Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman
A STATEMENT FROM ALAN KAUFMAN
So now in addition to myself a second author has stood up to claim as I do that the hi-tech drive to replace the book is nothing less than a cultural crime.
Is it a coincidance that a Native American author, son of a genocided people, and a Jewish author and son of a Holocaust survivor--again, the child of a genocided people--should each intuit that what hi-tech is doing to the book and to our individual freedoms smacks of nothing less than totalitarianism?
What profoundly amazes and saddens me is that young people who should be the fount of independent thought and revolutionary thinking have been so duped by these gadget-generating greedy corporations that they have actually swallowed, hookm line and sinker, the marketing message that Hi-Tech is the way and the future! It is as if an entire generation has been sold through brilliant marketing that the best way to spend ones life is through obsessive purchase and use of appliances like Washingmachines and
Refrigerators and cars and...oh, but wait. That did happen, didn't it. Right after WWII, during the Eisenhauir era when the man in the gray flannel suit, the corporate man, began his rise on the back of technologies and through corporate sustems that were produced, in large part, to serve the aims of war, now applied to civilian life (including population control). At least them, youth revolted, through rock and roll, Beat Literature and later, the cultural explosion of the 60s. And refrigerators and washingmachines do not a totalitarian society make: Kindles do. Hi-Tech is something altogether different. Hi-Tech and all its systems and devices are addictive,
attention-destroying and soul-sapping. Also, we have a youth population that have been subjected to the most sinisterly effective marketing campaign in human history--one that made the selling of National Socialism or Communism to their respective populations seem like games by comparison. But the end games are the same:
control and domination of our thoughts and actions. How can young people not see that plainly and fail to rise up in outrage and destroy the machine that is systematically devouring them? Instead, Sherman and I are called names and villiified and mocked.
But though we seem like weirdos and cranks to so many of you, we are the only voices in the wilderness arguing for the rescue of your human essence.
From Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-k...mment_35789066
From Evergreen Review:
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html
From the Panel: Are Books Dead? Hi-tech and the Written Word:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7seAE...layer_embedded |
Okay... I HAVE to get a few things straight.
First, *I* am 51. My *mother* who's a proud owner of a Sony PRS-500 (recently updated to accept ePub and she can't be happier) is 71. So unless you're so freakin' old as to qualify for military retirement benefits from either the War of Northern Aggression or the Great War (WWI for those who don't know what I meant by 'the Great War'), just who are you calling 'youths'?
Second, that Sherman Alexie has stood up to bray the same nonsense as you are putting forth, is a testament more to his own mental decline than any (I'm guessing this is how you think of this.) 'great truth' being 'revealed' by you two.
Third, it is Eisen*HOWER*, you dummy! You'd think that with all the obsessing you've been doing over WWII and the trauma your mother endured, you'd have studied it enought to *know* this! But then, history and facts aren't relevant to you except as to how they can be distorted and manipulated by you to get your twisted view across, yes? (No, spelling it Eisenhauir does NOT qualify as a 'typo'.)
Fourth, you niggling offspring of a knigget and an elderberry bush, we're ridiculing you because you insist upon spamming everyone with your incoherent, hallucinatory, warped, demented and down-right incorrect 'vision', not because we don't like you. (Okay, I'm stretching it a bit here - we *DON'T* like you!)
Have a nice day. And, BTW, I'd really like to know who is your supplier for those medical-quality hallucinogens. I've got some friends who need Christmas gifts.
Derek