The End of History, part 2

We've said a few things about Fukuyama and the (his?) 'end of history' in class, as well as the future of liberal democracy in the 21st Century (i.e. the Laclau and Mouffe articles from the first week). I just wanted to share a more recent article by Fukuyama:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/liberal-democracy-will-still-prevail/2008/08/27/1219516560192.html

According to Fukuyama,

"A critical issue that will shape the next era in world politics is whether gains in economic productivity will keep up with global demand for such basic commodities as oil, food and water. If they do not, we will enter a much more zero-sum, Malthusian world in which one country's gain will be another country's loss. A peaceful, democratic global order will be much more difficult to achieve. Growth will depend more on raw power and accidents of geography than on good institutions. And rising global inflation suggests that we have already moved a good way towards such a world."

It's worth a read if you have the chance.

Freud and Advertising

Here's the URL for the first installment of the documentary on Freud and advertising I mentioned in class:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3LSyck0YTE

Conspiracy theory or revelation? You be the judge.

Directed Advertising

Here is the youtube skit I mentioned today in class, for your collective perusal. I think it makes the point both effectively and comically.

How quickly the future dates

As I mentioned in class, last year's class on Snow Crash was far less enthusiastic than yesterday's. Not that the novel didn't have its defenders way back then, but the dominant view was that what seemed wildly futuristic in the early 1990s was now irredeemably passe. There were also serious problems, some students thought last year, with the cyberpunk genre: perhaps it, too, was passe, or at least aesthetically deficient. Sci fi, or speculative fiction (that obvious attempt to 'legitimise' the genre) has often suffered from the sense that it it might be brimming with ideas it tended to be poorly written, mass market-oriented, nerdyguycentric, and that projections were ridiculously out of whack with what actually happened. All of these have validity, but it strikes me that, in terms of the last criticism, a response could be that speculation should be seen less as prophecy than as heuristic tool, something to get us thinking in new ways. What we do as a result, or where that thinking takes us, is less important than that we are engaging in the process. The future in many ways is in our heads--if it dates quickly, the fault lies in our own imaginative deficiencies. Here endeth the lesson.

Truman Show Followup

A couple of ideas perhaps worth following up in terms of the film and utopias generally:

Why is the 1950s the go-to decade for Americans when they think of utopian worlds? Certainly it wasn't that good if you were black, for example, or 'liberal'. Clearly consumerism had a part to play, that rapid and unprecedented expansion in the goods available to ordinary people. By comparison with the 1930s and the war years, this was a time of new and undreamed of prosperity for many. As we discussed with Seahaven itself, the world was static, or seemed static, safe and 'controlled'. Prosperity and security: are they all we need? Do the majority of people prefer that to freedom?

The idea of Christof as Creator connects to notions of utopia and its relation to religion. For some theorists, utopias essentially are post-Englightment entities constructed by humans. But does religion, or something like, infiltrate all utopian dreaming. I leave the definition of 'religion' vague on purpose.