It's been so long since the npg site has been updated with news that I thought I would submit this.

"The Death of Cool: Running on Empty"
http://www.npgmusicclub.c...fcool.html

[submitter commentary:]
Everything here from Frontline to Werner Heisenberg to Marshall Mcluhan to Jackson Browne to MTV, perhaps with Noam Chomsky and Alvin Tofler's "Future Shock" hovering in the background. All very hashed together, but a step above the Matrix.

They might have done better to refer readers to the following quotation by Mcluhan from "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man":

"After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media."

Hard to get happy after that.