Synopsis: The Irish may just have slid sideways into sovereign default territory, but it’s not quite that simple. Read on. A turning point in the evolution of the European union may have been reached tonight. The Irish government has either deliberately or accidentally triggered an esoteric legal crisis about the value of Irish bonds which [...]
Read more →The Future We Deserve has been on hold. I’ve been in four countries this spring, and doing fascinating things in each. Belgium, doing a hexayurt village in Brussels and learning how to think like a European Berlin, learning about mesh networking, transferring the hexayurt to c-base and researching squat culture. The UK, building hexayurts with [...]
Read more →The Longest Road, Morgan Page / Lissie, Downtempo remix. Not the other mixes. I’ve tried to avoid writing this for some time. I’ve searched for another way, for a way of putting what’s inside of me – inside of all of us – into action without words. It’s not enough, I’m bursting at the seams. [...]
Read more →The air is thick with the stench of death and war today. Libya cannot end well, there are no good options on the table, and our countries – the “Torture Democracies” who run Guantanamo Bay, ship people to Egypt to be electrocuted by the secret police, and will not admit the invasion of Iraq was [...]
Read more →City States: If Italy collapsed as a nation state, but remained peaceful, Naples and Venice and so on could theoretically join the EU with very little in life changing. Rational Borders: The suburbs of Geneva are in France. If they were in the city state of Geneva, it would change very little. Matrix Government: If [...]
Read more →It doesn’t matter how brilliant and benign an authoritarian ruler is, having one person’s aesthetic judgment form the basis for a civilization is always going to be intensely restrictive, self-limiting and ugly. Nobody’s vision scales. This is a fundamental, non-negotiable reason we need a genuine pluralism in which many kinds of talent combine, on a [...]
Read more →Four brief points, A lot of the enthusiasm on Twitter is rooted in the simple fact that people are reassured by the revolts in other countries because it means they don’t have to get out on the streets here. There are some futures in which this is the beginning of a global economic collapse or [...]
Read more →Nothing, nothing at all is happening in the Middle East Princes and dictators sleep at home in their beds as usual The streets are filled with poor, no trickle-down oil wealth This cradle of civilization, who preserved geometry and birthed algebra and knew the shape of the earth Sleeps under lock and key as always [...]
Read more →(written on the train to Berlin, which is an intimidating city for a person with my sense of history) The law of large numbers is our enemy. As the “water” of humanity settles to an even level in the vessel we call “life” we discover that the precise contour traced out by our individual semi-random [...]
Read more →At times I don’t know who I’m writing for – a few brave readers, and possibly posterity. If we really wind up with very large scale deployments of the technologies I’ve developed – the hexayurt most likely, but possibly CheapID or the more general “State in a Box”/”Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps” models of how to [...]
Read more →