Let’s be honest: G7, G8, and G20 meetings have historically accomplished very little. They’re big, expensive opportunities for powerful people to get their pictures taken, trying to remind everyone how important they are (or how important they suppose themselves to be). We’ve known this for a long time. We should also admit that the corresponding [...]
June 2010
This is my first post following ChangeCamp London (there will likely be one or two more) in which I’m suggesting points for probable improvement: mostly things I actively promoted through the planning process, and which I hope to see emphasized more in the future. This post argues for the need to be open throughout the process. [...]
A recent tweet reminded me of Clay Shirky’s excellent observation: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Kevin Kelly called it The Shirky Principle, using the example of unions to illustrate: Unions were a brilliant solution to the problem of capital management which tended to exploit uncapitalized workers. But [...]
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration. A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which [...]
There are some valuable lessons in Andrew Potter’s Authenticity Hoax — lessons most people probably don’t want and won’t accept. Here’s some of the synopsis from the AuthHoax blog (I don’t see the need to rewrite it): For many, the search for the authentic is a powerful source of meaning in a secular age, fostering [...]
Yesterday’s announcement of new copyright legislation in Canada was met with the expected array of complaints from complainers, aka bloggers, slackers, n’er-do-wells, social deviants, hipsters, and cultural parasites. They received the news as an affront to their supposed “freedom” to exchange intellectual and aesthetic work and reshape existing artifacts into new “creations.” The dispute comes [...]
