July 2012
19 posts
But just as our complaints have their plus ça change quality, so do their corollaries. We end up finding ways to make the sea of information seem less sea-like. We find ways, essentially, to fool ourselves into a sense of sense-making. As controversial as Shelley’s ideas about poetry may have been at the time, they speak also to an enduring assumption: that the workings of human creativity...
“We are moving from a world of problems, which demand speed, analysis, and...”
– - Denise Caron (via stoweboyd)
Paul Higgins: Can be expressed as a move from complicated to complex where we move from systems thinking to complexity thinking
(via emergentfutures)
Rafael Fajardo to Mr. Higgins: I think that your word choice is potentially confusing and would like to offer the...
“We have to know the facts, not only because they are facts, but because there’s...”
– Jen Doll, on why we need to look at the faces of killers. (via theatlantic)
This times one fucking million.
“Revolts catalysed by Twitter and Facebook, alongside the offline networking of...”
– Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback & Culture
There’s a great article in MIT Technology Review called The Hidden Risk of a Meltdown in the Cloud that Historian of Technology Edward Tenner, in an article for the Atlantic, cleverly analogizes to what happened with the San Diego fireworks a couple weeks ago.
From the original article:
A growing number of complexity theorists are beginning to recognise this problem. The growing...
We may disagree that the information society has brought about a new form of value creation in which information is wealth. Nevertheless the rise of the information society certainly coincides with the installation everywhere of feedback loops which monitor and regulate consumption, production and distribution. Capital strains to reduce its overheads by outsourcing labour to consumers - witness...
This cultural preoccupation with success as a reflection of worthiness means that decision-making is particularly stressful for us. “Anything about a decision that … [is] less than perfect is a rebuke to the decision maker,” says Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. Westerners seem particularly sensitive to decision-related regret, as Schwartz...
“The pattern was repeated in the explosion of commercial and artistic innovation...”
– - Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From.
To repeat: Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and da Vinci were emerging from a medieval culture that suffered from too much order.
What will emerge from the excessive orderliness of social networking and identity quantification?
“When the internet was new, its early enthusiasts hoped it would emulate the...”
– The Dot-Com City - architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange examines Silicon Valley urbanism (via kchayka)
Bullshit. Our patience with serendipity is not fading, our patience with planned, quantified, overly designed systems that stifle luck, chance, randomness, risk, mistake, glitch,...
Arcfinity: Watch Bruce Sterling and Liam Young... →
arcfinity:
On June 16, urbanist and part-time terror suspect Liam Young brought together an ensemble of thinkers, writers and artists to forge the collaborative blueprint for a future city. Arc’s editor Simon Ings went along to rub shoulders with, among others, Warren Ellis, Rachel Armstrong and Bruce…
Oh man. This sounds AWESOME.
