Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • The Revolution will not be Televised, it will be led by Radical Software

    Laura Mitchell interviews Alan N. Shapiro Do you play video games? A little, not so much. There’s a blackjack machine that I play a lot, in an offtrack betting parlor where a bunch of semi-addicted male gamblers hang out. I never lose more than 5 Euros at a time, and sometimes I win.

  • I consider Star Trek to be a great text of Western Civilization

    “I consider Star Trek to be a great text of Western Civilization” Scientist Shapiro on his vision of progress and the future Alan N. Shapiro in discussion with Joachim Scholl, Deutschlandradio Kultur The philosopher and computer expert Alan N. Shapiro explains his ideal for a future as an “employer.”

  • “Twelve Monkeys” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

    In a time of momentous and accelerated changes (for example, in a few brief decades we are dismantling a book culture which took centuries to construct), it is a great comfort to know that time travel will soon be available to bring us back to critical junctures in case we made a mistake.

  • “Groundhog Day” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

    In most movies and television series about time travel, a temporal displacement system still under construction (usually at the cutting edge of research in theoretical physics) has gone haywire. In the TV series Time Tunnel (1966-67), the Pentagon is about to cut off financial support for a top-secret time travel project operating underground.

  • Star Trek, Marx and Time Travel

    Alan Shapiro – Star guest of the next Transmediale – on new computers, 1968 and anarchism Interview in the Berlin daily newspaper “Neues Deutschland,” January 5, 2010 Translated from the German by Dwight “Doc” Gooden As a software specialist, Alan Shapiro would like to set the digital world on a new footing.

  • “Desperate Living” (film): John Waters’ Science Fiction Dystopia, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Maybe it was the mono sound of my budget-priced video recorder, which the salesperson at Saturn Hansa had dubbed the ‘Trabant’ (der Trabi, das Symbol eines verschwundenen Landes, the symbol of a disappeared country, hat heute längst Kultstatus erreicht, has long since attained cult status) of VCRs.

  • “Jurassic Park” (film): Newman Eaten by a Dilophosaurus, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Steven Spielberg’s stated goal for the film Jurassic Park (1993) is to achieve what he calls “total realism.” He wants to make cinema coincide with the real. This is a symptomatic fantasy that Jean Baudrillard diagnoses in The Evil Demon of Images as “cinema attempting to abolish itself in the absolute of reality.”