All Tomorrow's Cultures

At the moment I write this, a creeping group think has saturated both higher education (The Chronicle of Higher Education), and popular media (New York Times, Huffington Post, etc.).  It's that moment when public debate constricts to a terrifying one-dimensionality--when all manner of unwarranted assumptions attain hegemony and become the scaffolding for etiolated prognostications.  And, in this case, where we enter a time-warp and return to the 1980s.    Take, for example, an April 30 article from the front page of the New York Times , "Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden". Here, the President of San Jose State University, Mohammad Qayoumi, discusses his enthusiastic adoption of MOOC modules from MIT: "Traditional teaching will be disappearing in five to seven years, he predicts, as more professors come to realize that lectures are not the best route to student engagement, and cash-strapped universities continue to seek cheaper instruction" (A1)...

In a January 26th New York Times op-e d, " 25 Years of Digital Vandalism , " William Gibson reflects on the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.  As a genuine futurist, Gibson looks to Stuxnet as a sign of the times--and a bellwether for the future.  He confesses, "I briefly thought that here, finally, was the real thing: a cyberweapon purpose-built by one state actor to strategically interfere with the business of another."  But he's disappointed in the end, to find that Stuxnet is really just another virus--albeit one perhaps appropriated by one government against another.  He is ambivalent about the meaning of this for the future of nuclear security.  One of Gibson's strengths is his restless, global search for sites of the future.  Here, he looks to Iran, but he is best known for his (highly selective) evocations of Japanese postmodernity.  But this is a never-ending quest--the future proves elusively peripatetic.  As he commented...

Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney’s hollowed eyes. “It’s all going to change, Yamazaki. We’re coming up on the mother or all nodal points. I can see it, now. It’s all going to change. (William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties, 1999, p. 4) Two of William Gibson’s science fiction novels—Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties —feature Colin Laney, a online researcher whose particular talents allow him to identify networks on the cusp of becoming, the “nodal points” where people, ideas and technologies from disparate corners of the globe come together in surprising, paradigm-shattering ways. Gibson’s networks are the speculative shadows of the more quotidian networks capitalized on by entrepreneurs of computer mediated social networking, each of whom attempts to cash in on the “network” as an object to be constructed, maintained. And yet, as the Gibson quote suggests, “ne...