The Lost Finger and the Corporation Spirit

This is the story of a potentially dangerous machine making frozen custard (via boingboing). To date it has ripped off two fingertips in two separate incidents. The fingertip severed last friday was sold inadvertently to a customer while the employee was rushed to hospital. This is also the story of the customer who found the fingertip. He was enraged by what he found in his frozen custard, which is, perhaps, only natural. He returned to the frozen custard outlet and gave them a piece of his mind. But when the manager implored him to let her get the fingertip to the hospital where it might be rejoined to its rightful owner, the customer refused. That kind of behaviour has not endeared the customer to JesusH and Heanyland

But what happened? While the customer was shocked and confused by foreign matter in his custard the Corporation Spirit entered his mind. If you carefully look at this site, you will find
a) that the Corporation Spirit has nothing to do with the devil
b) that it usually does not enter the minds of customers, but rather that of CEOs of big corporations (via treehugger).

But whereever it goes, the Corporation Spirit dehumanises the minds it occupies. This is how Corporations cause endless suffering for the machinistas in Honduras, exploit and/or pollute natural ressources etc. (remember NoLogo? I do, more often than is pleasant, but perhaps not often enough). In their private lives CEOs and managers may be very nice people, but when at work they have to bend themselves to the amoral and psychopathic objectives of the corporation. Here is an interview with Joel Bakan, co-author of The Corporation which explores this idea in somewhat greater detail. We have no time for this.

We need to get back to the customer who abducted a human fingertip, however unwillingly. He could not differentiate between a company that sold him splatter-custard and a human being who had a tragic accident. He could have helped, but the Corporation Spirit came over him and prompted him to kidnap the fingertip a second time. It now resides in his freezer and is occasionally taken out for the benefit of media cameras.

One World - Reflected by 6 Billion Minds

My extremely significant other alerted me to this news of Joseph Weizenbaum, who gave a talk at the world's largest computer museums in provincial Paderborn/Germany. Unfortunately I only found German sites, so here is what he said.
'The internet is a dungheap with pearls in it. But you have to ask the right questions to find those pearls. This is what most people can't do.'
'We have the illusion of living in an information society. We hve the internet, we have google, the search engine, we are under the illusion that the knowledge of all mankind is at out fingertips.'
But 'it's the work of interpetration inside the head that transforms the signs we see on the screen into information. Most of the time we don't get the signs that are important for our decision.'
Weizenbaum claims that even at the best of universities students can no longer write their essays without resorting to writing programmes or even... no he doesn't say it, but submitting essays found on the internet seems to become increasingly common.
The worst, Weizenbaum thinks, is giving computers to smaller children - it would turn their brains into applesauce.

Then, applesauce dribbling from my ears I dive for the next pearl. Is this it? A Wired article in which Steven Johnson propounds the "cognitively demanding leisure" hypothesis. It is a fact that we are getting constantly better results an IQ-tests. So much so that IQ-test companies have had to grade us down over the last decades, so that results peak at 100 points. Johnson thinks that having to wrestle with VCRs and user-unfriendly software may well have contributed to this rise of intelligence. Via Boingboing.
So which of these informations is the pearl? Both, of course.

Real Virtual Art

How would you feel, if you just dropped into your local corner shop, because you forgot to get something really essential when you did your proper shopping, like toilet paper or batteries. Everything looks normal, but as soon as you close the door, the humdrum shop turns into a high-tech art gallery. Holograms of strangely anthropomorpic birds swish by, dancers endlessly repeat their movements - compelled by your own gestures...
That is how I felt, when I first entered the fragile circus (found at Das hermetische Café). The flying puppets are even more haunting. So don't go there without broadband, shockwave and lots of time.

To get myself back into reality and out of nightmare mode I only had to look outside my open window and take a deep breath. The lilac in the yard has punctually and obligingly opened its blossoms to send out its bewitching fragrance.

Failing such a serene boost of reality, what about a game of chess to sober you up? I don't play chess and with this online version of the game I can see why. When you make a move the programme shows all the possible future moves. It makes losing your pieces endless fun.