- Oct 2020
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We are sharded beings; the sum total of our various aspects as contained within our biological beings as well as the myriad of technologies that we use to extend our biological abilities.
To some extent, this thesis could extend Cesar Hidalgo's concept of the personbyte as in putting part of one's self out onto the internet, one can, in some sense, contain more information than previously required.
Richard Dawkin's concept of meme extends the idea a bit further in that an individual's thoughts can infect others and spread with a variable contagion rate dependent on various variables.
I would suspect that though this does extend the idea of personbyte, there is still some limit to how large the size of a particular person's sphere could expand.
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kfitz.info kfitz.info
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Reversing the trend toward privatization will thus require not just massive public mobilization and demand of elected officials, but also a hard turn away from efficiency as a primary value, a recognition that the building of relationships and the cultivation of care is slow and difficult and of necessity inefficient. In fact, that its value lies in its inefficiency — but making the case for such inefficiency as a necessary value requires a lot of effort, and a lot of caution.
There's a kernel here of something about the value of links (social, business, etc.) as put forward by Cesar Hidalgo in Why Information Grows. Where is the real value? How can it best be extracted? Built up? Having a more direct means of valuing these otherwise seeming intangibles will be important in the future.
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- Mar 2019
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www.gardnercampbell.net www.gardnercampbell.net
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Engelbart insisted that effective intellectual augmentation was always realized within a system, and that any intervention intended to accelerate intellectual augmentation must be understood as an intervention in a system. And while at many points the 1962 report emphasizes the individual knowledge worker, there is also the idea of sharing the context of one’s work (an idea Vannevar Bush had also described in “As We May Think”), the foundation of Engelbart’s lifelong view that a crucial way to accelerate intellectual augmentation was to think together more comprehensively and effectively. One might even rewrite Engelbart’s words above to say, “We do not speak of isolated clever individuals with knowledge of particular domains. We refer to a way of life in an integrated society where poets, musicians, dreamers, and visionaries usefully co-exist with engineers, scientists, executives, and governmental leaders.” Make your own list.
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- Nov 2018
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www.twitterandteargas.org www.twitterandteargas.org
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I had begun to think of social movements’ abilities in terms of “capacities”—like the muscles one develops while exercising but could be used for other purposes like carrying groceries or walking long distances—and their repertoire of pro-test, like marches, rallies, and occupations as “signals” of those capacities.
I find it interesting that she's using words from information theory like "capacities" and "signals" here. It reminds me of the thesis of Caesar Hidalgo's Why Information Grows and his ideas about links. While within the social milieu, links may be easier to break with new modes of communication, what most protesters won't grasp or have the time and patience for is the recreation of new links to create new institutions for rule. As seen in many war torn countries, this is the most difficult part. Similarly campaigning is easy, governing is much harder.
As an example: The US government's breaking of the links of military and police forces in post-war Iraq made their recovery process far more difficult because all those links within the social hierarchy and political landscape proved harder to reconstruct.
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