… for me, the only real case, or the only real evidence for what a world without technology looks like is the past and the… Read More »Technology (14): Only Forward? Kevin Kelly on tech and cities as possibility factories
This is an extract from Douglas Rae’s lecture Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and an Economic System Incapable of Coming to Rest, which unpacks some of… Read More »Technology (13): Marx, Schumpeter, Howard Head’s Tennis Racquet, and how the world melts
This post contains a few snapshots from a post by Jerry Neumann (The Deployment Age) and a great overview on the Death and Birth of… Read More »Technology (12): Rise and Fall, Part 2
Why is the transition from one techno-economic system to another so disruptive for companies and individuals? On rookies and old pros We know that it… Read More »Technology (11): The World Turned Upside Down; or, the rise and fall of techno-economic regimes
If you haven’t come across it yet, Jeremy Norman‘s HistoryOfInformation.com is absolutely tremendous. It contains “more than 5,000 illustrated entries covering a diverse range of… Read More »Technology (10): a historyofinformation
Writing History by Messing Around As far as we know, writing has been invented four times in human history. The big four are Sumerian cuneiform,… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (4): Innovation at Play; or, A Loaded Pun
Technology often advances at the margins, where new problems challenge people to adapt old tools or to make new ones. (See also Hybrids (2): combinations… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (3): Marginal Revolutions
Elon Musk isn’t (just) building cars at Tesla. He started by building a car, but the end was never the car: the end was a… Read More »The machine that makes the machine; or, matryoshkas of change
Writing as Infant Technology … the thing about new technologies… is that it takes several generations for us to decide what they’re good for. They’re… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked Beginnings
We often think of writing (and reading) as primarily a matter of culture and education, which obscures its position as one of humanity’s most transformative… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (1): Transforming Fire; Slow Burn