Excerpted from Sakari Maaranen: “Governments have got stuck with the weight of their own regulations. Regulations are important, but they also do slow down progress. Therefore governments rarely are at the forefront of new developments, though they are necessary for sovereign jurisdictions. Other large organisations, especially corporations, are stuck with money even more tightly. They… Continue reading
Elite overproduction and the next great wave of social instability
Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades. Excerpted from Peter Turchin: “How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects… Continue reading
Does cyberwar hacking promote peace?
“The hype about everything “cyber” has obscured three basic truths: cyberwar has never happened in the past, it is not occurring in the present, and it is highly unlikely that it will disturb the future. Indeed, rather than heralding a new era of violent conflict, so far the cyber-era has been defined by the opposite… Continue reading
McKenzie Wark on the Unity of Cultural and Technological Hackers
How … are those of us training in the use of language, to collaborate with those who work with code? Excerpted from McKenzie Wark: Almost never is the “technical a real object of inquiry. It is something fallen, quotidian, not an object to be thought. Its something about which to direct only a hermeneutic suspicion…. Continue reading
Video: Thomas Malone on the Success Factors for Collective Intelligence
Excerpt: “If it’s not just putting a bunch of smart people in a group that makes the group smart, what is it? We looked at bunch of factors you might have thought would affect it: things like the psychological safety of the group, the personality of the group members, et cetera. Most of the things… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Off the Network
“Off the Network is a fresh and authoritative examination of how the hidden logic of the Internet, social media, and the digital network is changing users’ understanding of the world—and why that should worry us. Ulises Ali Mejias suggests how we might begin to rethink the logic of the network and question its ascendancy.” *… Continue reading
Smart Citizens vs. the Urban Intelligence Industrial Complex
“A Urban Intelligence Industrial Complex (led by IBM, Cisco, General Electric, Siemens, Philips et al) has emerged and continues to try to insert itself into urban agendas; with little success, in comparison to the marketing spend, it must be said. One can imagine a quiet fading away of all those “Smarter Planet” promotional schemes soon,… Continue reading
What’s the nature of the ‘invisible work’ created by the sharing economy ?
“eBay’s impact hasn’t been on the thousands of tech jobs it created for eBay,” Sundararajan says, “but on the hundreds of thousands of sellers it created.” Excerpted from EMILY BADGER: “The sharing economy, however, is not exactly like economic disruptions that came before it. More complex technology typically demands more complex skills. And, in the… Continue reading
Rethinking Intangible Value for the new Ethical Economy
Republished from Adam Arvidsson & Nicolai Peitersen: Since the latest financial crisis a number of attempts have been made to fix the inherent problems of the financial system and to find ways to initiate a new impetus to ailing economies in the Western world. In this article, Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen argue that the… Continue reading
Salingaros on Kahn
As there is running a major exhibition on Louis Kahn at the National Museum of Norway, Oslo, I was wondering if I should go there. Searching information about Kahn I came upon an essay by Nikos A. Salingaros, the renown architectural theorist. I learned there are three great American architects carrying the name Kahn, one of them… Continue reading