Stromata Blog: The Davos Dystopians

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Worth Reading (Fiction)

Mamet, David: Chicago: A Novel
In Roaring 20's Chicago, a Great War veteran turned hard-boiled reporter falls in love with the wrong woman and then seeks to find her killer.
Nelson DeMille: The Cuban Affair: A Novel
Two million dollars to charter a boat for a fishing tournament? A great way for the owner to pay off the boat's mortgage, but it turns out to include slipping into Castro's prison island in search of a lost (and perhaps imaginary) treasure.
Kate Atkinson: Life After Life: A Novel
Ursula Todd has the opportunity to relive her life, over and over and over, moving steadily through the Great War and its sequels and accumulating shards of memory.
Connie Willis: Crosstalk: A Novel
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Mark Steyn: The Prisoner of Windsor
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Tim Powers: My Brother's Keeper
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Tim Powers: Declare: A Novel
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H.F.M. Prescott: The Man on a Donkey
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Theodore Odrach: Wave of Terror
Based on the author's experiences when the Soviet Union occupied his homeland after the Stalin-Hitler Pact, this book melds Chekov and Solzhenitsyn. By stages, the isolated folk of the Pripyet Marshes learn that there are worse masters than their former Polish overlords.
Simon Montefiore: Sashenka: A Novel
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Harry Turtledove: The Man with the Iron Heart
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Neal Stephenson: Anathem
If you have not a smidgen of interest in how Platonic philosophy relates to the "many worlds" version of quantum mechanics, you still may like this novel, though you'll probably wish that the characters talked less. Persevere. After a slow start, the story grows compelling, and the intellectual dialogues turn out not to be digressions.
Alfred Duggan: Lord Geoffrey's Fancy
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Rodney Bolt: History Play : The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe
A pseudo-history springing from the premise that Shakespeare's flashy predecessor survived the famous Deptford brawl and fled to the continent, where he secretly wrote almost all of the Bard's works. A clever, tongue-in-cheek reworking of literary history that also recreates the milieu shared by many real Elizabethan exiles.
Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays (Library of America, 131)
Fiction and essays by a black American writer who deserves a wider audience.
Harry Turtledove: Gunpowder Empire
Debut of a juvenile series set in parallel worlds. 22nd century teen siblings, trapped without adult aid in a besieged city, must cope with the bizarre (to them) customs and prejudices of a never-fallen Roman Empire.

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Wednesday, May 25, 2022

The Davos Dystopians

Hidden, alas, behind National Review’s paywall is an essay by Michael Brendan Dougherty titled, “Supervillains Gather in Davos”. It’s not about how the Global Elite are conspiring to take over the world but, rather, about their dreary vision of what a better world would be like. Let me quote a few choice bits:

Why can’t our leaders imagine anything other than a future of privation and control? . . .

One would think that a technology-powered future with 3D printing would finally increase the productivity of great artisans and craftsmen, which has remained stagnant for centuries and become so prohibitive that these arts and trades are being lost to the prefab altogether. Such a breakthrough would allow the physical environment to be rebuilt in the most glorious Georgian, Tudor, or Spanish Colonial styles, but available to the masses. Farms and pastures could practically run themselves, making food better, making it cheaply, and delivering it fresh. The greatest educators would run classes for all those who wanted to take them. And new technological breakthroughs would clean up the atmosphere.

But that’s not what they imagine at all. For the Davoisie, the future is your guts wirelessly reporting you truant and then a text message buzzing on every device in the house, warning your pets to exit the room while it is flooded with gas to sedate you into compliance with Pfizer. Afterwards a Chinese multinational informs you that the gas-flooding and Pfizer SWAT-team incident have brought about serious penalties to your carbon score, thereby deferring your long-awaited meat ration by several more years. As a help in the future, Microsoft’s cognitive copilot will be taking over even more duties and tasks previously assigned to you.

It is actually a crisis for our global elites that every idea they have for solving problems involves subtracting more of our humanity and freedom from human civilization. The only vision they have of the future is of a population drugged, fed on fake food, entertained by phones strapped to their faces, and controlled by machines. They see our unhappy reaction to this, and their imagination only comes up with more elaborate gags for us, and dreams of unsolvable mazes to drop us in.

Wanting a freer and more civilized world doesn’t guarantee either freedom or civilization, but not wanting them, enthusing instead over a future in which all men live in an inescapable panopticon, is the sure path to tyranny and barbaric ennui.

Posted by Tom Veal on Wednesday, May 25, 2022 at 10:31 AM in Dystopian Visions, L, t U & E, Science, Web/Tech, Wokeness | Permalink

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Bernard Lewis & Butzie Ellis Churchill: Islam: The Religion and the People
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Wednesday, May 25, 2022

The Davos Dystopians

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