Author Lewis Lapham reminds us of the phrase made (in)famous by Emperor Charles V: “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.” So, what of the language of the internet? Again, Lapham offers a fitting and damning summary, this time courtesy of a lesser mortal, critic George Steiner: “The true catastrophe of Babel is not the scattering of tongues. It is the reduction of human speech to a handful of planetary, ‘multinational’ tongues…Anglo-American standardized vocabularies” and grammar shaped by “military technocratic megalomania” and “the imperatives of commercial greed.” More from the keyboard of Lewis Lapham on how the communicative promise of the internet is being usurped by commerce and the “lowest common denominator”. From TomDispatch: But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating datastreams out of which we’ve learned to draw the breath of… Read more