by
Ellen Ullman
17
[1] Transactions
1
terms
1
notes
27
Twenty years before my meeting with the vice president, I was a communist. I joined an underground party. I took a nom de guerre. If I had been clever enough to write a bug fatal to world banking, I would have been promoted to party leadership, hailed as a heroine of the revolution. [...]
Now the thought terrifies me. The wave of nausea I felt in the vice president's office, the real fear of being responsible for her system, followed me around for days. And still, try as I might, I can't envision a world where all the credit cards stop working. The life of normal people-buying groceries, paying bills-would unravel into confusion overnight. [...]
[...]
The global network is only the newest form of revolution, I think. Maybe it's only revolution we 're addicted to. Maybe the form never matters- socialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism, electronic commercewho cares, as long as it's the edgy thing that's happening in one's own time. Maybe every generation produces a certain number of people who want change-change in its most drastic form . And socialism, with its quaint decades of guerrilla war, its old-fashioned virtues of steadfastness, its generation-long construction of a "new man"-is all too hopelessly pokey for us now. [...]
interesting point of departure for the problems with non-systems thinking. in this case, if banks crashed overnight, it might feel good on a semiotic level for those who have associated "banks" with "exploitation" and "capitalism", but of course it's not a lasting solution. you can't get rid of what banks represent unless you change the forces that produced banks in the first place. on the other hand, that's not a justification for keeping banks around!
basically not thinking dialectically enough. unsure if she knows that, and thinks other people don't, or if she missed that point somewhere down the line.
Twenty years before my meeting with the vice president, I was a communist. I joined an underground party. I took a nom de guerre. If I had been clever enough to write a bug fatal to world banking, I would have been promoted to party leadership, hailed as a heroine of the revolution. [...]
Now the thought terrifies me. The wave of nausea I felt in the vice president's office, the real fear of being responsible for her system, followed me around for days. And still, try as I might, I can't envision a world where all the credit cards stop working. The life of normal people-buying groceries, paying bills-would unravel into confusion overnight. [...]
[...]
The global network is only the newest form of revolution, I think. Maybe it's only revolution we 're addicted to. Maybe the form never matters- socialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism, electronic commercewho cares, as long as it's the edgy thing that's happening in one's own time. Maybe every generation produces a certain number of people who want change-change in its most drastic form . And socialism, with its quaint decades of guerrilla war, its old-fashioned virtues of steadfastness, its generation-long construction of a "new man"-is all too hopelessly pokey for us now. [...]
interesting point of departure for the problems with non-systems thinking. in this case, if banks crashed overnight, it might feel good on a semiotic level for those who have associated "banks" with "exploitation" and "capitalism", but of course it's not a lasting solution. you can't get rid of what banks represent unless you change the forces that produced banks in the first place. on the other hand, that's not a justification for keeping banks around!
basically not thinking dialectically enough. unsure if she knows that, and thinks other people don't, or if she missed that point somewhere down the line.
inveigh
(en)
(verb) to protest or complain bitterly or vehemently; rail
36
Someone from law enforcement would inveigh against exporting encryption products with keys longer than 40 bits
notable
7 years, 2 months ago
Someone from law enforcement would inveigh against exporting encryption products with keys longer than 40 bits
notable
7 years, 2 months ago