Kurt Vonnegut Interviewed on NPR Inside Second Life

What it means to be a man without a country, or what Marx has to do with improving life through technology.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my big literary heroes, a keen observer and wry critic of culture and society. His Armageddon in Retrospect is an absolute necessity and his wildly entertaining series of fictional interviews with luminaries, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian is an absolute gem, firmly planted on this year’s edition of the annual Brain Pickings summer reading list.

In 2006, NPR interviewed Vonnegut from inside the virtual world Second Life, as a part of their Infinite Mind series. Recorded shortly before Second Life reached its peak and mere months before Vonnegut passed away, the interview is a rare cultural time-capsule in more ways than one, as well as a fitting meta-wink to God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, which is premised on the idea that Vonnegut would conduct fictional interview with dead cultural luminaries and ordinary people through controlled near-death experiences, allowing him to access the afterlife, converse with his subjects, and leave before it’s too late.

It’s actually possible to get a better life for individuals [through technologies like Second Life] and I have frequently inanimated new technologies, but I love cell phones. I see people so happy and proud, walking around. Gesturing, you know. I’m like Karl Marx, I’m up for anything that makes people happy.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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Happy Birthday, George Orwell: BBC’s 1954 1984 Adaptation

From Big Brother to Little Brother, or what Newspeak has to do with the API economy.

Tomorrow marks the 108th birthday of the great George Orwell, best-known for his satirical novella Animal Farm and his dystopian cult-novel Nineteen Eighty-Four — some of the most poignant pieces of political and cultural criticism ever published. In 1954, five years after the book’s original publication, BBC staged a live television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring Peter Cushing and Yvonne Mitchell. The film has now passed into the public domain and is available for free in its entirety online under a Creative Commons license, as well as in a collector’s edition DVD.

In today’s sociocultural context of increasing concerns about privacy, censorship and surveillance, Orwell’s work is more relevant — and more terrifying — than ever, offering a timely warning of the society we might become if we fail to codify, appropriate and regulate the tools and technologies of digital culture, what Jennifer 8. Lee so aptly calls “Little Brother.”

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Hume at 300: Timeless Philosophy for Timely Thinking

Why imagination is at the root of the mind, or how to become a bestselling historian.

To mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of iconic philosopher David Hume, the fine folks at The RSA put together a panel of leading scholars, who reveal how Hume’s philosophy deeply resonates with contemporary culture and modern thinking on everything from creativity to education to politics to the future of publishing.

[Hume] concluded the dynamic power, which drives the workings of what we think of as the mind, is in fact the imagination. The organizing principle of what we like to think of as the mind is, in fact, custom, habit, convention — the sort of experience, the cognitive experience, the moral experience we acquire from everyday life in the society, in which we move.” ~ Nicholas Phillipson

For more on Hume, you won’t go wrong with Phillipson’s David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian.

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