Everyone knows to avoid distractions at work, but it's also important to avoid them in the other half of the cycle. When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don't avoid love.)

Nike's relationship with one of Ura-Harajuku's founding fathers and designer of the coveted Japanese label Undercover: Jun Takahashi.

Heidegger calls this Being-with (Mitsein) or Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein, also Dasein). Buddhism calls this dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) and interdependence.The late Thich Nhat Hanh, my beloved Thay, referred to it as “interbeing.”

… but the Buddha advised us to do the opposite. We have to try to go home and recognize the suffering in it and embrace it and look deeply into it. In that way, we come to understand the nature, the roots of our suffering, and we see the way out, the way of transformation and healing…

always sweated so much that I stayedfairly well ventilated in all weathers.Oversweating seems an ambivalentblessing, and it didn't exactly do won-ders for my social life in high school,but it meant I could play for hours ona Turkish-bath July day and not flag abit so long as I drank water and atesalty stuff between matches. I alwayslooked like a drowned man by aboutgame four, but I didn't cramp, vomit,or pass out, unlike the gleaming Peo-ria kids whose hair nevereven lost its part right upuntil their eyes rolled up intheir heads and theypitched forward onto theshimmering concrete

A 2017 NBER working paper, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, which suggested that “research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply,” prompted renewed conversation about scientific innovation.

Secondly, there’s a consistent emphasis on output, particularly bringing research to market. Again, this “results-driven” approach feels very tech-native to me: a belief that basic research should ultimately serve a long-term purpose that benefits humanity – and that we should try to shorten that timeline as much as possible. Most people I spoke to believe that if you can commercialize your work, you should – with the caveat, of course, that not everything can be commercialized. Even nonprofit science initiatives tend to emphasize values that are startup-inspired, such as speed, demonstrated credentials, and collaboration. Finally, there’s an implicit belief among practitioners today that change is exogeneous: we must work outside of institutions, exerting influence from the outside in, to accomplish these goals. While some organizations do partner with universities, for example, they still operate outside of a traditional academic career path.

Thiel regards competition as undesirable, because if many companies–or countries–are trying to do the same thing, none will truly stand above the others, and all will have narrower profit margins than if they were doing something unique. (This is the basis for Thiel’s notorious advocacy of monopoly.)

Thiel understands the contemporary significance of scapegoating. One of the central arguments of the book is its critique of the illusory, “horizontal” mode of progress in contrast with the “vertical” progress of technological innovation. Thiel writes: “horizontal progress is globalization–taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere.” In other words, Thiel defines globalization as a mimetic process that spreads through imitation: China, India, and other developing nations copy innovations originating elsewhere, thereby producing goods at a fraction of the cost. This is what he calls “one to n” progress, which drives most growth today, in contrast with the “zero to one” progress that he insists is what we most need.

Other forms of social organization are generally viewed as oppressive “legacy institutions” to be at best ignored or often actively undermined. This contrasts with plural institutions as it locates the individual (or at best a highly homogeneous community) rather than a subsidiary network of gradually more distant communities as the ultimate “customer” and because it focuses on the sufficiency of a single immutable ledger rather than facilitating plural technical modes, as in epistemic pluralism.

Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College and the author of The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, sketches out a more equitable path. “This is the way a lot of these advances in labor will come. Maybe the small firms [have it first], but then you also get the big, wealthier firms on board,” Schor told me. “Gig workers, hourly workers, lower-paid workers—one would hope that if this really started to take hold, then you get legislation that rolls it out for everybody.”

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?

That technologies are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into another mode has been expressed by Lyman Bryson in the phrase "technology is explicitness." Translation is thus a "spell­ing-out" of forms of knowing

hus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious aware­ness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an ex­tension of his physical body.

