It took Richard Ridel six months of tinkering in his workshop to create this contraption–a mechanical Turing machine made out of wood. The silent video above shows how the machine works. But if you’re left hanging, wanting to know more, I’d recommend reading Ridel’s fifteen page paper where he carefully documents why he built the wooden Turing machine, and what pieces and steps went into the construction.
If this video prompts you to ask, what exactly is a Turing Machine?, also consider adding this short primer by philosopher Mark Jago to your media diet.
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Part of what makes electronic music so wide-reaching and sonically far-seeing, so to speak, is its diversity of influences—classical composition, avant-garde theory, punk and funk energy, the sounds of factories and city streets worldwide—and its range of innovative instrumentation. But foremost among those instruments, many classic analogue synthesizers of old are now found in virtual environments, where their pots, keys, patch bays, and pitch wheels get simulated on laptops and MIDI controllers. Something is lost—a certain “aura,” as Walter Benjamin might say. A certain tremulous imprecision that hovers around the edges of synthesizers like those designed by Robert Moog.
Moog’s creations, writes David McNamee “ooze character” and are “the most iconic synthesizers of all time. FACT.” For this reason, Moog’s analog creations still hold market share as modern instruments while remaining legacy items for their transformation of entire genres of popular music since the 1960s, even though the engineer-inventor had no musical training himself and no real interest at first in making particularly usable instruments.
“Massive, fragile and impossible to tune,” a function Moog initially dismissed, once the Moog was made portable and liberated from specialized, wonky domains, it became a primary compositional tool and both a lead and rhythm instrument.
The Moog’s fuzzy, wobbly, warm sounds are unmistakable; they can purr and thunder, and the breadth of their capabilities is surprising given their relative simplicity. We’ve told their story here before and followed it up with a ten-hour playlist of Moog and Moog-inspired classics. Today, we bring you the playlist above, “Moog This!” which takes a leftfield approach to the theme, and will catch even serious electronic music fans off guard with its selections of not only obscure new sounds inspired by legends like Giorgio Moroder and Vangelis—the music of Firechild, for example—but also tracks from these legends that sit just to the left of their most famous compositions.
Rather than the usual, brilliantly futuristic Donna Summer dance track “I Feel Love”—the Spotify curator here goes for the similar-sounding, but much more elaborate instrumental “Chase” (top), the only track here from Moroder. Rather than the era-defining “West End Girls”—the Pet Shop Boys’ perfect downtempo 1984 pop song—we get “Men and Maggots,” from their moody 2005 score for Sergei Eisenstein’s perfect silent film, Battleship Potemkin. That’s not to say there aren’t any vocal tracks here, but they are mostly of the abstract, highly effected variety, like those from Boards of Canada and Air.
All in all, “Moog This!” the playlist shows what the synthesizer is capable of outside the context of mainstream pop, while still capturing the qualities that make it an ideal vehicle for accessible, emotional music, a pleasing tension so well harnessed by the analog synth-obsessed Stranger Things soundtrack, which, like most of the tracks here, manages to sound both like the soundtrack of a much cooler past and of very cool future.
If ever the creators of the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are casting about for sequel-worthy source material, we suggest they look no further than The New Yorker’s video above, in which professional Scrabble players replay their greatest moves.
The bingo—a move in which a player uses all seven tiles on their rack, earning a bonus 50 points—figures prominently.
It seems that top ranked players not only eye their racks for potential bingos, they’re constantly calculating the odds of drawing a next-turn bingo by getting rid of existing tiles on a three or four letter word.
And what words!
The desire to win at all costs leads top seated players to throw down such ignoble words as “barf” and “mayo” in an arena where rarified vocabulary is the norm.
For the record, they’re continuous mounds of earth built near rivers to stop water from the river flooding nearby land….
