digg-ing america: stuck in transition
by Anthony Marenna
Published: May 2, 2008
Lately it seems like the entire country is stuck somewhere between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. A trip to Digg (a popular user-generated news aggregation website) will reveal as much. On one hand, we have a failing economy: Americans are wholesaling their prized belongings using free “for sale” ads on Craigslist. Financial mogul Warren Buffet proclaims a recession, that somehow our monetary problems will be worse than expected. “I think this is going to be fairly long and fairly deep,” he told USA Today. And how could that be better evidenced by this disheartening wake-up call: Foreclosures jump 57% in last 12 months. Great.
On the other hand, and yes there always does seem to be another hand, the technology and science communities are laughing this recession off. They’re doing just fine. Want proof? Digg-ers all over the internet are escaping their mountainous bills through grand tales of the future… except today. They leap with excitement when word arrives about the first ever holographic 3D storage units, set to hit retail outlets next month.
Holographic like Star Trek? It sure looks that way. This comes on the heels of a statement by the creator of the Internet, not Al Gore but Sir Tim Berners-Lee, that the Internet is “still in its infancy.” He seems to think that the World Wide Web, good old WWW, might be the key to planetary government in the not-so-distant future. Might those words be prophetic? And finally, who cares about a recession when word comes through the Diggs about NASA’s new methane rocket that will lead to deep space exploration, chopped-off fingers being regrown with a new “pixie powder,” and the inkling that affordable electric cars could be here by 2009. That’s a lot to dream about. Shame we can’t pay for it.
Don’t you get the feeling that we’re trapped between a bit more than administrations? It’s clear that the Bush administration has one foot out the door, that much we can surmise. But the fact remains that we’re mired in the first election since the Great Depression where the current vice president is not running for president. Wait, America suffered an economic failure the last time there was a really uncertain election? Interesting. But even if the economic woes don’t have everything in the world to do with this wild election that has America’s rear ends aching at the edges of their over-sized seats, where does personal responsibility for economic troubles begin?
America is literally poised at the precipice of a surge into the future. But because the concept of frugality on the part of the individual is lost on $500 Playstation 3 consoles, $4/gallon gas prices (Exxon making $10 billion per quarter), oh, and $725 to get into the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, we’re not going to be able to afford it.
The fact of the matter is that those of us without Playstation 3s are doing just fine. We’re not going to the All-Star game, but we’re paying too much to watch it on cable TV and we’re happy enough with that. Frugality of the masses is rewarded by any economy, good or bad. It keeps the greedier brands of big business in line and allows the consumer-friendly industries to thrive. But it’s not simply a matter of asking the politicians to bail us out. As nice as that would be, it’s just not. Some help from Washington would be welcome, but at the end of the day, we carry the weight on our shoulders, so why not lighten the load before we go for a jog? Why not?
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