Alan N. Shapiro, Technologist and Futurist

Blog and text archive about media theory, science fiction theory, future design, social choreography, Computer Science 2.0, new media art, robots and androids, Star Trek, The Prisoner, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan

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Top 100 Post-World War II French Thinkers

October 31st, 2010 in Category: Thinkers

Georges Bataille, Albert Camus, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lefort, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, George Steiner, Paul Virilio, Julia Kristeva, Frantz Fanon, Claude Lévi-Strauss...
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Halloween at Bayville Scream Park

October 29th, 2010 in Category: Horror

"WHEN SUMMER ENDS IN AUTUMN GLOOM THEN PIRATES RISE FROM GRAVE AND TOMB."
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Reply to Thomas König

October 29th, 2010 in Category: Uncategorized

If you watch the video of my presentation in Leipzig on “The Library of the Future,” you can hear at the end a statement made by Thomas König during the question-and-answer session. “Thinking on my feet,” in the video, I already made a reply to König. Now I would like to add two more aspects to that reply.
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Die Bibliothek der Zukunft auf Video

October 27th, 2010 in Category: Future Design, Library of the Future

Presented at the Wikipedia Critical Point of View Conference in Leipzig, Germany, Sept. 26, 2010
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New York Yankees Baseball (story)

October 25th, 2010 in Category: Baseball, Creative Writing

"Todd and I had had a baseball Jones for months. When game day arrived we jumped into Todd's Chevy and tooled into town for the Yankee game on Saturday night. We were psyched. On the way we were shooting the breeze about the Yankee game the night before, which we had watched at Todd's house on the tube."
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Iraq vs. U.S.: Total War Meets Pure War

October 24th, 2010 in Category: War & Peace

This was one of the very first high-quality pieces of writing that I did in my life. I wrote it during the first two weeks of the Gulf War in 1991. I was living in New York City at the time. I tried to balance the perspectives of Chomsky and Baudrillard/Virilio.
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Beaubourg, Quai Branly, and the Simulacrum of Jean Baudrillard, by René Capovin

October 23rd, 2010 in Category: Architecture, Jean Baudrillard

"Quai Branly is a remake of Beaubourg, in a different field of art. Whereas Beaubourg is a perfect institution in the field of modern art (as Baudrillard himself explicitly says – the first part of my essay is dedicated to his famous 1977 article on Beaubourg), Quai Branly is a perfect institution in the field of 'primitive art'."
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“Amok Time”

October 22nd, 2010 in Category: Cyborg Spock, The Original Series

"T'Pring, parted from me and never parted, never and always, touching and touched, we meet at the appointed place." "Spock, parted from me and never parted, never and always, touching and touched, I await you." "What thee are about to see comes down from the Time of the Beginning, without change." says T'Pau.
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Die Bibliothek der Zukunft – The Library of the Future

October 20th, 2010 in Category: Future Design, Library of the Future

The concept of libraries as they are is in many ways obsolete. I am speaking about university libraries, public libraries, and online libraries. Recently, I looked closely at the websites of about 150 university libraries, primarily in the USA, but also in the UK, Australia, Germany, and other European and Asian countries.
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A New Computer Science is Underway: Alan N. Shapiro interviewed by Anja Wiesinger

October 19th, 2010 in Category: Computer Science 2.0

American philosopher and veteran software engineer Alan Shapiro reflects on computer science in relation to the history of ideas it originated from.
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America at War in Vietnam

October 17th, 2010 in Category: War & Peace

In 1962, President Kennedy starting bombing South Vietnam. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson received authorization from Congress - via the dubious "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution" - to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States" and wage Total War against North Vietnam.
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Jean Baudrillard and America

October 16th, 2010 in Category: Jean Baudrillard, New American Studies

Baudrillard’s "America" is an important and misunderstood book – a milestone work of social commentary about the USA by a French author, in the same tradition as Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." Baudrillard continues Tocqueville's inquiry, asking many of the same essential questions 150 years later.
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Baudrillard’s “Requiem for the Twin Towers”

October 16th, 2010 in Category: Jean Baudrillard

In October 2008, Caroline Heinrich single-handedly organized a conference on Baudrillard ("L'actualité de Jean Baudrillard") which took place at the Antiquariat am Ballplatz in Mainz, Germany. The speakers were Caroline, myself, René Capovin, Thomas Weber, Michael Teichert, Robin Parmar, and Marine Baudrillard.
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My Hometown is Roslyn, Long Island, New York

October 15th, 2010 in Category: New American Studies

Sometime around 1980, I sat inside my hometown library in the "haute bourgeoise" town of Roslyn and read all the books they had about the student-worker near-revolution in May-June 1968 in France: books like Alain Touraine's "The Movement of May" and Alfred Willener's "The Action-Image of Society."
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Play, Don’t Work at Bayville Adventure Park

October 14th, 2010 in Category: New American Studies

Driving Game, NBA Hoops BONUS, WHEEL A WIN, BASKET FORTUNE, SKEE BALL - TOWER OF POWER, The Jewelry Box, MONOPOLY - coin game, BASKETBALL - mini dunxx, PHAROAH'S TREASURE, JUMPIN' JACKPOT, Pirate's Adventure, MAD WAVE MOTION THEATER, THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD by SEGA
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