There is, for example, no way of refusing 1 c > comply with the new sense ratios or sense "closure" evoked by 1 l 1c TV image. But the effect of the entry of the TV image will vary from culture to culture in accordance with the existing srnsc ratios in each culture. In audile-tactile Europe TV has in-1 rnsi fted the visual sense, spurring them toward American styles of packaging and dressing. fn America, the intensely visual culture, · 1 V has opened the doors of audile-tactile perception to the non­v isual world of spoken languages and food and the plastic arts.

they have given us a theory of disease (discomfort) that goes far to explain why man is impelled to extend various parts of his body by a kind of autoamputation. In the physical stress of superstimu­lation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the off ending organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pate and increase of load. For example, in the case of the wheel as an extension of the foot, the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of ex­change by written and monetary media was the immediate oc­casion of the extension or "amputation" of this function from our bodies. The wheel as a counter-irritant to increased burdens, in tum, brings about a new intensity of action by its amplification of a separate or isolated function (the feet in rotation).

Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of ourselves involving us in a state of numbness.

Toynbee notes a great many rever­sals of form and dynamic, as when, in the middle of the fourth century A.D., the Germans in the Roman service began abruptly to be proud of their tribal names and to retain them. Such a moment marked new confidence born of saturation with Roman values, and it was a moment marked by the complementary Roman swing toward primitive values. (As Americans saturate with European values, especially since TV, they begin to insist upon American coach lamps, hitching posts, and colonial kitchenware as cultural objects.) Just as the barbarians got to the top of the Roman social ladder, the Romans themselves were disposed to assume the dress and manners of tribesmen out of the same frivolous and snobbish spirit that attached the French court of

Benda saw that the artists and intellectuals who had long been alienated from power, and who since Voltaire had been in opposition, had now been drafted for service in the highest echelons of decision-making. Their great betrayal was that they had surrendered their autonomy and had become the flun­kies of power, as the atomic physicist at the present moment is the flunky of the war lords.

The electric tape succeeds the assembly line.

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. It is like the difference between a railway system and an electric grid system: the one requires rail­heads and big urban centers. Electric power, equally available in the farmhouse and the Executive Suite, permits any place to be a center, and does not require large aggregations. This reverse pattern appeared quite early in electrical "labor-saving" devices, whether a toaster or washing machine or vacuum cleaner. Instead of saving work, these devices permit everybody to do his own work.

In fact, it is not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with population. Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another's lives.

With man his knowledge and the process of obtaining knowledge ;1rc of equal magnitude.

Or, "We can program twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week. Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know some­thing about maintaining equilibrium in the, commercial economies of the world.

ab­sorbed

The effect of electric technology had at first been anxiety. Now it appears to create boredom. We have been through the three stages of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion that occur in every disease or stress of life, whether individual or collective. At least, our exhausted slump after the first encounter with the electric has inclined us to expect new problems.

or myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.

Eighteenth-century man got an extension of himself in the form of the spinning machine that Y cats endows with its full sexual significance. Woman, herself, is thus seen as a technological extension of man's being

A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual informa­tion is provided.

Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, "He understood the grammar of gunpowder." Napoleon had paid some attention, to other media as well, especially the semaphore telegraph that gave him a great advantage over his enemies. He is on record for saying that "Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets."

The movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure.

If the TV tbbe fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good.

Examination of the origin and development of the individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society.

he mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people de­clare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude-a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all

It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.

The Theater of the Absurd

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole: of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

n the mechanical age now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern. Slow movement insured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of ttime.

Yet, they are predominantly expressed through aesthetics of consumerism, still contained within a clear neoliberal framework. Fifteen years on, the field seems to have taken this fear of left-wing ideals at heart.

But to fully exploit this potential, design needs to decouple itself from industry, develop its social imagination more fully, embrace speculative culture, and then, maybe, as MoMA curator Paola Antonelli suggests, we might see the beginnings of a theoretical form of design dedicated to thinking, reflecting, inspiring, and providing new perspectives on some of the challenges facing us.

For us, the purpose of speculation is to “unsettle the present rather than predict the future.”

