by V. Penelope Pelizzon
For Nicole Cuddeback and Antonio Ambrosio
Thank Christ for outskirts, where the river pulls you
east or west beyond brilliance into the merely making do,
scrappy verges where the water eddies and people
unremarkably rake their gardens or tinker under cars.
The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy
by Hardy Green
The word “utopia” has the distinction of being a double agent. It can derive from either the ancient Greek word “ou-topia,” meaning “no place,” or from “eu-topia,” meaning “good place.” Is “utopia,” by its very nature, impossible to achieve? If so, why have we tried, time and time again, to create utopias that are destined only to fail?
Hardy Green’s The Company Town takes on the question through a history of single-employer communities in America, beginning with the textile mills of the Industrial Revolution and on to the corporate campuses of the present day.
Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate, and a professor at Columbia Law School. He also serves as the chairman of the media reform organization Free Press. Wu is best known for developing the term “net neutrality” and the theory behind it. Before taking the stage to talk about his book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Wu sat down for our In The Green Room Q&A.
In the 1930s, AT&T tried to crush an invention dreamed up by the engineer Clarence Hickman — one that would come to be essential to its telephones and to our lives.
“The secret machine in Clarence Hickman’s office was an answering machine,” said Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. “It was fully functioning and about six feet tall.”
It took the answering machine decades to enter American homes because, Wu said, AT&T decided it was bad for phones. “I’m not sure where they got this estimate that as many as two-thirds of telephone conversations were obscene,” Wu said. The company feared that no one would use telephones if they thought their conversations could be recorded.
In Golden States of Grace: Prayers of the Disinherited
ArticlesFeuilletonFriday, December 3, 2010 How One Family Created Chinese America
PoetryThis week in L.A.From the green room
Wordpress template made by HeJian
|
