trust

The WikiLeaks story is really becoming a saga. It’s like a new chapter is added every week, with new characters and new ethical questions raised. The latest one helped me work out at least one big answer to move forward with. The answer hinges on trust. It used to be that knowledge was power: it [...]

Police at G20, and After

by Brian on 07-03-2010

in canada,civics

They’ve done a good job of making moderate people critical. I tend to give police the benefit of the doubt, and I was one of the people thinking, “well it’s not an easy task” last week, but the way complaints have been handled (i.e. not) since then is deplorable. Both the police and people in all [...]

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 [...]

Thanks to the miracle of aggregation and analytics we now have a lot more rankings and crap than we know how to use — so many handy ways to see who has the most authority, influence, power, popularity… Reminds me a little of Pandora’s Box — eh? One thing hasn’t quite made it out of [...]