Categories: Uncategorized

Sitting in my “Drafts” folder

Here are a couple of items that I should post before they languish in my “Drafts” folder (along with a zillion other articles):

Guile has had it with computer game company Electronic Arts, who
have lately shown a knack for screwing up perfectly good games by
releasing bad patches (a “patch” is an update to a piece of software;
ideally, they’re supposed to fix bugs and introduce minor improvements)
and then completely dropping support for the game. Once again, it’s
another case of a company viewing us as consumers rather customers.
Gideon Strauss points to Dave Hegeman’s review of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative
Class and How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and
Everyday Life. This book (which thus far I’ve only read about, rather than reading) talks about the socioeconomic effects of the “creative class”, of which I am purported to be a membet.
It’s Hegeman’s conclusion that both Gideon and I find intriguing, and I believe something with which we disagree:

Welcome to the brave new world
of economic prosperity, technological progress, and alienation. The
coffee may be good and the music cool, but there is a spiritual and
relational emptiness at the core of these hip new neighbourhoods
which is bound to reveal itself in due time.

I disagree; one of the reasons
creatives tend to leave suburbia is because of “spiritual and
relational emptiness”. You can feel this emptiness in the architecture
of communal spaces of suburbia, whose highest priorities are the
extraction of money from “consumers” and the storage of cars.

Hegeman also states:

Whatever the reason, Christians
seem to be largely absent from the super-creative high-tech scene,
and without the salt and light that Christians have to offer, the
dot.com neighbourhoods have become a hip new Vanity Fair:
colourful, vibrant, prosperous, and, despite appearances to the
contrary . . . dead.

I would say “not so”:

Larry Wall is about as devout a
Christian as they come. He’s also the inventor of the Perl programming
language (a.k.a. “the duct tape of the internet); the ‘net wouldn’t have happened quite the same way without him.
Moby, who practically wrote the dot-com soundtrack, openly professes his faith.
…and during the downtime between coding sessions, we enjoyed Kevin Smith movies.

Of these three, Larry’s probably the most traditional, but
each has managed to integrate their faith into the creative/high-tech
world. This world does have
its share of seekers, Christian and otherwise, who are looking for that
“something more” and who know that hipness is merely a byproduct, not a goal.

Joey deVilla

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View Comments

Anonymous says:

June 10, 2004 at 3:56 pm

What about the assumption that the whole thing is spiritually void becuase it lacks Christians? What about Muslims, Jews, Bhuddists, etc?
Although I supppose if you're the type to complain about a lack of Christians, you don't really consider those brands to be spiritually valid, anyway.
Er, that "you" is not "you, playing the accordion over there." It's a generic "you."
And I'm Catholic. RC. & the RC Church issued some statement in the 1970s that Catholicism represented "a path" to God, and that there were other, equally valid paths. Heh. That's not well publicized.
---
Hrm. good thing I wasn't trying to speak ex cathedra. I must be thinking of the 1976 doc referred to here, and since slightly repudiated? I'm not up on all of this... (IANACL: I am not a canon lawyer)
Anonymous says:

June 11, 2004 at 11:19 pm

Without responding to the "why Christianity?" question despite its obvious validity, let me refer you to Donald Knuth's "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About." I likewise recommend Knuth's "3:16," which in addition to being a "The Way of the Cross-Section" Bible study is also a stunning collection of some of the best calligraphy the world has to offer.
I'll also add that until I read "Things" I had no idea that Guy Steele (Harbison and Steele C, Common Lisp, Scheme, to some extent Java...) does what he does because he believes that God wants him to.
Anonymous says:

June 12, 2004 at 11:04 am

"This world does have its share of seekers, Christian and otherwise, who are looking for that "something more" and who know that hipness is merely a byproduct, not a goal."
Great final phrase!
By the way, an interesting research product would be to try and determine the factors that determine sideburn length and angle. Mine go with seeming randomness from almost nothing to a length and slant that make complete strangers in the street shout, "Hey, Mephistopheles!" Yours seem to be approaching Victorian proportions, judging from recent pictures.