"Impulse and pleasure, Bell says, are alone real and lifeaffirming in postmodernism. Reason is the enemy, and the desires of the body constitute truth. Postmodernism eliminates the boundaries of art and insists that acting out, rather than making distinctions, is the path to knowledge."
This is not the triumph of herd instinct but a cultural convergence of humanity toward a single society. Evolution has gone about as far as it can to perfect human beings physically: its next step will be social. Teilhard saw such evolution already in progress; through technology, urbanization, and modern communications, more and more links are being established between different peoples politics, economics, and habits of thought in an apparently geometric progression.
"The value of startup hubs, like centers for any kind of business, lies in something very old-fashioned: face to face meetings. No technology in the immediate future will replace walking down University Ave and running into a friend who tells you how to fix a bug that's been bothering you all weekend, or visiting a friend's startup down the street and ending up in a conversation with one of their investors."
"Blah blah blah the best and the brightest blah blah blah want to succeed blah blah blah competition will move faster blah blah blah the best hackers blah blah blah make them irrelevant..." Hoo-ah, coach, hoo-ah.
"The pace of change in technology is so much faster now," Wong said. "Instead of a generation, or even years, we are seeing breakthrough technologies emerging in the space of months." Social norms have a hard time keeping pace.
Indeed, its embrace of the primacy of data over human judgment, in everything from its search algorithm to its attempts to turn hiring into a science, gives some people the creeps. Listen to a talk that Page, Google's co-founder and president of products, gave in 2002 at Stanford. He said Google aims to turn the technology behind its search engine into a true artificial intelligence that could "answer any question, which means you can do basically anything." The audience laughed tentatively, perhaps thinking of the ai in the movie The Terminator that tries to wipe out humanity. If Google succeeds in its mission, Page added with a grin, "then we're doing everything."