The pros’ game boards yield a vocabulary lesson that is perhaps more useful in Scrabble (or Banangrams) than in life. Look ‘em up!
aerugo
capeskin
celom
enginous
gox
horal
jupon
kex
mura
oxeye
pya
uredele
varve
zincate
Don’t neglect the two-letter words. They can make a one-point difference between a major win and total and unmitigated defeat.
ag
al
da
ef
mo
od
oe
qi
xi
yo
Careful, though—“ir” is not a word, as Top 40 player Jesse Day discovered when attempting to rack up multiple horizontal and vertical points.
Bear in mind that challenging a word can also bite you in the butt. Busting an opponent’s fake word play costs them a turn. If the word in question turns out to be valid, you sacrifice a turn, as top 100 player, Princeton University’s Director of Health Professions Advising, Kate Fukawa-Connelly, found out in a match against David Gibson, a previous North American champ. Had she let it go, she would’ve bested him by one point.
Appear even more in the know by boning up on a glossary of Scrabble terms, though you’ll have to look far and wide for such deep cuts as youngest North American champion and food truck manager, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard’s “forking the board,” i.e. opening two separate quadrants, thus preventing the opposing player from blocking.
You’ll recall, a few months ago, when Google made it possible for all of your Facebook friends to find their doppelgängers in art history. As so often with that particular company, the fun distraction came as the tip of a research-and-development-intensive iceberg, and they’ve revealed the next layer in the form of three artificial intelligence-driven experiments that allow us to navigate and find connections among huge swaths of visual culture with unprecedented ease.
Google’s new Art Palette, as explained in the video at the top of the post, allows you to search for works of art held in “collections from over 1500 cultural institutions,” not just by artist or movement or theme but by color palette.
You can specify a color set, take a picture with your phone’s camera to use the colors around you, or even go with a random set of five colors to take you to new artistic realms entirely.
Admittedly, scrolling through the hundreds of chromatically similar works of art from all throughout history and across the world can at first feel a little uncanny, like walking into one of those houses whose occupant has shelved their books by color. But a variety of promising uses will immediately come to mind, especially for those professionally involved in the aesthetic fields. Famously color-loving, art-inspired fashion designer Paul Smith, for instance, appears in another promotional video describing how he’d use Art Palette: he’d “start off with the colors that I’ve selected for that season, and then through the app look at those colors and see what gets thrown up.”
In collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, Google’s Art Recognizer, the second of these experiments, uses machine learning to find particular works of art as they’ve variously appeared over decades and decades of exhibition. “We had recently launched 30,000 installation images online, all the way back to 1929,” says MoMA Digital Media Director Shannon Darrough in the video above. But since “those images didn’t contain any information about the actual works in them,” it presented the opportunity to use machine learning to train a system to recognize the works on display in the images, which, in the words of Google Arts and Culture Lab’s Freya Murray, “turned a repository of images into a searchable archive.”
The formidable photographic holdings of Life magazine, which documented human affairs with characteristically vivid photojournalism for a big chunk of the twentieth century, made for a similarly enticing trove of machine-learnable material. “Life magazine is one of the most iconic publications in history,” says Murray in the video above. “Life Tags is an experiment that organizes Life magazine’s archives into an interactive encyclopedia,” letting you browse by every tag from “Austin-Healey” to “Electronics” to “Livestock” to “Wrestling” and many more besides. Google’s investment in artificial intelligence has made the history of Life searchable. How much longer, one wonders, before it makes the history of life searchable?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
History has remembered John Cage as a composer, but to do justice to his legacy one has to allow that title the widest possible interpretation. He did, of course, compose music: music that strikes the ears of many listeners as quite unconventional even today, more than a quarter-century after his death, but recognizable as music nonetheless. He also composedwith silence, an artistic choice that still intrigues people enough to get them taking the plunge into his wider body of work, which also includes compositions of words, many thousands of them written and many hours of them recorded.
