Digital Culture and Life Online

Identity/Destiny

October 7, 2003

Identity/Destiny. by Richard Thieme “Identity/Destiny” was published in Prophecy Anthology, Volume 1“  a full-color book featuring sequential art by artists such as Shannon Wheeler, Scott McCloud, Sho Murase, Yuko Shimizu, Nathan Fox and Bernie Mireault by Sequent Media (2004). The text accompanied wonderful graphic narrative. Identity is destiny. Identity is designed. Our destiny then is [...]

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Virtual Souls, Virtual Wine – on religion and technology for the NCR

September 24, 2003

Virtual Souls, Virtual Wine by Richard Thieme published in the National Catholic Reporter When we find ourselves blessed or cursed to live in a period of a genuine transformation – not just a time of accelerated change, but a time of elemental restructuring – it is hard to speak about the implications of that restructuring [...]

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Hacking Chinatown

July 12, 2002

Hacking Chinatown By Richard Thieme “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Those are the last words of the movie “Chinatown,” just before the police lieutenant shouts orders to the crowd to clear the streets so the body of an innocent woman, murdered by the Los Angeles police, can be removed. “Chinatown,” with Jack Nicholson as Jake [...]

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Straight Talk on Useability

August 9, 2001

Straight Talk I write an column called “Islands in the Clickstream” that is disseminated over the Internet. It’s about our interaction with new technologies and the larger issues of our lives that they raise. One reader wrote that more and more of my columns were emphasizing sentiment, rather than technological issues. He was right. So [...]

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Scents and Sensibilities

March 22, 2000

SCENTS AND SENSIBILITY BY RICHARD THIEME Originally published by the Village Voice March 22 – 28, 2000. Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved. Smells Are Ready for Their Online Debut-But Is the World Ready for Them? Digital scents will make plenty of dollars if DigiScents has its way. Sitting right at your desk, you’ll soon [...]

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In Defense of Hacking: The Director’s Cut

February 20, 2000

In Defense of Hacking by Richard Thieme Computer hackers are a prototype of twenty-first century humanity. Real hackers, that is. Real hackers embody the attitudes, skills, mind-sets, and realized possibilities that the digital world makes possible and rewards. Hackers reveal the kind of multi-dimensional thinking an information society demands – one in which all of [...]

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Cyborg Creep

February 6, 1999

By Richard Thieme Wearable computers and ubiquitous wireless environments will undermine independence and compromise security. “1984 was a beta version of what’s coming next.”–Chris Esposito, Boeing Today’s threats to security and privacy will seem tame by comparison to those of the next millennium, when we are living and working in ubiquitous wireless networks, where home, [...]

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A Moment of Clarity

February 28, 1998

If we are fortunate, there occurs at least once in our lifetimes a “moment of clarity” in which we observe ourselves with our own eyes and see how narrowly we have lived in contrast with how we might live if we fulfilled the possibilities of our best selves. We see that we have come to [...]

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The End of Television – Anticipating the Future in 1997

November 2, 1997

The End of Television by Richard Thieme published online by Freed November 1997 A funny thing happened on the way to this article about television. Television disappeared. I don’t say that lightly. I was the last kid on my block to get black-and-white television and the first to have color. We won a huge RCA [...]

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Find the Answer Within

August 5, 1997

Find the Answer Within published in .net Magazine (UK)Summer 1997 William Gibson’s Neuromancer is known to many because of one word, “cyberspace,” a fulcrum of a word around which a whole new world has coalesced. Equally memorable, though, is an image of the cyberjunkie Case jacking into the Dixie Flatline for the first time. The [...]

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Hot Wired Wheels – Anticipating the Future

July 29, 1997

Hot Wired Wheels by Richard Thieme Published on Web Ireland, Summer 1997 Your autombile, the Internet and you will soon be a seamless weld of three systems of information and energy. You’ll be slotted into an energy field like a card in a laptop. Daimler-Benz is trotting out technology that they say will give us [...]

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Knock Knock

May 2, 1997

Knock Knock by Richard Thieme published as “Mapping the Human Heart”  in Internet Underground, January 1997 “Who are you?” said the caterpillar. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “How can it not know what it is?” Deckard, Blade Runner Blade Runner. A film about replicants, genetically engineered androids, machines that look and act human — [...]

