I’ve been tracking emerging trends for a while now, exploring the co-evolution of humanity and our technologies, and building visions of the kinds of futures I’d like to see. Lately, I’ve found myself a bit restless, wondering “what’s next?”
The conferences and gatherings I’m attending are beginning to feel stale, the...
Why Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media and Why Free Media Require Free Technology [Video, 1:03:42]
Preserved from re-publica.de
Media that spy on and data-mine the public are capable of destroying humanity’s most precious freedom: freedom of thought. Ensuring that media remain structured to support rather than suppress individual...
I was driving through the Tenderloin the other night - one of the most socio-economically depressed areas of San Francisco. Across a long wall someone tagged "Occupy Wall Street" in big letters with a clean font and preceded by the Twitter "#" hashtag notation. It was a big, funky chorus bridging the grimy street with a...
What is so peculiar, even curious in a strange sense, concerning the current events of global unrest is not the actuality of the events themselves but the fact that these events do not coalesce (as of yet that is) around a particular and immediately recognizable leader or agenda.
In fact to a very large extent it could be called a non-prophet...
Being free, I am free of being.
We are on the edge of a Paleolithic Machine intelligence world. A world oscillating between that which is already historical, and that which is barely recognizable. Some of us, teetering on this bio-electronic borderline, have this ghostly sensation that a new horizon is on the verge of being revealed, still...
Looking at the present from the perspective of the future is probably one of the most interesting capabilities of the human mind, how much more so when the amount of interest we have invested in our futures has grown exponentially.
Looking at the present from a future vantage point assumes we can project ourselves into an indefinite state of...
Q: How do the Amish raise a barn without money?
A: Community, and the social capital that weaves it together.
In my husband’s Latvian community, they have a concept similar to barnraising called “talka,” which describes collective volunteer work for the good of society and environment.
Several times a year we come together at our camp...
“Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.”
Mark Twain
(part 1)
A number of articles these past weeks have caught my attention as I write these words, the first, coming from: The guardian: Population of world 'could grow to 15bn by 2100' (Nearly 7 billion people now inhabit planet but projections that number will double this...
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
Brian Massumi - Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus
The social aspect of the hyperconnected web carries an update to the nature of propinquity. Propinquity is a conceptual brick we need re-acquire and redefine in the era of...