NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #94      A Publication of The Nature Institute    September 14, 1999
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            Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                     On the Web: http://netfuture.org
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

NETFUTURE is a reader-supported publication.


CONTENTS
---------

Editor's Note

Quotes and Provocations
   When Everything Is Computed
   Schooling the Imagination

DEPARTMENTS

Tech Knowledge Revue (Langdon Winner)
   The Voluntary Complexity Movement

Correspondence
   Readers Comment on the Jacques Lusseyran Issue

About this newsletter


==========================================================================

                              EDITOR'S NOTE

Nothing published in NETFUTURE has produced as much reaction, or as deeply
felt reaction, as the material on Jacques Lusseyran in NF #92 (see
http://netfuture.org/1999/Jul2199_92.html).  That is gratifying, since I
would have wished it to be just so.

I don't often print correspondence that serves little other purpose than
to applaud the newsletter.  In fact, what correspondence I do publish
tends to be selected disproportionately on the negative side (relative to
what I receive), since I figure this is the better service for readers.
But I've also been made aware of the fact that many readers care a great
deal about the newsletter and like to hear occasionally about its success
"out there".  And so I include in the correspondence section of this issue
some excerpts from the reader response to NF #92.

I received, by the way, not a single negative phrase about #92.

SLT

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==========================================================================

                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS


When Everything Is Computed
---------------------------

For years now worried parents have been shoving computers at their kids
with the fervent hope that such high-tech toys would engage all those
otherwise "wasted" childhood energies and transform the kids into rocket
scientists.  So there's no little irony in the recent report suggesting
that science may be losing out to ... what?  The computer!  For example, a
corporate executive worries about his college-age son:

   Everyone says computer sciences are mandatory for him, but no one has
   ever recommended that he even look at chemistry.  It's truly sad that
   kids can graduate today without getting exposure to the fun of physical
   sciences.

Warren Hein, associate executive officer of the American Association of
Physics Teachers, says that

   The number of undergraduate majors in physics is at a post-Sputnik low.
   Kids are saying, "Why should I go into something as demanding and
   rigorous as physics when I can take computer science and make more
   money?"  (New York Times via San Jose Mercury News online)

There's also a worry about computer studies replacing more traditional
blue-collar training and subverting other engineering fields.  While the
number of students in computer engineering grows rapidly, enrollments in
electrical and environmenal engineering are said to be plummeting.

But this raises the interesting question whether the choice of field
really matters all that much.  Increasingly, from automobile repairing to
ecological studies -- and perhaps most of all in the hard sciences -- what
the student does is one or another form of computing.  When it comes to
the choice between computers and these other fields, one might be forgiven
for asking, "What's the difference?"

That may be a slight exaggeration.  But it's not at all an exaggeration to
say:  What educators really should be concerned about, especially at the
primary and secondary levels, is how to prepare their students to hold
their own in a world where more and more human activity is being reduced
to computation.  And the solution to this challenge is neither
"more and more exposure to computers" nor "more and more exposure to
abstract, computational science".  It is, rather ... well, as I've often
remarked, Waldorf educators seem to have gained the nearest glimpse of an
answer.

Which brings us to the next article.


Schooling the Imagination
-------------------------

The Sep., 1999 Atlantic Monthly advertises Todd Oppenheimer's feature
article about Waldorf education as an unveiling of what "may be the
world's best-kept education secret".  Oppenheimer makes a strong case that
the secret is well worth unveiling.

He begins his story in the worst possible place:  a California school for
juvenile offenders.  As the principal, Ruth Mikkelsen, remarked, "One of
[these] kids in a normal class will pretty much destroy that class":

   "We had tried everything with these kids," Mikkelsen recalls.  "Nothing
   worked.  You can't lecture to them.  Independent study doesn't work.
   They need constant support and socializing."

And yet, as Oppenheimer reports, he later found these young people proudly
reciting memorized lines from Shakespeare and playing music instruments in
ensembles.  In fact, the educational program was so successful that, when
an outside evaluator was called in, he tried to deny the school's
achievement:

   After his visit he told Mikkelsen that the effectiveness of her program
   for juvenile offenders couldn't be fairly judged, because it was clear
   that she truly did not have problem kids.

This was several years after the school began to adopt some Waldorf
methods.  When Mikkelsen heard the evaluator's remark, she "suddenly
realized it was working".  So also John Cobb, the local probation manager:
"Kids who can't make it anywhere else can make it here".

