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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
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Daily Blah for... Monday, October 23, 2006
From the "Scary as Hell" Department
In other news, we're using Earth's natural resources 25 percent faster than the planet can renew them, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
Gaah.
Not much else to be said, just ... Gaaaah.
It's okay, right? I'm still going to have descendants four generations' hence who'll be blogging about this kind of sourpuss, overemotional environmental warning?
The truly scary thing is, the next generation may be starting to take it as read that they are probably the last people to walk to the face of the Earth -- creating, if we're not lucky, the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that tends to plague human minds. From an excellent, future-focused column I read today on the Clock of the Long Now by "Kevalier and Clay" author Michael Chabon:
If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.
Sigh.
I love our species, dumb as it is, and I refuse to countenance self-eradication, though there seems to be some gaia-esque logic to it. You get to that logic if you stare hard enough at this graphic:
This graphic comes from the London Times, and it's a quick-read version of this story in the New Scientist, which asks the all-important question: if the human race disappeared tomorrow, how long would it take planet Earth to heal?
This, you see, is the real reason I an such an ardent booster of, oh, any space project going. Why I think we couldn't have a more important topic to discuss, on this blog or any other. It's about spreading ourselves around a bit in space, and not bunching up so much on one planet. It's about not taking from an ecosystem more than we can give back, which is practically the definition of self-genocide.
(Is there such a term, I wonder? Well, the word "genocide" itself only popped into existence in the 1940s, to fill the need to describe a crime so heinous it beggared the imagination. If that is the pattern, I wouldn't want to be the lexicographer that has to slip "self genocide" into his dictionary. He'll be writing it by hand, with the last piece of notepaper.)
And yes. It's also about giving eight-year-olds dreams again. Ones that don't involve morally-correct mass-destruction.
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