Thought experiments are probably closer to conceptual art than they are to conventional design. But it is too easy to focus only on the experiment part; it is the thought bit that makes them interesting and inspirational for us. They allow us to step outside reality for a moment to try something out. This freedom is very important. Thought experiments are usually done in fields where it is possible to precisely define limits and rules, such as mathematics, science (particularly physics), and philosophy (especially ethics) to test ideas, refute theories, challenge limits, or explore possible implications.1

he book is a wonderful example of imaginative speculation grounded in systemic thinking using little more than pen-and-ink illustrations. It could so easily have been a facile fantasy thrilling us with the weirdness of each individual creature, but by tempering his speculations, Dixon guides us toward the system itself and the interconnectedness of climate, plant, and animal.

For us, Zygmunt Bauman captures the value of utopian thinking perfectly: “To measure the life “as it is” by a life as it should be (that is, a life imagined to be different from the life known, and particularly a life that is better and would be preferable to the life known) is a defining, constitutive feature of humanity.”1

There is a view that utopia is a dangerous concept that we should not even entertain because Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism are the fruits of utopian thinking

Speculating is based on imagination, the ability to literally imagine other worlds and alternatives. In Such Stuff as Dreams Keith oatley writes that “[i]magination gives us entry to abstraction, including mathematics. We gain the ability to conceive alternatives and hence to evaluate. We gain the ability to think of futures and outcomes, skills of planning. The ability to think ethically also becomes a possibility.”2There are many kinds of imagination, dark imaginations, original imaginations, social, creative, mathematical. There are also professional imaginations—the scientific imagination, the technological imagination, the artistic imagination, the sociological imagination, and of course the one we are most interested in, the design imagination

The universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of human minds and hands.

We believe that some design should always question prevailing values and their underlying assumptions and that this activity can sit beside mainstream design rather than replace it. The challenge is to keep evolving techniques that are appropriate to the times and identifying topics that need to be highlighted, reflected on, or challenged.In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik olin Wright describes emancipatory social science “as a theory of a journey from the present to a possible future: the diagnosis and critique of society tells us why we want to leave the world in which we live; the theory of alternatives tells us where we want to go; and the theory of transformation tells us how to get from here to there—how to make viable alternatives achievable.”11For us, the fulfillment of this journey is highly unlikely if is set out like a blueprint. Instead, we believe to achieve change, it is necessary to unlock people’s imaginations and apply it to all areas of life at a microscale. Critical design, by generating alternatives, can help people construct compasses rather than maps for navigating new sets of values

Designers start by identifying shortcomings in the thing they are redesigning and offer a better version. Critical design applies this to larger more complex issues. Critical design is critical thought translated into materiality.

We coined the term critical design in the mid-nineties when we were researchers in the Computer Related Design Research Studio at the Royal College of Art. It grew out of our concerns with the uncritical drive behind technological progress, when technology is always assumed to be good and capable of solving any problem. our definition then was that “critical design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life.”It was more of an attitude than anything else, a position rather than a methodology. Its opposite is affirmative design: design that reinforces the status quo

There are many possibilities—socially engaged design for raising awareness; satire and critique; inspiration, reflection, highbrow entertainment; aesthetic explorations; speculation about possible futures; and as a catalyst for change

And from a macro perspective, it’s notable that while no one has quite “cracked” UGC in audio, the biggest video platform globally (YouTube) is based on it.

