It’s great to do “meaningful work” and have “meaningful dialog” and make “meaningful contributions.” But do you really know what it means? It’s often just a synonym for “good” — which can be , um, good — but at its worst it merely means that something “feels good” or “resembles good.” When it’s done right, [...]
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Let’s look at the genuine potential of new technology instead of dwelling on what’s being replaced — whether in remorse or celebration… This began as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Experiments in Delinkification a few months ago. I sat on it until Scott Rosenberg brought the topic up again this week with a series of [...]
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Here’s the completely unrequested bibliography for Truth, Will & Relevance (minus a few cosmetic references): Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams, 1918. Ariely, Dan; Norton, Michael; “Conceptual Consumption.” Annual Review of Psychology, 60. 2009. Argyris, Chris; Schön, Donald. Theory in Practice. 1974. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. Barzun, Jacques. Of Human Freedom. 1939. Barzun, Jacques. Clio [...]
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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 [...]
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My book is finished and available for purchase, download, or reading online. Sorry if you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, where I already mentioned it a few days ago. This is the formal “announcement.” Description: Truth, Will & Relevance outlines an innovative way to understand human nature and conduct — conceived specifically to address [...]
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Yesterday a new website launched, Action London 2010, providing Londoners what promises to be a textbook perfect case study on dos and don’ts of civic engagement in the digital age. They say (and have demonstrated they are) working to improve the site quickly, to their credit. I wasn’t going to post this but I eventually decided to lay [...]
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Steven Johnson has an excellent column in the New York Times, on the iPhone and the mixed merits of open and closed platforms. He begins with a reference to Jonathan Zittrain’s work on “generativity,” (familiar to readers of this blog) i.e. “the ability of a self-contained system to provide an independent ability to create, generate [...]
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Generativity: maybe the most important word we’ll use in the next 10 years. It applies to all aspects of the challenges we face: social, technological, cultural, intellectual, economic. There’s a big article in the newest Atlantic that got me thinking about it: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America: If it persists much longer, this [...]
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The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here’s my recommendation: Don’t. Don’t do any of that shit, and don’t run off to make membership [...]
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