Game over, Tech wins

I ran across an interesting article in Eurozine (http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-11-16-vargasllosa-en.html) in which sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky debates Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa on points from Llosa's new book "Civilization of the Spectacle". Since C. P. Snow, people have been debating his two cultures, science vs. the arts. The article declares that the battle has to be recast, because it has entered a phase in which technology is dominant. I'm not advocating that you read the whole article; you've heard all the arguments before. The bottom line is: technology has replaced fine arts as the force that elevates mankind. Something for technologists to ponder.
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Lipovetsky: "What was noble culture, high culture, for the Moderns? Culture represented the new absolute. As the Moderns began to develop scientific and democratic society, the German Romantics created a form of religion through art, whose mission was to contribute what neither religion nor science were providing, because science simply describes things. Art became something sacred. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the poet – and artists in general – were those who showed the way, who said what religion was saying earlier.

When we observe what culture is in the world of consumption, in the world of the spectacle – what you aptly call the "civilization of the spectacle" – is precisely the collapse of that Romantic model. Culture becomes a unit of consumption. We're no longer waiting for culture to change life, change the world, as Rimbaud thought. That was the task of the poets, such as Baudelaire, who rejected the world of the utilitarian. They believed that high culture was what could change man, change life. Today, nobody can possibly believe that high culture is going to change the world. In fact, on that score it's the society of entertainment, of the spectacle, that's won. What we expect from culture is entertainment, a slightly elevated form of amusement; but what changes life today is basically capitalism, technology. And culture turns out to be the crowning glory of all this."