how i learned to stop worrying and love the death star

This is incredible. typical quote:

"Kubrick’s film presented a future of company men moving with assurance and clear intention toward a godlike minimalist object. Lucas, on the other hand, gave us a slapdash world of knuckleheads pursued by industrial-scale minimalists. Visually, Kubrick’s film is as seamless and smooth as the modernist authority it mirrored. Like the mid-century modernists, 2001 associated abstraction with the progressive ideals of the United Nations as embodied by its New York headquarters. Lucas, on the other hand, was a nonbeliever. Even the initially smooth and unitary form of the Death Star was shown, as the rebel fighters skimmed its surface, to be deeply fissured with an ever-diminishing body of structural fragments. These crenulated details suggested a depth and complexity to modern life that modernism’s pure geometries often obscured."

found on boing boing, which if you didn't know already, is the best blog on the internet (TM)

Update 2/12

I take it back.  I actually nicked this from Ken MacLeod's blog. For people other than Ben, Ken MacLeod is a science fiction author, who entertainingly sprinkles a lot of communist and anarcho-capitalist philosophy in his books. read 'em! the stone canal is excellent, as is the execution channel (a new one.  more of a techno-thriller than scifi)