It presentsphilosophical material in dialogues, such as those of Plato’s Socrates,which the reader can imagine himself overhearing. Or episodes are tobe imagined as told to a live audience on successive days. Later, in theMiddle Ages, writing will present philosophical and theological textsin objection-and-response form, so that the reader can imagine an oraldisputation. Boccaccio and Chaucer will provide the reader with fic-tional groups of men and women telling stories to one another, that is,a ‘frame story’, so that the reader can pretend to be one of the listeningcompany. But who is talking to whom in Pride and Prejudice or in Le Rouge etle noir, or in Adam Bede? Nineteenth-century novelists self-consciouslyintone, ‘dear reader’, over and over again to remind themselves

Extratextual context is missing not only for readers but also for thewriter. Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally somuch more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audi-ence. ‘The writer’s audience is always a fiction’

noetic signifi-cance of tables and lists, of which the calendar is one example. Writingmakes such apparatus possible. Indeed, writing was in a sense inventedlargely to make something like lists: by far most of the earliest writingwe know, that in the cuneiform script of the Sumerians beginningaround 3500 , is account-keeping.

In the period he studies, Clanchy finds that ‘documents did notimmediately inspire trust’ (Clanchy 1979, p. 230). People had to bepersuaded that writing improved the old oral methods sufficiently towarrant all the expense and troublesome techniques it involved.

The reason why the alphabet was invented so late and why it wasinvented only once can be sensed if we reflect on the nature of sound.For the alphabet operates more directly on sound as sound than theother scripts, reducing sound directly to spatial equivalents, and insmaller, more analytic, more manageable units than a syllabary: insteadof one symbol for the sound ba, you have two, b plus a.

somesymbols were pictographs, some ideographs, some rebuses)

Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essen-tially the same objections commonly urged today against computerswere urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letteragainst writing.

Jousse (1925)used his term verbomoteur to refer chiefly to ancient Hebrew and Aramaiccultures and surrounding cultures, which knew some writing butremained basically oral and word-oriented in lifestyle rather thanobject-oriented. We are expanding its use here to include all culturesthat retain enough oral residue to remain significantly word-attentivein a person-interactive context (the oral type of context) rather thanobject-attentive.

Goody’s findings here, and the findings of others (Opland 1975;1976), make it clear that oral peoples at times do try for verbatimrepetition of poems or other oral art forms. What is their success? Mostoften it is minimal by literate standards.

A chirographic (writing) culture and even more a typographic(print) culture can distance and in a way denature even the human,itemizing such things as the names of leaders and political divisions inan abstract, neutral list entirely devoid of a human action context. Anoral culture has no vehicle so neutral as a list.

Two introductory ‘ands’, each submerged in a compound sentence.The Douay renders the Hebrew we or wa (‘and’) simply as ‘and’. TheNew American renders it ‘and’, ‘when’, ‘then’, ‘thus’, or ‘while’, toprovide a flow of narration with the analytic, reasoned subordinationthat characterizes writing (Chafe 1982) and that appears more naturalin twentieth-century texts.

Protracted orally based thought, even when not in formal verse,tends to be highly rhythmic, for rhythm aids recall, even physiologic-ally. Jousse (1978) has shown the intimate linkage between rhythmicoral patterns, the breathing process, gesture, and the bilateral sym-metry of the human body in ancient Aramaic and Hellenic targums,and thus also in ancient Hebrew.

There is no way to stop sound and have sound. I can stop a movingpicture camera and hold one frame fixed on the screen.

Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what aprimary oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no knowledge what-soever of writing or even of the possibility of writing. Try to imagine aculture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.

Instead of wheels, the wheel-less automobiles have enlarged toenails called hooves; instead of head-lights or perhaps rear-vision mirrors, eyes; instead of a coat of lacquer,something called hair; instead of gasoline for fuel, hay, and so on. Inthe end, horses are only what they are not.

This is tosay, a literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is topurely oral people.

As a result – though at aslightly reduced frequency now – scholarship in the past has generatedsuch monstrous concepts as ‘oral literature’. This strictly preposterousterm remains in circulation today even among scholars now more andmore acutely aware how embarrassingly it reveals our inability to rep-resent to our own minds a heritage of verbally organized materialsexcept as some variant of writing, even when they have nothing to dowith writing at all. The title of the great Milman Parry Collection ofOral Literature at Harvard University monumentalizes the state ofawareness of an earlier generation of scholars rather than that of itsrecent curators.

