http://www.thestranger.com/archive/843/FEATURES/

Never heard of this writer or this website, but his feature article (3-parts, follow the links) is excellent.

-- ace (x@y.z), July 23, 1999

Answers

I was just going to post this, Ace. Great article...

R.

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), July 23, 1999.

Good article,

Nothing new to any TB2000 regular but nicely and concisely written. We are beginning to see more and more of these overview articles. Things are heating up.

-- R (riversoma@aol.com), July 23, 1999.

My favorite paragraphfrom this piece --

"THE OBJECT LESSON OF Y2K is that the headlong plunge into the Information Age which has occurred over the past quarter-century has wholly outstripped human comprehension of its implications. Almost no one grasps the extent to which computer systems control the everyday economic and social functions we take for granted, from international currency transfers to ATM withdrawals to the medical testing devices in any hospital. It follows that almost everyone is prone to drastically underestimate the possible effects of simultaneous computer failures across the land. (And there is no reason to suppose that the legions of the ignorant do not include most politicians and CEOs, which is one reason Y2K issues have taken so long in getting addressed at all.) As one friend put it to me in an e-mail posting about an essay he'd read online: "A depression? On the basis of THIS single material problem?" He was inclined to put down such alarmism to the author's crypto-right- wing survivalist prejudices. He may have been right on that score; even apart from the predictable millennialist types who abound on the Internet, a distressing number of the most avid Y2K commentators seem the sort of folk who might have Ayn Rand shrines in the living room."

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), July 23, 1999.

Some Cascadians could probably help out here, since this magazine is out of Seattle. Any comments re "The Stranger" from folks in the Silicon Forest?

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), July 23, 1999.

Gotta love The Web. This from a Seattle Website named Larry's Self-Indulgent Home Page :

The Stranger is a free weekly paper in Seattle. It finally has its own Web site, though the paper ain't quite what it used to be in the old days (i.e. 1991). Actually, there's three original parts of it still worth reading: The Stranger Personals (which inspired the Presidents of the United States of America song "I Saw U"), Clark Humphrey's "Misc.," and "Savage Love." A notably good exception among the new stuff is Wm. Steven Humphrey's "I [heart] Television."

Despite the writer's diss of the current paper, one hopes that some of the artsy and avant-garde in Microsoft's hometown will wake up and smell the Starbucks...

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), July 23, 1999.