Raceway. The exposed ductwork look, along with open plan offices, will be remembered as the lead paint and DDT of the early 21st century.
I just had a great conversation with Harry (a fellow strategist) about this infographic.
The great strength of the thinking behind this diagram is its firm grasp of money as a marker of exchange for *value*. The value of ideas, of labor, of operational expertise, of platforms. “Money” is turning into something much more like a game and a lot less like the rigid cyclicality of the market. If we think about money as value, moving in a positive sum game, seeing the future of work becomes a much more optimistic exercise
via www.emergence.cc
Strange Buildings
Erwin Wurm: House Attack (Viena, Austria)
Check out more buildings here.__
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This got a “wow!” out of me.
(via weandthecolor)
This just gets better and more pointed every time I watch it. The end, with its idea of one universal holding company for all of humanity, seems to be the illogical end state that all economic ideologues point towards. The teleology of post-cold war neocon “end of history” is right here… unless you frame this in terms of Jihad vs McWorld.
Is late capitalism the same as modernization? What attributes of it are currently contested?
The difference between deep understanding and labeling… or in a more contemporary dialectic, the difference between googling and knowing.
R. P. Feynman and the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. (via x1x2x3ct)
Fascinating. The stuff here that fuels modernization is exploding- construction, raw materials for electronics, short cycle fashion (cotton), urban life (coffee), western lifestyle (beef), and then insane speculative bubbles driven by globalized social media hysteria (gold).
Economics is the study of human behavior as *behavior*, as opposed to a meaning making exercise. What does this say about the world in 2010? Modernity is the great arena of struggle now…
As I’ve been saying for about 15 years now - the problem is not that we are going to run out of oil. The problem is that we are never going to run out of oil.
The deposits of burnable fossil hydrocarbon fuel are huge, geological-time huge. Nuclear and renewable sources of power need to be developed to state where they are cheaper, more convenient, and more strategically sound than petrochemical energy sources.
Financially, I’d continue to bet on the profitability of oil, gas, and coal companies that have good R&D for extractive technologies, and good leases. In fact, a company like BP would have been a great bet until Deepwater Horizon.
I’ve been collecting old Western Electric 500 phones for a few years now. Usually all I’ve had to do to get them working is build a small project box that takes the crescent lugs and patches them into an RJ-45 jack. this even worked in the UK - apparently BT runs on the old Bell Labs standard - even though they have a separate hot leg for the bell.
When people use these old phones, they are astonished with the sound quality. A real diaphragm speaker in the earpiece and the same with the mike. There’s no DSP - it’s high quality analog sound… end to end if you aren’t calling long distance. I suspect that won’t be the case for long. The audiophile nut in me feels like its an experience similar to listening to a good vinyl pressing on a tube amp. Warm. Immediate.
What is gained? What is lost? Can we choose the technological locus of affect that we want to live in? Can we become “modernist amish”, curators of our own models for appropriate technology?
