Here’s the most recent edition of my reading highlights, passages of posts and books that I’ve highlighted on my Kindle.
Kevin Kelly — Chapter 8: No Harmony All Flux (kk.org)
Change comes in various wavelengths. There are changes in the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed. The first level—changes in the game—produces the kind of changes now visible: new winners and losers. New businesses. New heroes. We see the rise of Wal-Marts, and of Nucor steelmaking. The second level—changes in the rules of the game—produces new kinds of business, new sectors of the economy, new kinds of games. From this type of change comes the Microsofts and Amazon.coms. The third level of change, which we are now entering, whips up changes in how change happens. Change changes itself. While the new economy provokes change in the first two levels—all those new business and business sectors—its deepest consequence is the way it alters change. Change accelerates itself. It morphs into creative destruction. It induces flux. It disperses into a field effect, so you can’t pinpoint causes. It overturns the old ways of change.
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You can’t install complexity. Networks are biased against large-scale drastic change. The only way to implement a large new system is to grow it. You can’t install it. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia tried to install capitalism, but this complex system couldn’t be installed; it had to be grown. The network economy favors assembling large organizations from many smaller ones that keep their autonomy within the large. Networks, too, need to be grown, rather than installed. They need to accumulate over time. To grow a large network, one needs to start with a small network that works, then add more sophisticated nodes and levels to it. Every successful large system was once a successful small system.
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Cannes Centrale – On The Scene – Presented by MSLGroup (cannescentrale.com)
In order to be creative, you have to have the basic materials with which to create: facts, information, knowledge, experience, and whatever else you can find. If you don’t have this storehouse of diverse materials, it’s more difficult to make new (and unusual) combinations. Also, if an idea or concept isn’t in your head (as opposed to being at the end of a Google search), it’s very difficult to drag it up into consciousness. I personally am glad that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to acquire knowledge and experiences in a variety of different areas. I think a good memory is a blessing. I also believe it is a skill that can be practiced and developed. If you get lazy (“let the machines do the work”), it can atrophy. This obviously has negative consequences on one’s creative abilities.
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Conceptual Trends and Current Topics (kk.org)
* In a series of science papers, biologists prove that humans are weakening their gene stock with such artifices as eyeglasses and medical care, since “biologically inferior” stock now breeds. This sets off religious and scientific eugenics cults and social weirdness around “healthy” genes.
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* No more employees. Everybody is hired as a consultant, each negotiates a deal with various goodies (benefits, insurance, perks). Even factory workers are treated as “consultants.”
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* American universities go franchise. Ivy League schools launch branches in Tokyo, Berlin, London.
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* Everybody becomes so completely cynical about the election process that voter turnout drops to 2 percent (families and relatives of prospective politicians) until finally the “democratic process” is abandoned in favour of a lottery system. Everything immediately improves.
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* It becomes clear that there are significant racial differences between people — that the stereotypes were right after all.
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* A new profession — cosmetic psychiatry — is born. People visit “plastic psychiatrists” to get interesting neuroses and obsessions added into their makeup.
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* A new concept of “global Darwinism” takes root: people argue for the right of the human species to rid itself of weak specimens. Aid to developing countries ceases. Hospitals become “viability assessment centres” and turn away or terminate poor specimens.
* In reaction, a new definition of viability (based on memes rather than genes) is invoked. People are subjected to exhaustive tests (occupying large amounts of their time) to check the originality and scope of their ideas.
* A new profession, meme-inspector, comes into being.
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* A new type of artist arises: someone whose task is to gather together existing but overlooked pieces of amateur art, and, by directing attention onto them, to make them important. (This is part of a much larger theory of mine about the new role of curatorship, the big job of the next century.)
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* Traveling as a process enjoys a revival. People abandon the idea of “getting from A to B” and begin to develop (or re-discover) a culture of traveling: semi-nomadism. Lots of people acquire super new faxed-and-modemed versions of the mobile home. It becomes distinctly “lower-class” to live in a fixed location. Fast forms of transport come to be viewed like fast food is viewed now — tacky, undesirable, fake.
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* Big changes in education: A combination of monetarism and liberalism creates a new paradigm wherein schools are expected to be profitable manufacturing and research enterprises. This leads to: * The infant think-tank, where the innocent genius of children is routinely tapped by captains of industry for large sums of money …
* Various highly original manufacturing industries: hand-painted wallpaper and postcards, naive sculpture and pottery, clothing design and manufacture … * Teachers chosen (by the kids, of course) on the basis of their performance record and likely profitability. They are subjected to grueling and penetrating interviews by kids … * The old concept of education “in the abstract” (i.e., unrelated to real tasks) is only practiced in the most be-nighted outposts of the civilized world (England, USA etc.) …
* Successful children are traded between schools for huge transfer fees …
* Schools completely abandon divisions based on age. People of all ages turn up and sort themselves into effective and profitable groups …
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Work : Essays : Why I Write (k-1.com)
I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.
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Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are: Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money . Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity. Political purpose — using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude. <You have reached the clipping limit for this item>
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The Secret Agent a Simple Tale (Joseph Conrad)
“Conceive you this folly, Ossipon? The weak! The source of all evil on this earth!” he continued with his grim assurance. “I told him that I dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination.” “Do you understand, Ossipon? The source of all evil! They are our sinister masters—the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress. It is! Follow me, Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and the dumb, then the halt and the lame—and so on. Every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom.” “And what remains?” asked Ossipon in a stifled voice. “I remain—if I am strong enough,” asserted the sallow little Professor, whose large ears, thin like membranes, and standing far out from the sides of his frail skull, took on suddenly a deep red tint. “Haven’t I suffered enough from this oppression of the weak?” he continued forcibly. Then tapping the breast-pocket of his jacket: “And yet I am the force,” he went on. “But the time! The time! Give me time! Ah! that multitude, too stupid to feel either pity or fear. Sometimes I think they have everything on their side. Everything—even death—my own weapon.”
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“Mankind,” asserted the Professor with a self-confident glitter of his iron-rimmed spectacles, “does not know what it wants.”
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The Clock in the Mountain (kk.org)
virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?”
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The biggest problem for the beating Clock will be the effects of its human visitors. Over the span of centuries, valuable stuff of any type tends to be stolen, kids climb everywhere, and hackers naturally try to see how things work or break. But it is humans that keep the Clock’s bells wound up, and humans who ask it the time. The Clock needs us. It will be an out of the way, long journey to get inside the Clock ringing inside a mountain. But as long as the Clock ticks, it keeps asking us, in whispers of buried bells, “Are we being good ancestors?” How do you become one of those time-conscious beings who visit and wind the Clock? Jeff Bezos has just launched a public web site, 10000-year-clock, where interested folks can register their desire to visit the Clock in the Mountain when it is finished many years from now. Bezos has said he will give some kind of preference to current members of the Long Now Foundation because the purpose of the Clock is to promote what the Foundation promotes: long-term thinking.
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A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 (ribbonfarm.com)
The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business. That is also roughly the order of decreasing strength, increasing legibility and partial subsumption of the four forces. Here is a visualization of my mental model:
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