While it's true that any education today must have a rehabilitative
dimension (as long as there has been television, Waldorf teachers have
unavoidably found themselves playing a rehabilitative role with chronic
television watchers), Waldorf education is intended for the mainstream.
The whole approach was founded in 1919 by Rudolf Steiner in Stuttgart,
Germany, and has ever since embodied many of the reforms widely called for
-- but rarely implemented -- in today's schools.  In Mikkelsen's words,

   All the things you read about public schools -- that you need to do
   this, you need to do that -- hell, they've been doing it for eighty
   years.

Oppenheimer's article is lengthy, and I cannot begin to summarize it here.
What follows are just a few items that caught my eye, along with a comment
or two of my own.  You can, for the time being, read the article at
http://theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/issues/99sep/9909waldorf.htm .  Also, I
have elsewhere written a somewhat fuller description of the Waldorf
approach, available at http://netfuture.org/fdnc/appc.html.

** The Atlantic article's title, "Schooling the Imagination", says
a good deal about the nature of Waldorf education, and, as Oppenheimer
emphasizes, such a schooling begins with the senses.  A multi-sensory
approach to education is widely advocated today; there is more and more
recognition, for example, that mental capacities develop at least in part
out of the activities of the young child's hands and entire body (which,
incidentally, makes nonsense out of all the glib talk about reproducing
neural patterns in digital media and thereby "cloning the mind").
Likewise, music performance has been linked to enhanced mathematical
skills.  "Yet few education systems in this country have the history with
these methods that Waldorf schools do."

** Waldorf schools are run by the teachers, who have full authority to
shape the curriculum in their own classes.  Textbooks are de-emphasized --
or, rather, emphasized, with the difference that students create their own
textbooks, often with considerable enthusiasm and artistic skill.
Teachers must present their material directly, out of their own present
engagement with the subject.  Students are not graded; they are given
responses to their work.

** Oppenheimer quotes Steve Grineski, an interim dean at Moorhead State
University (speaking before Columbine):  "The most serious problem in
schools is kids not getting along.  The reason people get fired isn't
their lack of job skills, it's their lack of social skills".  That, says
Oppenheimer, is why Mikkelsen was attracted to Waldorf.  In Mikkelsen's
words, "It's like learning to be a really good parent, plus tapping into
every creative thing you ever thought of".

** Oppenheimer was struck by the crude dolls in a Waldorf kindergarten --
stuffed cotton with almost no facial features.  Of course, every parent
(at least, before the days of software for toddlers) had stories to tell
about their child's long-term love affair with a scraggly rag of a doll.
As one kindergarten teacher pointed out:

   The only thing an intelligent child can do with a complete toy is take
   it apart.  An incomplete toy lets children use their imaginations.

** "Waldorf teachers believe that one of their primary jobs is to help
youngsters develop a strong will .... Students must learn that the rewards
they reap from an experience require a commensurate amount of effort --
mental, physical, even emotional."  But technology in our society tends to
tilt the balance against this engagement.  According to Douglas Gerwin, a
Waldorf high school teacher, technology "promises an experience by which
we don't have to do anything to make it happen".  On the other hand, Peter
Nitze, a Waldorf graduate, testifies:

   If you've had the experience of binding a book, knitting a sock,
   playing a recorder, then you feel that you can build a rocket ship --
   or learn a software program you've never touched.  It's not a bravado,
   just a quiet confidence.  There is nothing you can't do.  Why couldn't
   you?  Why couldn't anybody?

Nitze, who went on to graduate from Harvard and Stanford, is now a global-
operations director at AlliedSignal, an aerospace and automotive-products
manufacturer.

** Oppenheimer makes a large point about the "moral lessons" that young
Waldorf students receive along with their fables and fairy tales, and in
general he stresses the ethical teachings in these schools.  This strikes
me as highly misleading.  I'm not aware that Waldorf schools even have any
"units on ethics" in their curriculum.  In fact, that kind of separation
of ethics from life is more a symptom of the fragmentation found in
conventional education.

Children are irreducibly ethical in outlook.  They find themselves living
in a morally toned world.  The point, then, is that Waldorf teachers do
not set out systematically to destroy, or even just to ignore (which is
the same thing) this aspect of the child's world.  It's not so much that
some sort of a moral lesson has to be tacked onto a fairy tale, as that
the child is allowed to experience and respond to the tale in its
fullness, which includes strong emotional and moral components -- though
not necessarily components that you could easily reduce to rational
precepts.