Ubuweb offers an impressive audio archive of Cage’s spoken word, beginning with material from the 1960s and ending with a talk (embedded at the top of the post) he gave at the San Francisco Art Institute in the penultimate year of his life. There he read a 30-minute piece called “One 7” consisting of “brief vocalizations interspersed with long periods of silence” before taking audience questions which “range from inquiries about the process by which Cage composes, his lack of interest in pleasing an audience, his love of mushrooms, Buddhism, chance operations, and whether Cage can stand on his head.”
Turn the Cage clock back 28 years from there and we can hear a spirited 1963 conversation between him and Jonathan Cott, the young music journalist later known for conducting John Lennon’s last interview. “At every turn Cott antagonizes Cage with challenging questions,” says Ubuweb, adding that he marshals “quotes from numerous sources (including Norman Mailer, Michael Steinberg, Igor Stravinsky and others) criticizing Cage and his music.”
Cage, in characteristic response, “parries Cott’s thrusts with a veritable tai chi practice of music theory.” This contrasts with the mood of Cage’s 1972 interview alongside pianist David Tudor embedded just above, presented in both English and French and featuring references to the work of Henry David Thoreau and Marcel Duchamp.
Cage has more to say about Duchamp, and other artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, in the undated lecture clip from the archives of Pacifica Radio just above. Have a listen through the rest of Ubuweb’s collection and you’ll hear the master of silence speak voluminously, if sometimes cryptically, on such subjects as Zen Buddhism, anarchism, utopia, the work of Buckminster Fuller, and “the role of art and technology in modern society.” The contexts vary, both in the sense of time and place as well as in the sense of the performative expectations placed on Cage himself. But even a sampling of the recordings here suggests that being John Cage, in whatever setting, constituted a productive artistic project all its own.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Colin Winterbottom specializes in taking photographs that offer a fresh perspective on America’s capital, Washington DC. As his web site tells us, his photos seek to express “not just what a place looks like, but how it feels to be there.” A point that also comes across in a video he shot several years ago.
He introduces the video above, entitled “Stained glass time lapse, Washington National Cathedral,” with these background words:
I am primarily a black and white architectural still photographer, but while documenting post-earthquake repairs at Washington National Cathedral I was impressed by the drama of the vibrant colors the windows “painted” on stone and scaffold. With just weeks before a related exhibition was to open I began mounting cameras to scaffold to take advantage of rare vantage points. The opening and closing view, for example — with Rowan LeCompte’s remarkable west rose window at eye-level and centered straight ahead within the nave — cannot be recreated now that scaffold is down.
The photographs in the exhibition “Scaling Washington” (which was at the National Building Museum in 2015) often played off the unexpected harmony between the Cathedral architecture and scaffold, both having engaging rhythmic structural repetitions. Thus the inclusion of wonderfully painted scaffold herein. For the purpose of the exhibition (which had much other content) the video was left silent and had remained so for several years until composer Danyal Dhondy recently offered to write an original score for it. It fits so well and complements the rhythms of the original edit so perfectly. Now the piece has new dimension and life outside the original exhibition.
It’s good to know there’s still some beauty and tranquility somewhere in Washington. Do enjoy.
Claudio aka Doctor Mix runs a YouTube channel where he uploads tutorials on mixing and producing music, reviews of audio gear and instruments, and hawks his online mixing and mastering service. But the above video caught our attention. Using just one synthesizer, the brand new *analog* Arturia MatrixBrute (what a name!), Doctor Mix recreates the Kraftwerk hit “The Robots.” (Which, if you are a longtime reader of this site, you know we love.)
Doctor Mix builds up the song piece by piece, and while the original band used several different synths to create the track, the MatrixBrute is able to handle everything, as it has a sequencer/drum pads built in, and programmable sounds that in this supplemental video, Doctor Mix will sell to you. (He even is able to use a vocoder with the machine to intonate its Russian lyrics: “Ja tvoi sluga / Ja tvoi rabotnik”)
Along with that and electronic-drum pads (first seen on TV in 1975), the band also used the Moog Mini-Moog, the ARP Odyssey, and a Roland Space-Echo, which provided the vocoder sounds.
