History is a giant wave washing over the timeline, some things float to the top and get carried along with it, while others are swept away for ever. In the months after 9/11, footage of the event played on tv news every day for weeks. The attack only lasted a few hours, but hundreds of hours of video footage was captured. I assumed that the internet would hold a record of those video clips, but it really doesn't. All that exists now is some carefully curated footage and most of it is in documentaries. One particular memory I have can't be found online, maybe it's in some newsroom vault or maybe it was erased and taped over. But I can describe it. The man filming is running down the streets getting closer and closer to the first tower. He arrives just as the first tower falls. A wave of darkness blocks out the camera and you can hear the powerful wind howling past like a hurricane. Gradually light starts to come back and the street he was on is transformed into a mono-c...
I love to read, lately I've been rereading my way through some of the classic dystopian future books predicting how things would be in our time. It's fun to see what predictions were way off, and which ones we are currently living with. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) actually nailed air pods. The author Ray Bradbury described tiny "seashell" speakers that fit hidden in the ear. The protagonist starts talking to his wife, but she is oblivious because she has tiny speakers hidden in her ears. The wife in the book is also addicted to a screen that constantly shows a senseless barrage of images and short clips that are mostly incoherent. The protagonist watches it for a few seconds and a scene appears with two people in the middle of an argument. No context is given, but the actors are in a disagreement. Montag, the protagonist suggests they turn it off, but his wife says, "no I want to see who wins the argument." Montag says, "but you don't even know what the...