Laurie Anderson’s next manuscript to be locked away for 88 years | Hacker News Reader

Laurie Anderson’s next manuscript to be locked away for 88 years

theguardian.com

40 pointsmitchbob25 comments

I am not a fan of these super-natural art projects. It is one thing to make a statue that might stand for a thousand years ... or not. It is another to designate forest land and other resources, to attempt to lock them away from use by future generations.

The legal system dealt with this hundreds of years ago. We cannot have "dead hands" dictating how future generations should live and work. The proper vehicle for such things is government. Donate the land as a park or nature preserve and cross your fingers that your intent will be respected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

A similar worry developed around the concept of compound interest. Some semi-rich people wanted to park money in bank accounts for a few generations in order to make thier great-grandkids into powerful people... with explicit instructions on how to use that money/power. Such multi-generation shenanigans are against the general public interest.

It's 88 years. The odds of it falling afoul of the law against perpetuities is negligible and would indicate something catastrophic happened.

> We cannot have "dead hands" dictating how future generations should live and work

The whole world is dictated by dead hands. I cannot walk around pristine forests (maybe I even need to pre-register), I need to deal with bureaucracy, I need to pay taxes, almost every single landscape is ruined by human buildings, etc. So what is that even about?

Those things are controlled by government, which you may change. You aren't confined to a single job/city because your dead father holds you their by contract, the penalty being you repaying for all the food you ate as a kid.

When I helped at a legal clinic, lots of old people wanted their kids to stay local. They wanted wills drafted to disinherit the kids if they ever moved away. I spent hours explaining how idiotic that was.

Idiotic, but still legal?

Legal to try, but massively impractical unless you are rich enough to setup an estate to police the matter. You need to have someone checking on the situation, forever.

Courts have thrown out most wills that demanded children stay married or only marry in or out of particular races or religions.

I guess you live in a city. Or a highly populated country.

There's lots of unused land in this world. Most of Canada is. I live in a rural area, and loads of forest land, yet I'm 20 minutes to a city with 1M in population.

A few hours more outward, and it's just all empty federal land.

Where do you live? Surely not the US, Canada or Mexico. These places have lots of untamed, not locked down land.

Unless, of course, you're in a city.

>We cannot have "dead hands" dictating how future generations should live and work.

Almost everything (tech, cultural, etc) you have now is because of "dead hands".

Wish we had more dead hands dictating how future generations should live and work. And more current people having a vision of the world and what they build and live for beyond their own lifetime.

> Almost everything (tech, cultural, etc) you have now is because of "dead hands".

And a bunch of those hands belonged to total assholes who gained their foothold in our lives and culture by fucking over vast numbers of other people and preventing alternatives (sometimes superior alternatives) from becoming what we have now instead. You really don't want all of those dead hands dictating how future generations should live and work. Some of them would happily see you dead or enslaved if it'd make them or their family a dollar richer. Some of them would see many of us dead or enslaved for much less.

It's easy to look around at the end result of luck and survivorship bias and assume that what we have today was the best possible outcome and imagine how wise and benevolent the people who got us to where we are now must have been, but I think you'd be disappointed if you took a hard look at how typically human and flawed the dead creators of some of the things you now enjoy were, and by what might have been if that wasn't the case.

We are the best generation to decide how we should live and work. Future generations will be the best to decide how they should live and work. Nobody else could possibly have the information needed to make the right choices for others, and people should have the freedom to decide what is best for themselves. The most we can hope for is that enough of us will make choices today that we think will result in something good for future generations based on the information we currently have. If we can manage that much at least history will be kind to us.

Lock it in a massive ice block that takes 88 years to melt. https://elephant.art/laurie-anderson-duets-on-ice-performanc...

With current predictions. Which means it will likely be melted in 10-15

Pretty presumptuous to assume anyone will care in 88 years

Maybe, but these are pretty famous writers and artists. I'm sure we would care today if say, Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald had locked away some works 88 years ago.

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We typically use the word "art", which, yes, is often performative and sometimes nonsense!

Not all art is to everyone's taste, and that's ok too. You don't have to enjoy this art piece. I find the idea of creating something that I cannot possibly enjoy to be quite poignant. But hey, I'm sure you have art you enjoy that I do not.

Bauhaus is about all I can stand as art.

The issue which I have with this is the sheer waste of resources because some rich person wants to be relevant decades after their death.

What happened to founding a hospital? Or something useful in the here and now and in the future. Not a big fan of Nobel either, BTW.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Those two words are all that are required to describe this "news."

Maybe so, but in that case you could avoid breaking the site guidelines by simply not posting.

We are so starved for aura we have to farm into the future now, I too would like to dine.

I agree, this is pure (US) boomer behavior, they still think that the world will care about them almost a century into the future from the moment of their deaths. The world won't do that, one of the reasons being that said boomers have been quite talentless given their resources.

Vanity is not a trait exclusive to people born in an ill-defined interval of time. You internet using people need to come up with a better term for people you want to blame for everything bad in the world. Jobs, Wozniak, Berners-Lee, or that Ethernet dude, Metcalfe, are not responsible for the end of the world.

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