https://www.amplab.ca/2015/11/13/welcome-to-the-techno-dystopian-future/ between media & literature Thu, 26 Nov 2015 16:20:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3.8 https://www.amplab.ca/2015/11/13/welcome-to-the-techno-dystopian-future/#comment-210 Thu, 19 Nov 2015 19:06:03 +0000 https://www.amplab.ca/?p=5115#comment-210 I liked your critique of some of the discourse on media labs and .This probe reminded me of our own Expo 67 and the super anthropocentric motto “Man and His World” and how the World Fairs seem to act as temporary media labs/trade shows that are also involved in the construction of national identity. I also wondered what happened to the expos since the 60s and we still have them but the themes have shifted, interestingly, from how many different ways that man can master spaces to the somewhat alarming need to apply technology to the crises of food shortage (“Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life: Milan 2015) and renewable energy (“Future Energy”: Kazakhstan 2017)

]]> https://www.amplab.ca/2015/11/13/welcome-to-the-techno-dystopian-future/#comment-206 Wed, 18 Nov 2015 16:40:58 +0000 https://www.amplab.ca/?p=5115#comment-206 I have always found it deeply disturbing that images of housing in the “future” always involved these space-craft-like modules, where individual “units” of people could live separately and contained in their little bubbles, as though the dream of the future was to never have to interact unless it was absolutely necessary.
This was surely because the American Dream was each family to its own house, while the enemy Communists were “collectivized”. But the notion of “community” has suffered ever since; the “global village” is just consumerism on a mass scale, and everyone on the internet is part of some kind of “online community” which is non-existent IRL.
The “labor-atory”, a shared place of work, is essential to reversing the harmful trend toward alienation and division which predatory capitalism thrives on.

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