: it merely exercizes your thumbs.

Not a few of you walk around with highly developed thumbs jammed deep into your own eye, like overweaned Oedipus Rex's, though lacking the nerve of that tragic king to pluck out your own eyes in order to better see the truth.

For you are merch-juggled children breastfed on marketing strategies hatched before you were born and are so fully indoctrinated with h-tech propoganda that it is safe to say that with few exceptions virtually your entire generation haven't the capacity to interrogate your own experience vis a vis the addictive, soul-numbing machines that have become mocking substitutes for your human experience.

Not a single one of you on Mobile Read, in your responses to my point, demonstrate a capacity to question the Matrix in which you float of the most engulfing social conditioning ever foisted by private enterprise upon a peer group of human beings.

In this regard, you are no different than the children of any emergent totalitarian society, who cannot imagine a world without Big Brother. And it is chiefly that which I find so heartbreaking about the impact of hi-tech: not the machines per se but what the machines have made of you.

In fact, I sense from many of the responses that very few among you have bothered even to read in full or at all either of my esaays but simply respond to each other's postings and vent with your thumbs instead of your minds.

Your responses, in fact, are amazingly similar, as though formed from the same pool of 50 or so monosyllabic words. This is, as I understand it, endemic to the level of discourse that occurs in hi-tech: a perpetual public convocation of spewing illiterarates.

It appears that my essay has inspired a generational backlash among many of you, who see this as a face-off between an old fart white book-worshipping Luddite (how you portray me) and mainly young, progressive, enlightened and exciting hi-techers (how many of you regard yourselves).

So, I'd like to extend the following invite to any and all of you on this site. Lets thumbwrestle for three shirtless private rounds in an alley of my choice, and see who's left victorious: my 6'2”, 200 pound, tattooed, 57 year old military veteran Bronx-born streetfighting ass or your nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly selves.

If defeated, I'll French with a Kindle but if you go down, you must not only toss your device but read in full classics that I'll list, ranging from Marcus Aurelius, Sophocles, Homer and the Old Testament to Flaubert, Tolstoy, Babel, Stendahl, Proust and George Eliot, to name but a few.

And yes, there will be a test.
Oh dear. You really hit a lowwater mark with this post Mr. Kaufman. You compare us to nazis because we adopt a technology that make us be more diverse in our reading. And at the same time you threaten us by telling us how big and strong you are? Seriously, talk about using the same scare tactics that helped the Nazi-party to power in Germany during the 30's.

With this I will henceforth ignore anything you feel the need to say. I can only conclude that we are so far away from each other in our convictions that it is impossible to come to any kind of consenssus. But one thing I will not do is stoop to your level.

Feel free to fondle your old hardback books, along with all the other dinosaurs who will in a decade or so wake up, look around and wonder why noone is buying their "archaic" books.
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