At the time, band member Ralf Hütter said of the making of the album: “We are playing the machines, the machines play us, it is really the exchange and the friendship we have with the musical machines which make us build a new music.”
But we’ll hand it to Doctor Mix: the Arturia MatrixBrute is a good ol’ fashioned analog machine, and a lot of the new gear reviewed on his site shows that the warm tones of analog equipment is having a renaissance. Warm up those vaccuum tubes, kids, the other sound of the ‘70s is back!
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
What place does the paper book have in our increasingly all-digital present? While some utilitarian arguments once marshaled in its favor (“You can read them in the bathtub” and the like) have fallen into disuse, other, more aesthetically focused arguments have arisen: that a work in print, for example, can achieve a state of beauty as an object in and of itself, the way a file on a laptop, phone, or reader never can. In a sense, this case for the paper book in the 21st century comes back around to the case for the paper book from the 12th century and even earlier, the age of the illuminated manuscript.
Bookmakers back then had to concentrate on prestige products, given that they couldn’t make books in anything like the numbers even the humblest, most antiquated printing operation can run off today.
In the video above, the Getty Museum reveals the painstaking physical process behind the medieval illuminated manuscript: the sourcing, soaking, and stretching of animal skin for the parchment; the conversion of feathers into the quills and nuts into the ink with which scribes would write the text; the application of gold leaf and other colors by the illuminator as they drew in their designs; and the sewing of the binding before encasing the whole package tightly between clasped leather covers.
Some illuminated manuscripts also bear elaborate cover designs sculpted of precious metal, but even without those, these elaborate books — what with all the art and craft that went into them, not to mention all those pricey materials — came out even more valuable, at the time, than even the most coveted laptop, phone, reader, or other consumer electronic device today. Most of us in the developed world can now buy one of those, but the non-institutional patrons willing and able to commission the most splendid illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance included mostly “society’s rulers: emperors, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops.”
To fully understand the making of the devices we use to read electronically today would require years and years of study, and so there’s something satisfying in the fact that we can grasp so much about the making of illuminated manuscripts with relative ease: see, for example, the two-minute Getty video just above, “The Structure of a Medieval Manuscript.” A fuller understanding of the nature of illuminated manuscripts, both in the sense of their construction and their place in society, makes for a fuller understanding of how rare the chance was to own beautiful books of their kind in their own time — and how much rarer the exact combination of skills needed to create that beauty.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Carl Spitzweg’s 1839 painting The Poor Poet is an odd canvas, one which, the German History in Documents and Images project writes, “testifies to a general mid-century unease with the extremes of Romantic idealization.” On the one hand, it pokes fun at its subject, a “cliché of the artist as an otherworldly genius who must suffer for his art.” (The poet’s stove appears to be fueled by his own manuscripts.) On the other hand, the painting shows a sense of defiance in its figure of the bohemian: “antibourgeois, destitute, but inspired,” argues the Leopold Museum of another version of the painting. The Poor Poet’s ambiguity is “expressed in the iconography of the pointed cap… for during the French Revolution the so-called Jacobin or liberty cap was used as a symbol of republican resistance.”
Spitzweg’s painting was one of the most beloved of the period, and it cemented the reputation of the middle class former pharmacist as a foremost artist of the era.
It also happens to have been Adolf Hitler’s favorite painting, a fact that rather tainted its reputation in the post-war 20th century, but did not prevent its proud display in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, where, in 1976, German artist Ulay—partner of Marina Abramović from 1976 to 1988—walked in, took the painting and walked out again. “Ulay drove—with the museum guards at his heels—to Kreuzberg, which was known as a ghetto for immigrants,” writes the Louisiana Channel in their introduction to the 2017 interview with the artist above.