Misunderstandings of this sort underlie the occasional misbegotten charge
that Waldorf education is religiously motivated and therefore should not
be allowed in public schools.  Unfortunately, things have reached a point
in our political state where any publicly sanctioned act that reflects
more than a strictly materialistic view of the world can be decried as a
transgression of the boundary between church and state.

** Waldorf educators do not try to get students to read as early as
possible.  In fact, they are quite happy to see reading delayed.  Reading,
after all, is a lot more than mere word identification, and some of its
other aspects may require attention prior to reading in the narrow sense.
Jane Healy notes in Failure to Connect that

   reading consists much more of a person's `habits of mind' -- e.g.,
   sustained concentration, language, imagery, questioning strategies --
   than it does of reciting words or alphabet sounds.

Waldorf schools cultivate a love of language -- through the spoken,
rhythmical word, stories, poetry, recitation, and even the artistically
transformed written letters -- before they push the highly abstract
function of reading onto children.  It is well known that some of the most
talented figures in modern history have been extremely late readers.
(Oppenheimer mentions Churchill and Einstein.)  "Many Waldorf parents
recall that their children were behind their friends in non-Waldorf
schools but somehow caught up in the third or fourth grade, and then
suddenly read with unusual fervor".

** In math and science, Waldorf teachers do not spoon-feed the concepts to
their students and then provide after-thought demonstrations to illustrate
the concepts.  Students face the experimental situations first, and then
learn, over time, to draw out the meanings.  "Nowadays we always push
people to think so fast, instead of letting them reflect", says one
science teacher.  "One of the things I had to learn was to not answer
their questions, especially in the twelfth grade.  If you give them
answers, they'll just shut down.  It's amazing what they'll come up with
if you wait long enough."

** "Despite Waldorf students' unfamiliarity with standardized tests, their
SAT scores have generally come in well above the national average,
particularly on verbal measures."  Also, "when they get direction on how
to take multiple-choice tests [oh, to need such special instruction in
mainline schools!], their scores soar."

** Oppenheimer tells this story:

   On one occasion, when I joined a Waldorf teacher-training class, I
   started the day by learning a complex singing round.  As I struggled to
   keep up, I could feel my thinking being pushed.  The process exhausted
   and stretched me in unfamiliar ways, and made me envious of Waldorf
   students.  My envy peaked one evening in New York City, at a parents'
   night for the Steiner School.  As part of a fundraiser, several faculty
   members had arranged to sing cabaret songs; when they finished, some of
   the eighth-graders, who were helping to serve food, decided that they
   would sing something too.  Moments later the adults sat transfixed as
   half a dozen teenagers performed James Taylor's "That Lonesome Road" a
   cappella, in slow, layered parts, with the polished harmony of a
   professional chorus.  "All I could think," Chris Huson, a banker and
   the parent of a Waldorf second-grader told me later, "is that when my
   kids grow up, I want them to be just like those guys."

One final thought:  almost every element in the Waldorf program can go
wrong -- badly wrong.  And all the more badly because the aim is so high.
But that's pretty much the point.  Mainstream education today, because of
its public funding, must try to avoid offending anyone.  This guarantees a
kind of lowest-common-denominator approach.  The aim cannot be
high, almost on principle, and therefore the result is a common disaster.

If you do aim high, you set yourself up for a fall on one count or another
-- but at least now you also have the chance of succeeding.  A great deal
depends upon the true, inner qualifications of the teacher.  But there's
no other way; this is the problem we must solve as a society.  The attempt
to prevent failures by lowering one's sights is all too characteristic of
our culture today.  School then becomes an information-shoveling bore and
a social hell-hole.

I worry greatly about the Waldorf movement's ability to train teachers
adequately in the face of rapidly increasing demand.  And I worry even
more about the life in the movement.  Steiner's whole emphasis was on the
meeting between teacher and student in the current moment, and on their
journey together.  The willingness to make this a journey of mutual
discovery was what counted, and yet it can't be doubted that at least some
teachers prefer a more comfortable approach:  they take Steiner's various
advices as fixed formulations to be adhered to, rather than as guidelines
that they must energetically transform into markers along a new path of
their own making.

Nevertheless, it is encouraging to hear that, in Oppenheimer's view at
least, the movement is doing fairly well, presenting a worthy example for
the larger society.