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Cybersleuth

May 2, 1997

Cybersleuth by Richard Thieme “The truth is out there,” says Lisa Soik, a local incarnation of X-files agent Dana Scully. “That’s the problem. There’s always more to learn. That’s what drives me. Wanting to know is not the hard part. The hard part is knowing when to stop.” Lisa Soik is a dynamo of intelligence [...]

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The Interior Castle

April 19, 1997

The Interior Castle The spatial metaphor of architecture has deep implications. A house, for example, is an archetypal symbol for the psyche; when we dream of houses, we are dreaming of our interior “space.” Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle described spiritual development as analogous to the exploration of hidden rooms. Similarly, orators in ancient [...]

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Life in the Electronic Fortress

April 12, 1997

Life in the Electronic Fortress published in the Small Business Times (Milwaukee WI) Innocents Abroad I received a telephone call recently from a young friend. Marcus (not his real name) was excited. Marcus lives and works in Tokyo, where he spends his days breaking into electronic bank accounts. then moving the money into hidden accounts. [...]

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Zen and the Art of Hacking

April 7, 1997

“Zen and the Art of Hacking” by Richard Thieme published in Internet Underground, April 1997 Don’t call them hackers, call them homo sapiens hackii — human beings who are “back-engineered” by their symbiotic relationship with computer networks to frame reality in ways shaped by that interaction. They’re not a new species, but they are a [...]

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Creating and Discovering Community in the Digital World – for IBM

April 4, 1997

Creating and Discovering Community in the Digital World by Richard Thieme We think of artifacts as physical constructs, but the symbolic artifacts that constitute our individual and collective mental maps of the world are no less substantial. Our belief systems are built of those symbolic artifacts; often unaware of their presence, we inhabit a complex [...]

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Red Rover, Red Rover

February 12, 1997

Red Rover, Red Rover published in Internet Underground, February-Match 1997 “whoever you are wherever you are it is time to go into the world, leaving your comfortable room, your home, every corner of which you know – your home is the last way-station before eternity.” Rainer-Maria Rilke When Americans landed on the moon, the earth [...]

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One Family, One Planet

November 29, 1996

One Family, One Planet Richard Thieme Published by Gateway Computer in the Gateway Magazine, Winter 1996 Our Island Earth The first photos from space of our planet – a fragile blue-and-white oasis in the desert of our solar system – changed what we meant by “one world” forever. Our experience of the Internet is doing [...]

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Stalking the UFO Meme. or, How to Build a UFO … Story

November 1, 1996

Stalking the UFO Meme by Richard Thieme published as  “How to Build a UFO … Story”  in Internet Undergr0und. November 1996 (Vol 1, Issue 12) “There is Thingumbob shouting!” the Bellman said. “He is shouting like mad, only hark! He is waving his hands, he is waggling his head, He has certainly found a Snark!” [...]

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Digital Disinformation

September 1, 1996

Digital Disinformation Richard Thieme What is Truth? Better yet, what is Truth on the Internet? The Internet is a torrent of images and words, sound and text. How much of that information flowing into our lives, overwhelming our brains, and taxing our capacity to make sense of it all is true? And how do we [...]

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Bridging the Chasm

June 1, 1996

Bridging the Chasm published in Internet Today in the U. K. in 1997 What in the world is happening? Everywhere I go as a consultant – businesses, schools, city government, even the FBI – I hear the same concerns. Here’s how it came in one morning on the telephone. “We need you to come talk [...]

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Lost

April 22, 1996

From dashboards to backpacks, GPS technology is everywhere. Maps updated with streams of data guide us through traffic jams. Hikers navigate mazes of trails with ease. Efficiency and security. That’s how GPS is sold. But something important is being lost — the ability to get lost. It isn’t just physical. Lost-and-found symbols have long given [...]

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In Search of the Grail

May 18, 1995

In Search of the Grail Originally published in Wired For Moses, it was a burning bush. For Buddha, it happened under the bo tree. For me, it was playing a game of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with my son. As we threaded our way past babel fish and Vogon poetry readings, I discovered that [...]

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The Future of Networks … in 1994

April 4, 1994

The Future of Networks: the Future of the World published in LAN Magazine (Australia) (Spring, 1994) I am not a futurist, but I do take solace in knowing that most futurists aren’t either. Futurists seldom describe the future; they describe the present. Since ninety-five per cent of us haven’t arrived at the present yet, it [...]

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