{"id":236,"date":"2003-12-27T23:05:57","date_gmt":"2003-12-28T03:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=236"},"modified":"2003-12-27T23:05:57","modified_gmt":"2003-12-28T03:05:57","slug":"looking-ahead-2004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=236","title":{"rendered":"Looking Ahead: 2004"},"content":{"rendered":"

Warren Ellis<\/a> is running a year-end series on his blog, where he asks various people to give their visions, or predictions, for 2004. Here’s my entry:
\nSurprise me.
\nThat’s what I ask of 2004.
\nSome of the things I can predict for the year to come are good. Personal things, mostly. (Moving on to greener pastures, for one thing).Others are bad. Political things, mostly. (The re-election, coronation, and Ascension — in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” sense — of George W. Bush).
\nBut nothing’s more dreary than predictability, the linear playing out of cause and effect.
\nTime passes: and that means that things can go off track, change course, suffer a phase transition, enter the orbit of a chaotic attractor.
\nOf, course, there’s no guarantee that these changes and surprises will be happy and fortunate ones. Sometimes they are, but other times they are tragic, unbearable, hideous.
\nBut a world without change, in which everything is predictable, is a world that’s already dead.
\nSo surprise me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warren Ellis<\/a> is running a year-end series on his blog, where he asks various people to give their visions, or predictions, for 2004. Here’s my entry:
\nSurprise me.
\nThat’s what I ask of 2004.
\nSome of the things I can predict for the year to come are good. Personal things, mostly. (Moving on to greener pastures, for one thing).Others are bad. Political things, mostly. (The re-election, coronation, and Ascension — in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” sense — of George W. Bush).
\nBut nothing’s more dreary than predictability, the linear playing out of cause and effect.
\nTime passes: and that means that things can go off track, change course, suffer a phase transition, enter the orbit of a chaotic attractor.
\nOf, course, there’s no guarantee that these changes and surprises will be happy and fortunate ones. Sometimes they are, but other times they are tragic, unbearable, hideous.
\nBut a world without change, in which everything is predictable, is a world that’s already dead.
\nSo surprise me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}