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 →The Celter Strategy recognizes the centrality of space exploration to resolving the problems of the earth. GPS, climate satellites, communications satellites, solar panels, microprocessors and much more came out of space research, but more than that, the clear conception of this as a single world, with a shared ecosystem, came from the spacer perspective. In [...]
Read more →I was having a think about Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games in the context of complexity science, and came up with another way of thinking about the four categories of activity in Cynefin. Simple rules, open goals is Conway’s game of life. Complex rules, open goals is VUCA – but also art and design. There’s [...]
Read more →I’m currently in Belgium, Brussels, staying in a borrowed flat. If things go according to plan, next stop is Ireland for about a month to apply a bit of thinking to one particular community’s economic future. If that doesn’t pan, then I’m foot loose and fancy free. Berlin’s a likely port of call either before, [...]
Read more →I’m working back towards The Future We Deserve, my (and your) book project. When we started The Future We Deserve, I had no idea what it was really about. I wanted to collect short, intense essays about the future and basically just see what happened if we took a “with enough eyes, all bugs are [...]
Read more →