Here, Ulay ran through the snow with the painting under his arm, to a Turkish family, who had agreed to let him shoot a documentary film in their home—however unaware that it involved a stolen painting. Before entering the family’s home, the artist called the police from a phone booth and asked for the director of the museum to pick up the painting. He then hung up the painting in the home of the family “for the reason to bring this whole issue of Turkish discriminated foreign workers into the discussion. To bring into discussion the institute’s marginalization of art. To bring a discussion about the correspondence between art institutes from the academy to museums to whatever.”
You can see Ulay’s film, “Action in 14 Predetermined Sequences: There is a Criminal Touch to Art” at Ubuweb. The “action,” as he calls it, did indeed elicit the kind of inflamed responses the artist desired. Ulay puts several of the headlines before the camera, such as “Madman steals world-famous Spitzweg painting in Berlin” and “Poor Poet to Adorn the Living-Room of Turks.” The last headline hints at the kind of bigotry Ulay hoped to expose. “This particular painting, you could say,” he tells us in his interview, “was a German identity icon, besides it was Hitler’s favorite painting.”
Ulay’s art robbery underscores the multiple thematic and political tensions already embodied in The Poor Poet—a shrewd choice for his attempt “to give a really strong signal of what I am about as an artist.” An artist does not seclude himself in his garret with Romantic dreams of revolution, Ulay suggests, all the while representing “bourgeois tastes,” writes Lisa Beisswanger at Schirnmag, in “the temple of bourgeois high culture, for the artistic pleasure of the social establishment”—pleasing everyone from art critics, to solid German citizens who still hang the reproductions in “living rooms full of the same upholstered furniture and wall-to-wall oak-fronted cupboards,” to a genocidal dictator who played on the prejudices of the German people to accomplish the unthinkable.
Of what aesthetic value is this kind of performance art? Does Ulay’s outrage at the situation of Turkish workers, which he calls “not acceptable,” warrant the “action” of hanging stolen artwork in the home of one such immigrant family? We might not see “art theft as artwork,” as Beisswanger argues, but we can still see Ulay’s action as composed of multiple meanings, including radical critiques not only of racism and exploitation, but of the marginal, perhaps criminal, status of art and of the artist in a complacently xenophobic, exploitative society.
When you hear the phrase Art of Noise, surely you think of the sample-based avant-garde synth outfit whose instrumental hit “Moments in Love” turned the sound of quiet storm adult contemporary into a hypnagogic chill-out anthem? And when you hear about “noise music,” surely you think of the dramatic post-industrial cacophony of Einstürzende Neubauten or the deconstructed guitar rock of Lightning Bolt?
But long before “noise” became a term of art for rock critics, before the recording industry existed in any recognizably modern form, an Italian futurist painter and composer, Luigi Russolo, invented noise music, launching his creation in 1913 with a manifesto called The Art of Noises.
“In antiquity,” he writes (in Robert Filliou’s translation), “life was nothing but silence.” After presenting an almost comically brief history of sound and music coming into the world, Russolo then declares his thesis, in bold:
Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility…. Nowadays musical art aims at the shrillest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound. Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor.
Not quite so radical as one might think, but bear in mind, this is 1913, the year Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” provoked a riot in Paris upon its debut. Russolo took an even more shocking swerve away from tradition. Pythagorean theory had stifled creativity, he alleged, “the Greeks… have limited the domain of music until now…. We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”
To accomplish his grand objective, the experimental artist created his own series of instruments, the Intonarumori, “acoustic noise generators,” writes Thereminvox, that could “create and control in dynamic and pitch several different types of noises.” Working long before digital samplers and the electronic gadgetry used by industrial and musique concrete composers, Russolo relied on purely mechanical devices, though he did make several recordings as well from 1913 to 1921. (Hear “Risveglio Di Una Città” from 1913 above, and many more original recordings as well as new Intonarumori compositions, at Ubuweb.)
