Google, Facebook and all the rest make most of their money advertising. The more they know about you and your behavior, the more accurately they can forecast which adverts will change your behavior, and the more they can make being paid to alter your behavior – on somebody else’s behalf. Advertising is a control game, [...]
Read more →Although I spend a lot of time feeling powerless, I have more undivided, informed, concentrated attention on the affairs of the world than almost anybody. Because I’m self-funded (i.e. usually broke) and self-directed, I get to set my own agendas. There are very few actors with this kind of freedom. It also means that I [...]
Read more →“A players hire A players. B players hire C players. Then comes the Bozo explosion” This is well explained by the Dunning-Kruger effect, “Idiots are too stupid to know they are idiots.” This can be seen as a minor corollary of the “Five Laws of Stupidity” which assert that idiots are the most dangerous kind [...]
Read more →The Phases of Money We discuss money as if it was water – a liquid, flexible, easily-measured, infinitely dividable pure substance. This aspect of money is well understood. But we live in a situation where very nearly all the wealth in the world seems to be tied up in destructive forms. If the money is [...]
Read more →Nathan Koren brought it to my attention. You should watch Utopia from Channel 4. It’s the bastard love-child of your brain, David Lynch’s, and Grant Morrison’s, on a bad nutmeg trip. This sounded implausible, but I duly fired up their iPlayer and got caught up. There are six episodes. Each episode leads people a little [...]
Read more →Punchline: Fracking probably holds the global economy together long enough for cheap solar to take over by 2020. (note: I used to work at the Rocky Mountain Institute, and worked on http://smallisprofitable.org and http://oilendgame.com. I’ve also spent a bit of time doing geostrategy around resource conflict) Details: I’ve been sold on the risk (I’d put [...]
Read more →Dougald wanted me to write up a couple of concepts quickly. Firstly, the “don’t wait for State help in a systemic crisis.” The State has about 1% of the population as first responders: police, army, fire service, coast guard, the lot. In a systemic crisis, there’s no enormous reserve of people from unaffected areas to [...]
Read more →I’m running out of mid-life crisis. When I hit 40, almost a year ago I declared on twitter that I was going to have a mid-life crisis. I’d been aware that since my life went nuts in Spring of 2001, I had been running hard with constant change and constant appoximations. I’d bolt from lifestyle [...]
Read more →A Feather for Lifting Anvils – EdgeRyders 2.0 plans to change the world The EdgeRyders community has decided to take a crack solving the world’s problems by inventing a new collective structure: “Venture Social Capital.” The idea is to “finance” new positive, local projects using the collective power of an extended social network, with a [...]
Read more →A couple of weeks ago, October 1st, I talked at the Meaning Conference. The good Will McInnes. Will invited me to give a talk at a social business sessions meetup in London, and I talked on the Hexayurt Project and Social Capital, and I guess Will wanted to see what I’d do with a broader [...]
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