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COFFEEHOUSE CULTURE -- Issue 2

We are the beneficiaries of the scientific age, the diners in this (silicon) chips with everything restaurant. The menu reads well, the food is cunningly and excitingly prepared, the dishes look and smell good, the servings are generous -- but, somehow, the whole thing not only fails to satisfy but leaves us with terminal indigestion and a lot of trapped wind.
...But, like food itself, we need science and its beneficent gifts to live. Where would we be without our computers, without our lasers and laproscopic surgery, our quantum quarks and quasars? Life without the high speed, high technology accoutrements on which we have all come to rely -- even those who profess not to have been tempted by the embrace of microcircuitry -- is unimaginable. It is a vision of a hell that is as bad as the history it once was.
...In every way science has enhanced our lives. There is almost no field in which the hand of science has not moulded, mended and mechanised our existence. But in taking the clay from which humanity sprang and reshaping it into a finely wrought and technologically sound vessel, science has sacrificed much that is dear not merely to us but to the Cosmos itself.
...Indeed, we have lost time itself. The minutes, hours, days, months and years by which man measured his progress through the Cosmic Cycles have become meaningless expressions of a distantly remembered past when time meant something. And that is not all. Science has stolen simplicity and replaced it with elaboration. It has taken common knowledge and made it a specialisation. It has transformed understanding into confusion and claptrap.But even that is not all. It has rendered man's ability to interface with nature into a battle of wills that it - or we - can only lose.
...In this special report we tell you who put the sigh into science and why we're all gonna fry.