Russolo’s musical contraptions, 27 different varieties, were each named “according to the sound produced: howling, thunder, crackling, crumpling, exploding, gurgling, buzzing, hissing, and so on.” (Stravinsky was apparently an admirer.) You can see reconstructions at the top of the post in a 2012 exhibition at Lisbon’s Museu Coleção Berardo. Many of his own compositions feature string orchestras as well. Russolo introduced his new instrumental music over the course of a few years, debuting an “exploder” in Modena in 1913, staging concerts in Milan, Genoa, and London the following year, and in Paris in 1921.
One 1917 concert apparently provoked explosive violence, an effect Russolo seemed to anticipate and even welcome. The Art of Noise derived its influence from every sound of the industrial world, “and we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare,” he writes, quoting futurist poet Marinetti’s joyful descriptions of the “violence, ferocity, regularity, pendulum game, fatality” of battle. His noise system, which he enumerates in the treatise, also consists of “human voices: shouts, moans, screams, laughter, rattlings, sobs….” It seems that if he didn’t supply these onstage, he was happy for the audience to do so.
After Russolo’s first Art of Noise concert in 1913, Marinetti violently defended the instruments against assaults from those whom the composer called “passé-ists.” Other receptions of the strange new form were more enthusiastically positive. Nonetheless, notes a 1967 “Great Bear Pamphlet” that reprints The Art of Noises, the effects aren’t exactly what Russolo intended: “Listening to the harmonized combined pitches of the bursters, the whistlers, and the gurglers, no one remembered autos, locomotives or running waters; one rather experienced an intense emotion of futurist art, absolutely unforeseen and like nothing but itself.”
It’s probably no stretch to say that mass disinformation campaigns and rampant anti-intellectualism will constitute an increasing amount of our political reality both today and in the future. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the political lie has always been with us. But its global reach, particular vehemence, and blatant contempt for verifiable reality seem like innovations of the present.
Given the embarrassing wealth of access to information and educational tools, maybe it’s fair to say that the first and last line of defense should be our own critical reasoning. When we fail to verify news—using resources we all have in hand (I assume, since you’re reading this), the fault for believing bad information may lie with us.
But we so often don’t know what it is that we don’t know. Individuals can’t be blamed for an inadequate educational system, and one should not underestimate the near-impossibility of conducting time-consuming inquiries into the truth of every single claim that comes our way, like trying to identify individual droplets while getting hit in the face with a pressurized blast of targeted, contradictory info, sometimes coming from shadowy, unreliable sources.
Carl Sagan understood the difficulty, and he also understood that a lack of critical thinking did not make people totally irrational and deserving of contempt. “It’s not hard to understand,” for example, why people would think their relatives are still alive in some other form after death. As he writes of this common phenomenon in “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” most supernatural beliefs are just “humans being human.”
In the essay, a chapter from his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan proposes a rigorous but comprehensible “baloney detection kit” to separate sense from nonsense.
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified…. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
Calling his recommendations “tools for skeptical thinking,” he lays out a means of compensating for the strong emotional pulls that “promise something like old-time religion” and recognizing “a fallacious or fraudulent argument.” At the top of the post, in a video produced by Big Think, you can hear science writer and educator Michael Shermer explain the “baloney detection kit” that he himself adapted from Sagan, and just above, read Sagan’s own version, abridged into a short list (read it in full at Brain Pickings).
Like many a science communicator after him, Sagan was very much concerned with the influence of superstitious religious beliefs. He also foresaw a time in the near future much like our own. Elsewhere in The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan writes of “America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…. when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few.” The loss of control over media and education renders people “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true.”
This state involves, he says a “slide… back into superstition” of the religious variety and also a general “celebration of ignorance,” such that well-supported scientific theories carry the same weight or less than explanations made up on the spot by authorities whom people have lost the ability to “knowledgeably question.” It’s a scary scenario that may not have completely come to pass… just yet, but Sagan knew as well or better than anyone of his time how to address such a potential social epidemic.
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