SLT

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==========================================================================

                    THE VOLUNTARY COMPLEXITY MOVEMENT

                              Langdon Winner
                             (winner@rpi.edu)

                                                      TECH KNOWLEDGE REVUE
                                                  1.3   September 14, 1999

"Do these sneakers have a built-in pager, cell phone and Web browser?"  I
asked the Nike salesman at the mall.  "I need to stay connected while I'm
out jogging."

"Not yet," he smiled, "but I suppose we'll have all that by next spring."

"Good.  I'll check back."

Although my question was facetious, it was not entirely absurd given
today's tendency for electronics, clothing, appliances, vehicles, and
buildings to merge as new, feature-rich hybrids.  Gone is the historical
moment in which a tool had just one function or a limited range of
functions.  No longer is a telephone just a telephone, a mirror just a
mirror, a dishwasher just a dishwasher.  In the era of "ubiquitous
computing" everything must become an "information appliance" communicating
with all the other instruments a person uses.  According to the latest
projections from the R&D labs, the creation, marketing and eventual use of
these gadgets will be one of society's major preoccupations in the coming
century.

Proclamations of this great turning point are far from subtle.
"Technology:  What You'll Want Next" exclaims the front page headline in
the May 31 issue of Newsweek.  The drooling lead story by Steven Levy
describes dozens of home conveniences sure to become tomorrow's
necessities.  "Your automatic coffee maker will have access to your
online schedule, so if you're out of town it'll withhold the brew."
"Electrolux's Internet Refrigerator can tell when food supplies get low
and order more from the supermarket."  Looking into the more distant
future, the article describes the "really smart house" now on the
drawing boards.  In the bathroom, for example, "The mirror over the
sink has given Mom the headlines while she's brushing her teeth, and the
toilet has monitored the family's general health by chemical sampling.
The medicine cabinet identifies Dad through biometric recognition and
allows him his daily meds, while keeping out the kids."

What a world we're making!  Thanks to the wonders of microelectronics,
pervasive presence of the Internet and the availability of low-cost
communications, there's literally no gadget so outrageous that no one will
try to design, promote and sell it.  In the Newsweek story and
similar accounts, the basic assumptions of ubiquitous computing are
presented in stark relief:

*  Decisions about what happens in domestic life should be delegated to
   "smart" instruments able to communicate with each other and with the
   organizations that provide various services and supplies.

*  From now on the objects we use will understand us thoroughly,
   anticipating our every need, whim, problem, and likely course of
   action.  (Your toilet will know more about you than your best friend.)

*  What matters above all is extending the horizons of comfort and
   convenience for wealthy consumers.

Descriptions of the world of ubiquitous computing are dazzling, if only
for their sheer silliness.  If you rate humanity's needs for the coming
century on a scale of 1 to 10, none of the products and services depicted
in Levy's article rises much beyond a score of 1.5.  Here we find some of
the greatest minds of our time, working long hours in high-tech Meccas
like the Media Lab and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and what's the
best they can come up with?  Hundreds of items slated for the Sharper
Image catalog.  It's surprising that apparently nobody working in this
field has noticed that all these new devices are not "intelligent," but
simply dumb.  Even thoughtful people like psychologist Donald Norman,
called "the movement's guru" by Newsweek, seem to have gotten caught up
in all the hoopla.  Imagine sitting week after week in corporate
meetings where all these weird gadgets are being scheduled for design
and production and nobody stands up to say, "Hey, folks, let's face it.
This stuff is just nuts!"

Of course, the reason talented people are busily at work on all these
absurd appliances and infrastructures is that there's likely tons of money
in it.  Examples of success like the Palm Pilot (now the Palm VII)
indicate how many billions can be made with a little ingenuity and clever
marketing.  The fact that few of the items imagined today fulfill even the
most basic standards of need or utility is beside the point.  We'll let
the market decide, celebrating the fortunes made on one generation after
another of superfluous techno-junk.

As if to dignify the role of ubiquitous computing, spokesmen for the
movement argue that its larger, more noble goal is to eliminate life's
complexity.  As Levy explains, "Everything connected to the Net.  It's a
combination that could change our lives by doing what the PC, for all its
virtues, never managed to accomplish:  making things easy."

Note this carefully.  A key selling point, it turns out, hinges on the
frank admission that all those wonderful "personal" computers, touted for
the past two decades as ways to make life simpler, have actually been a
disaster -- complicated, confusing and difficult to use.  Figures prominent
in hawking earlier models of the wired world, Michael Dertouzos and Kevin
Kelly, for example, now lead the choir denouncing the old PCs as a
failure.  As Kelly opines in Newsweek, "For years, we've been battling all
these devices; because they've been so hard to use, they were in the
center of our consciousness."

