Tag Archives: PowerPoint

What Spooks Think of PowerPoint

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Tim Hall

This Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms is an amusing and entertaining read, regardless of what you think of ethics of Wikileaks. I like the term “Clancy” meaning, “Somebody who has read a lot of Tom Clancy novels and thinks he knows the Craft. Total moron“. If you’re planning on writing fiction or running an RPG with an espionage-based theme, the whole thing is gold. Which explains why the link came via author Charlie Stross.

Best one for me is what they say about Microsoft Powerpoint

An efficient means for turning complex and sophisticated analysis into half-witted bullets. If you can’t read a 50 page analysis before invading a country or buying a company, you probably shouldn’t be in the business.

Single most destructive invention known to man.

This is not the first time PowerPoint has been blamed for the decline of Western civilisation…

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PowerPoint and the Decline of Western Civilisation

Posted on August 9, 2007 by Tim Hall

Slacktivist looks at the sort of organisations making use of Microsoft’s Powerpoint, from bat-crazy heretical fundamentalist churches to corporations run by the pointy-haired boss out of Dilbert.

In evangelical churches, Bill Gates’ computerized Colorforms has supplanted the flip chart and the overhead projector (as well as, disastrously, the hymnal).

The slide here is taken from a PowerPoint presentation from the site Last Days Mystery. It covers the very same territory Bruce’s presentation does, the “seven seals” of judgment from Revelation 6, except it uses spiffy bullet-point lists. You can find lots of similar PowerPoint presentations on other “Bible prophecy” Web sites.

This is the ideal technology for this task because, as Edward Miller notes, “PowerPoint … can give the illusion of coherence and content when there really isn’t very much coherence or content.” This is, for many PowerPoint enthusiasts, a feature, not a bug. The illusion of coherence and content is precisely why PP is the preferred technology in corporate America and among Bible prophecy “experts” (and why it was used almost exclusively in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon).

At some point in the far, far future, historians will recognise the release of Power Point as the point where Western Civilisation went into terminal irreversible decline.

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