It is now approaching two decades since the company now known as Alphabet started its attack against rational media [1], and at the same time started promoting its own brand names (such as Google). Other companies in the irrational media space have likewise fed mainstream consumers with similar myths regarding their own algorithms. All of… Continue reading Consumer Culture Technology, Cancel Culture Technology & Other Cultural Technologies (?)
Order + Dis-Order
My thinking about the complexity of the world was significantly influenced by a book recommendation I followed up on about a decade ago. It was summer, so one of my friends asked about influential books … and a friend of hers mentioned “The Social Construction of Reality” (by Berger & Luckmann). I decided to read… Continue reading Order + Dis-Order
Know “No”
Today I would like to simply share a rather straightforward insight: politicians rarely — if ever — say “No”. The way normal people can nonetheless identify and recognize a politician’s opposition to an idea is as follows: The politician will say “Yes” — and commit to this yes in the very far-off, distant future …… Continue reading Know “No”
Chaos vs. Reliability
There is a very widespread prejudice against dependence. Dependence is generally considered to be bad, and independence is generally considered to be good. A little over half a century ago, a musician named Carlos Santana published a song called “I Ain’t Got Nobody (That I can Depend On)” (or simply “No One to Depend On”).… Continue reading Chaos vs. Reliability
The further on I go, the less I know
Wittgenstein had a saying about “die Grenzen meiner Sprache”, namely that these correspond to “die Grenzen meiner Welt”. [1] In my not-so humble opinion, this quote misses something very fundamental about language: that it does not exist in any “particular individual” (see also the previous post, “Self Mythology“). Language is a technology that exists between… Continue reading The further on I go, the less I know
Self Mythology
This week a person near and dear to me used a particular term in a rather peculiar way … which I feel is at least odd, which I do not subscribe to, and which also seems confusing and misguided (from my point of view). Yet I cannot call it “wrong“, judging by what I can… Continue reading Self Mythology
Swarming Around
On the verge of solstice [1], let’s consider time some more. Amidst the bees buzzing around here and there, ideas have also been swarming around in my mind. First and foremost: it seems like swarms never die. Individuals die, swarms live on forever (more or less). Sure, extinction will do in a swarm, but isn’t… Continue reading Swarming Around
Lifetime Guarantee for How Natural Languages Scale
In the last episode, we looked at a few different scales — implicitly, from technology and product life cycles, through writing, biology and genetic information all the way across the universe back to the Big Bang itself. Seen this way, the irony of seeing writing and written langages as something permanent becomes crystal clear. Perhaps… Continue reading Lifetime Guarantee for How Natural Languages Scale
Rates of Evolution
Evolution is often thought of as a single thing. Yet’s it’s not even a thing at all — it’s a phenomenon, a figment of our imaginations, one way that we interpret the world we live in. It is perhaps one of our most abstract scientific concepts. At the same time, no one even just somewhat… Continue reading Rates of Evolution
Mainstreaming vs. Mass Throttling
This week I am very much under the influence of a few podcasts which address (or “report” on) topics I find fascinating, yet which are not directly in the “wheelhouse” of my interests. The topics covered, while somewhat similar, seem rather unconnected (apart from both being related to my own interest in such topics as… Continue reading Mainstreaming vs. Mass Throttling
Socio Business blog 