Tears flow from my eyes.  Can this be the same Kevin Kelly we've heard
extolling the utopian promise of wired society for the past decade?  Oh,
never mind.  Just ahead, we are assured, things will get much better.  The
new era of computing will eliminate all the vexations that riddled the
previous one, at last making life truly simple.  Because the new devices
are "ubiquitous and adapting to us instead of the other way around," Kelly
maintains, "they'll retreat."

Simplify.  Save time.  Reduce effort.  Liberate yourself from toil.  This
has been the continuing siren song of consumer technology throughout the
twentieth century.  Unfortunately, in its own terms, the dream is always
self-defeating.  As people add more and more time-saving, labor-saving
equipment to their homes, their lives do not become simpler and easier.
Instead their days become even more complicated, demanding and rushed.

Historians and sociologists have studied this phenomenon thoroughly and
can explain its predictable, recurring dynamics.  Ruth Schwarz Cowan's
book, More Work For Mother, for example, describes the attempts of several
generations of women to "save time" by using new household appliances.  As
people adopted these conveniences, they also changed their expectations
about what the good life should include.  Thus, families that bought
washing machines after World War II did not spend less time washing
clothes, but more.  The reason was that the machines enabled them to have
clean clothes more often, something that mom, dad and kids found
desirable.

Over several decades the same pattern appears in other areas of cleaning,
cooking and household management; new gadgets actually take up more time
and effort, but are welcomed because they seem to enhance people's
material well-being.  When the automobile and suburb are added to the
equation, one sees families spending enormous amounts of time taking care
of the supplies, services and repairs needed for the everyday maintenance
of the "good life".  Thus, the minutes and hours supposedly "saved" are
never put in the bank and never draw any interest.  The phantom of
simplicity and ease vanishes as people frantically dash about trying to
squeeze out the last ounce of satisfaction.

But that was then, this is now, right?  Surely the smart equipment slated
for our domestic tomorrow will finally help us achieve the trouble-free
existence of our dreams.

Don't count on it.  All one has to do is look at how the best-equipped
families in America's high-tech neighborhoods are now arranging their
everyday lives.  In Silicon Valley, for example, several anthropologists
are studying the detailed movements of people employed in the electronics
and computing industries.  Their findings, summarized recently in USA
Today, suggest that, if anything, the rat race identified by Professor
Cowan and others is being reproduced and greatly intensified.  Adults work
long hours, commute long distances and spend little time at home.  Their
children shuttle from schools and day care centers to their soccer games
and music lessons, driven by services like "Kids Kab" that fill in for
busy parents.  Mom and dad stay in touch by cell phone and pager, check
the Web for schedule changes, and coordinate the next day's agenda by
synchronizing their Palm Pilots when they meet at night.

Conditions of this kind take shape as people who work in technical fields
adapt family life to the norms and pulse of their high-tech jobs.
"They're multitasking like mad," researcher Jan English-Lueck told USA
Today.  "I'm stunned at all they do."  The picture that emerges is of
an endlessly busy, complicated, precariously balanced, strung-out
existence in which traditional boundaries between work and leisure have
evaporated.  "Parents go to events for their kids because they know
they'll also be meeting parents of other kids who will be good business
contacts," notes anthropologist Charles Darrah.  "Is that home or work?"

Adding smart machines to every corner of the built environment does
nothing to alleviate these patterns of hurry, stress and disconnection
from people.  Indeed, this is the very path through which the madness
spreads, grasping us more firmly.  Most appalling, we Americans scarcely
notice the pathologies our choices spawn.  Sometimes it takes an outsider
to remind us what we're doing.

Recently, I asked a German friend, Ernst Schraube, a psychologist now
finishing a sabbatical in the U.S.A., what he found most surprising about
our country.  "Oh yes," he said, "one thing that amazes me is how hard
Americans work and how little free time people have.  They fill their days
with activity and seem to leave little room to relax or be with family or
friends.  By European standards this is unthinkable.  In Germany, for
example, the work week is thirty-five hours and we have six weeks paid
vacation.  I don't know how you Americans stand it."

