Before the camera is a formidable, rather pale white dude with long, frizzy hair, reminiscent of an American Girl doll dunked in water and then left out to dry in the sun.
Author Ray Bradbury, famous for his dystopian visions of America's future, once called science fiction "the art of the possible." With the powerful effects of phenomena like Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns which states that information technology increases exponentially in power while simultaneously decreasing in size and cost showing up more and more obviously in our daily lives, it often feels as though the possible and the inevitable are converging. Think of Stanley Kubrick's blockbuster classic "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) co-written by esteemed sci-fi author Arthur Clarke.
Some of the sages of the 24-hour news cycle, in their infinite wisdom, have declared that the fate of the upcoming presidential election hinges on the fate of the economy.
Beginning with the folk music revival in the 1940s, a genre of traditional songs from England and Scotland known as "murder ballads" began insinuating themselves into the national consciousness.
In the spring of my junior year of high school at an age long after that by which my great-grandparents held their first real jobs I began, like clockwork, making the rounds to various towns in the Northeast with my mom.
Adrenaline-pumping music pulses in the background. Cameras pan around the room, capturing the gaudy red, white and blue graphics projected on the walls, zooming in and out on the applauding audience, sweeping across the candidates as if running down a high-five line, the same shot used to build excitement at the beginning of basketball games.
I remember first hearing about Facebook at dinner with a family friend who was then a professor at Vanderbilt University.