"THE DIVERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS FROM MORAL AND SPIRITUAL PROGRESS"

Jonathan Franzen, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (A Bilingual Edition), translated and Annotated by Jonathan Franzen with assistance and additional notes from Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("Culture can't catch its breath: to me the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker may be how early an clearly he recognized the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress. A succeeding century of the former, involving scientific advances that would have seemed miraculous not long ago, has resulted in high-resolution smartphone videos of dudes dropping Mentos into liter bottles of Diet Pepsi and shouting 'Whoa!' while they geyser. Technovisionaries of the 1990s promised that the Internet would usher in a new word of peace, love, and understanding, and Twitter executives are still banging the utopianist drum, claiming foundational credit for the Arab Spring. To listen to them, you'd think it was inconceivable that Eastern Europe could liberate itself from the Soviets without the benefit of cell phones, or that a butch of Americans revolted against the British and produced the U.S. Constitution without 4G capability." Id. at 140.).