Ken Hollings, author, lecturer, and top notch intellectualizer of outré culture, is presenting a series of late-night short spoken essays on BBC Radio 3 this week. The series, titled "Requiem for the Network," is about the birth of networked culture and how it simultaneously has amplified humanity, and also compromised it. BB readers may remember Ken as the mind and voice behind the absolutely fantastic radio series and book "Welcome to Mars," about the "fantasy of science in the early years of the American Century" involving nuclear war, LSD, flying saucers, the occult, B movies, the space age, and weird science. Ken's new series, "Requiem for the Network," airs on BBC Radio 3 all this week with each episode also available online for 7 days. Background on the series available at Ken's blog. From his introductory post:
As weaponry systems, commercial enterprises, banking and home entertainment draw increasingly upon the same operating platforms, the neutrality of the network is open to question. Perhaps the most appropriate model for understanding the enduring nature of the network is the Labyrinth: a structure of mystifying complexity where technology, deception and violence all meet. The US military, having been instrumental in developing the Internet, has now withdrawn into its own secret labyrinth, which it considers a safe environment for the transmission of classified data.
'Welcome to the Labyrinth' Monday March 21
'Victorian Search Engines' Tuesday March 22
'The Network Goes to War' Wednesday March 23
'I'll Be Your Orange Juice' Thursday March 24
'Heads in the Clouds' Friday March 25
Ken Hollings' Requiem for Networks (BBC Radio 3)
Ken Hollings (blog)
"Welcome to Mars" book (Strange Attractor Press)
"Welcome to Mars" (radio series)
(photo above: Ken and I two weeks ago at the Masonic Grand Lodge in London)
