Heard this on NPR's All Things Considered today... Get busy people! :-)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98694231
Poet on Call
by Andrei Codrescu
The Machines Haven't Taken Over
All Things Considered, December 24, 2008 With one pull of a switch, the
ocean of junk that spilled out of my mailbox every day, was swooshed back
into the speechless abyss. If you had asked me before this news, what hand
human or divine could stop spam, I'd have answered like Heraclitus, "Who
can stop the sea from rising?"
It turns out that somebody before a keyboard can, thank you. There is
hope. Machines haven't yet taken over. If it's that easy to stop what
seemed like unstoppable, why can't other seemingly unstoppable
human-generated and computer-driven phenomena be switched off the same
way? Why isn't somebody pulling the switch on the collapsing world trade
going on in the cracks between time zones? What's going on while I sleep
and my retirement money slips down some unfathomable hole? Why don't the
providers capable of such cosmic gestures as making the spam-ocean vanish,
not exercise their benevolent force against other oceans that threaten us:
the automatic unfair trades, the silent streams of world capital vanishing
into invisible dead zones, the globe-circling panics?
--
Steve
Equal bytes for women.
