“9/11 is big,” Mr. Milch, 61, said to the unusually large crowd in the room. He was lying on the floor — a bad back is his curse — next to a microphone. He was just getting going. “What part of 9/11 is big? If the future continues to reinterpret the past, it could be argued that 9/11 provides irrefutable proof that unless there is some other way that we learn to deal with our technology or deal with our brothers and sisters, it is goodbye as a species. That genie does not leave that bottle.”

He went on like that for a while, then said: “A dying culture, intuiting that it is dying, postulates an alternative reality: The Indians postulated in the ghost dance that they were impervious to technology, that when a bullet hit them, they went up to heaven. Does any of that sound familiar?”

are they fighting for progressing culture or just trying to catch up with whatever happened three seconds ago, to gobble up the knowledge before it's obsolete in another three minutes? now that people are gettng accustomed to choosing their own media and scary big aggregate feeds of information all spinning different colors of the same things... they don't have time to process it. who has time for the future?

To sum up: single-tracked, 'forward moving' progress is appealing because it's a clean and simple concept. But, actually, it's a boring and limited remains of Positivism, right?

Almost any kind of social change will be resisted - by nature, change is difficult and frightening, and the status quo is much easier to deal with.

I think the younger generations are all gonna be pretty open to change and advancement since we've been living in it non-stop.

at this juncture of the 21st century we are more aware of ourselves—we are more aware of our past—than culture has ever been before. Because of the internet, because of our tremendous archives that we’ve accrued, the culture of the past is open to us. And as we look at it, we can see that it’s a fabulous junkyard of ideas that may have been incredibly beautiful—and may have had an awful lot of life left in them—that have been discarded by the relentless forward rolling of culture and our insistence upon new things every day. I think that we’re now in a position where we can look back at the wonderful, glorious remains of our previous cultures—our previous mindsets—and we can use elements from that treasure trove to actually craft things that are appropriate to our future.

We, as a whole, are not secure enough in our present to say that if we upset the balance of things in some way it won't have catastrophic effects for us, so we're not willing to go out on a limb and see what we can achieve.

The reality is that people can and do control the future every day - as long as they envison wha they want and plan accordingly.

And bring a change of underwear.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape - Burroughs