But stand it we must, cramming more and more tasks into already harried
days, adopting all kinds of digital technology as glue to hold things
together.  It never occurs to us that real time could be saved doing away
with some of the routines and equipment that fill our lives.  It never
seems an option to reduce our workloads to enjoy being with the ones we
love.  So complete is our embrace of voluntary complexity that one
strategy alone seems sensible:  Push on and hope for the best!


                          ---------------------

Tech Knowledge Revue is produced at the Chatham Center for Advanced Study,
339 Bashford Road, Valatie, NY 12184.  Langdon Winner can be reached at:
winner@rpi.edu and at his Web page:  http://www.rpi.edu/~winner .

Copyright Langdon Winner 1999.  Distributed as part of NETFUTURE:
http://netfuture.org.  You may redistribute this article for noncommercial
purposes, with this notice attached.

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==========================================================================

                              CORRESPONDENCE


Readers Comment on the Jacques Lusseyran Issue
----------------------------------------------

Responses to "Can Technology Make the Handicapped Whole?" (NF-92)

It would have taken considerable effort to secure all the permissions that
would have been necessary in order to attribute the following excerpts to
their authors, so I have left the text unattributed.  Several of these
responses come from high-profile academics and authors whose names many
readers would recognize.  SLT


                          ---------------------

** "You keep getting better and better.  Your essay in #92 is profoundly
good, moving, inspiring.  Awesome.  Thanks for doing it.
....
"You keep revealing to me, in one domain after the next, how much I've
yielded to the mechanistic interpretation of human beings."

** "Steve, thanks for this amazing article.  Fantastic."

** "Thank you .... After scanning far enough to see R. Kurzweil's name, I
dropped everything and read it through.  A few months ago, when I asked
your reaction to The Age of Spiritual Machines, I wouldn't have been
prepared for such a compelling, completely human, yet spiritually based
response. Indeed, I wasn't prepared today.  But you've answered that
nagging doubt and sense of hopelessness which contemplation of such a
future engenders.  I can't wait to get a copy of And There Was Light, and
Lusseyran's autobiography.  You do have a knack for sending one to the
source.

** "Whew!  What a tour de force!  Thanks for that, it's inspiring.  I've
passed it on to our Disabilities Officer for a read."

** "This is the first time I write to you.  I want to thank you for a
beautiful and inspiring issue of NETFUTURE (#92).  Looking at things `from
the other side' as you do, makes you remember that we're constantly
subject to `propaganda' advocating a way of looking at the world that is
not necessarily the only valid one and certainly not the least limited
one.  Keep up the good work."

** "WOW!  There is no other way to describe this text, which is perhaps
the most interesting one I have sent over the months since I started [an
Internet forwarding service].  Netfuture is simply the best online
newsletter.  In this issue, Stephen Talbott brings the amazing story of a
blind Resistance fighter, who could `see' despite his blindness.  This is
all I can say about it.  You simply have to read it!"

** "Thanks so much for this. You provide a remarkable service, and I am
very grateful for it."

** "I read each issue of Netfuture with great interest, and can honestly
say your writing has changed how I view the world and technology."

** "i just read your piece in netfuture on Jacques Lusseyran.  it is one
of the most beautiful and insightful essays on technology i have ever
seen.  thank you for alerting us to Mr Lusseyran himself and for such an
insightful appraisement of the wider issues his case raises.  i shall get
a copy of his book and review it when it appears."

** "Another wonderfully inspiring issue.  I am especially glad to see you
tackle the whole area of `disability.'  Lusseyran's life is truly
fascinating and shows so clearly the limits of technological thinking
about human potential."

** "This issue was really moving, not only Lusseyran's story, but the way
you told it.  I ordered and just received his book And There Was Light."

** "I want to thank you for your last Netfuture article which I found
extraordinary .... I was particularly impressed by your sensitivity to the
deeper meaning and implications of technology on the way we think and
live."

** "I just got around to reading this wonderful issue of NETFUTURE.  Your
discussion of Jacques Lusseyran was compelling, and it's been quite a
while since anything I've read has given me as much to think about."

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==========================================================================

                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 1999 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
newsletter for noncommercial purposes.  You may also redistribute
individual articles in their entirety, provided the NetFuture url and this
paragraph are attached.

NetFuture is supported by freely given reader contributions, and could not
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http://netfuture.org/support.html .

Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web:

    http://netfuture.org/

To subscribe or unsubscribe to NetFuture:
    http://netfuture.org/subscribe.html.

Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #94 :: September 14, 1999

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