Word: sayed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From the very beginning, cultural evolution was a social enterprise, mediated by what you could loosely call a social brain. One person invents, say, a flint hand ax; the idea creeps across the landscape, gets improved here and there, and finally, in a distant land, stimulates a whole new idea: axes with handles conveniently attached...
...that drives the change. Science, technology, music, politics--flux in all these realms is hastened by the new electronic synergy. The Internet and allied technologies make us neurons in a vast social brain, a brain that keeps enticing us into making it bigger, stronger, faster. We have, you might say, a Web to weave...
Indeed, if you believe, as I do, that intelligent, culture-generating animals were a likely outcome of biological evolution, then you might even say the first great evolutionary process naturally spawned the second, which has since taken over as the great molder of the material world. In this view, the kind of global brain now taking shape has been in the cards not just since the Stone Age but since the primordial ooze; it has been, in some sense, life's destiny...
...solid melts into air"--was melting already, as of 1911, and forming large and inconvenient puddles on the floor, quite insusceptible to the morally muscular moppings of outraged critics. Here one directs the reader to the foldout chart elsewhere in these pages. Prepared with much disputatious--not to say rebellious--muttering by this magazine's critics, it lists the century's "best" work in every facet of the arts. Its most interesting aspect is the intensely clustered dates of the works representing the major expressive forms...
...published. So is T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Some claim it is a hoax, a parody of modernism's obscurantist tendencies. Others see its analogies to Joyce's work. Both are inferentially portraits of a pullulating urban landscape; both wear their classical erudition boldly. Which is to say, both writers embrace modernism's most basic hallmark--self- and cultural awareness--and know exactly what traditions they are undermining. The difference between them may be largely a matter of fastidiousness. Ulysses is finally an affirmation: "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down...