In the West among the ancient Greeks the fascination showed in theelaboration of the vast, meticulously worked-out art of rhetoric, themost comprehensive academic subject in all western culture for twothousand years. In its Greek original, techne ̄ rhe ̄torike ̄, ‘speech art’ (com-monly abridged to just rhe ̄torike ̄) referred essentially to oral speaking,even though as a reflective, organized ‘art’ or science – for example, inAristotle’s Art of Rhetoric – rhetoric was and had to be a product ofwriting. Rhe ̄torike ̄, or rhetoric, basically meant public speaking or ora-tory, which for centuries even in literate and typographic culturesremained unreflexively pretty much the paradigm of all discourse,including that of writing (Ong 1967b, pp. 58–63; Ong 1971, pp. 27–8). Thus writing from the beginning did not reduce orality but en-hanced it,

A grapholect is a transdialectal languageformed by deep commitment to writing. Writing gives a grapholect apower far exceeding that of any purely oral dialect. The grapholectknown as standard English has accessible for use a recorded vocabularyof at least a million and a half words, of which not only the presentmeanings but also hundreds of thousands of past meanings are known.A simply oral dialect will commonly have resources of only a fewthousand words, and its users will have virtually no knowledge of thereal semantic history of any of these words.

Indeed, language is so overwhelm-ingly oral that of all the many thousands of languages – possibly tens ofthousands – spoken in the course of human history only around 106have ever been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to haveproduced literature, and most have never been written at all. Of thesome 3000 languages spoken that exist today only some 78 have aliterature (Edmonson 1971, pp. 323, 332).

We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousandwords. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying?Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special condi-tions – which commonly include a context of words in which thepicture is set.

I wondered whether China might one day produce a story of such power. Or if instead every new work must encapsulate core socialist values and the spirit of the 19th party congress.

The two blockbusters released this year (Guan Hu’s Eight Hundred and Zhang Yimou’s One Second) were both mysteriously pulled from festivals and released to the public this year after the state demanded edits

Frank Pieke has termed “neo-socialism,” which is the attempt to harness market liberalization to strengthen state capacity and a more Leninist party. 14 In return, the state provides purpose and direction, as well as inspiring the rest of society with a transformative mission.

Thus I’ve arrived at the idea that a commitment to centralized campaigns of inspiration, represented by the tendency to fix clear goals, is the booster stage required to leave the gravitational pull of decadence and complacency. Ross Douthat laments that “a consistent ineffectuality in American governance is just the way things are.” 12 And he references Jacques Barzun, who defines a decadent society as one that is “peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance.” As a society turns developed, its main problems become social: an organizational sclerosis, which no technology is sophisticated enough to solve. No great effort is required to identify the comprehensive paralysis in the US. And that is the political and social current that Xi is trying to reverse in China.

Xi has decided that corruption is not a mystery to be endured, but a problem to be solved. A few years past the peak of the crackdown, it’s fair to say that the campaign hasn’t solely been effective in removing his adversaries, but has also been broad enough to restore some degree of public confidence in government.

Alongside the companies that gather data, there are newly powerful companies that build the tools for organizing, processing, accessing, and visualizing it—companies that don’t take in the traces of our common life but set the terms on which it is sorted and seen. The scraping of publicly available photos, for instance, and their subsequent labeling by low-paid human workers, served to train computer vision algorithms that Palantir can now use to help police departments cast a digital dragnet across entire populations. 

Ostrom also specified that commons came with boundaries. A commoning process, to include some, had to exclude others. What is needed, who needs it, and how to claim it are hotly contested political questions in our moment—particularly in the midst of a global pandemic. Who will ensure that the answers to these questions are found fairly?

“This isn’t him going to grab a beer with guys. He’s going to find psychological and emotional support from men who understand his problems,” Liz explains. “They’re not just getting together to have a bitch fest, gossip, or complain about their lives. They’re super intentional about what they’re talking about, why, and what’s important to them.”