Talk:Grim Meathook Future
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--Telecart 00:21, 30 April 2006 (UTC) Cleaned this up a bit, added citing and links.
--Telecart 00:26, 30 April 2006 (UTC) I've added a redirect for now, but shouldn't this be under 'Grim Meathook Future'?
[edit] Deletion?
I oppose deletion, here's why; A google search will show you that the Grim Meathook Future is a meme that is still being used. It was used by such prominent thinkers as Bruce Sterling (in his sxsw lecture you can find at boingboing: [1]) and Joshua Ellis in his 23C3 lecture ([2]. Josh is (last I heard) still writing a book about it, so it may very well raise more attention soon. I agree the entry is still rather thin, but I'll get around to it eventually, or maybe the original poster can show up and do some work. There's a lot of stuff to write about it, some I can pour here just for context:
I find this meme interesting in that it arises from a discourse which is accustomed to discussing the egalitarian Star Trek future and transhumanism as real possibilities. These are not evolutionary biologists who are by now used to fighting the good fight, these are people normally quite detached from the here and now, who apparently suddenly feel this urgency to open their eyes to the limitations of the here and now, and the consequences of this disenchantment.
On this Josh writes: ...The problem, I think, is not that the GMF (God, I love acronymizing my own bullshit) is the "end of history"; it's history catching up with us. The GMF is the Fall of Rome, part 2: the barbarians smash the gates, burn the books and kill anybody who's not already armed or dangerous or useful. [...] The problem is that a lot of geeks -- and the people who listen to them -- assume that we've somehow outpaced history, and human nature, and the fact that all the cool gadgets and nerd cred and Whuffie and MySpace friends in the world can't deflect a .762 round from an AK-47. It's the century-old equation of technological progress (in the guise of consumer technology) as social progress, when the two are not necessarily the same thing.
Warren writes: [...] I wouldn't think there's much doubt that things are getting strange again. And not the good kind of strange. A woman married a dolphin yesterday. Seriously. A US senator has declared that no woman can get an abortion in his own state unless she's a committed Christian virgin who's been beaten to within an inch of her life and anally raped. He said it on television. Quantum physicists are teleporting light. The truth behind that old "where's my bloody jetpack" view of the future is that the future is clearly not going to be that simple. In the last few months, I've started to get the feeling that maybe old miseryguts JG Ballard isn't right all the time, and the near future, at least, is going to be anything but banal. Unless, of course, you're already so dead inside that anything short of Jesus Robots descending en masse from the centre of the sun dispensing immortality juice and flying cars makes you yawn.
The future's getting weird and scary. My futurist friend Matt Jones said to me the other day that, in one sense, the future is a race between the Bright Spime Future and what other smart friend Dr Joshua Ellis has termed the Grim Meathook Future. What's the Grim Meathook Future? Take a look at New Orleans -- what is now called the K-Hole, the hole that Hurricane Katrina left in the United States. Everyone knew in advance that the 2006 hurricane season was going to be a freak one. The K-Hole is the remains of a massive system failure. That's the Grim Meathook Future: infrastructures that cannot cope. Dead bodies laying for two weeks on the streetcorners of the most powerful nation on earth: that's the Grim Meathook Future. Things turning backwards. I live on an island that's just been informed that there's probably not enough water to go round this summer. Turn that sentence around in your heads a few times.
Bottom line, I believe the anxiety and fear that brought people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to write their particular books at this particular time lies in this fear of what the technorati have called GMF; Fear of going back to the dark ages, as their whole rational scheme of the world gets violently smashed to bits. In a way, The Cold War made sense; The Long War, as it is now called by the Pentagon, makes a lot less sense, and is quite frightening to anybody from an enlightenment background who takes it at all seriously. It fundamentally means an Orwellian perpetual war. (This is of course POV, but I think it signifies why I think the topic - as a concept - is significant and relevant) --Telecart 22:16, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
