India is unusual in having two shared public “pets”. Dogs are the ones that I’ve seen before in other countries, prowling every street and temple. These puppies with their sore-furred mum are in Pushkar. Unusually, people feed them. The other day while waiting for a safari at a tiger reserve, I saw a woman feed […]
The next page I found in the notebook (after the last one) is my own view of the problem of information goods having zero marginal cost, so not functioning within capitalism. Paul Mason describes this in Postcapitalism. Walking through the diagram… “Zero marginal cost newtech” is the starting point. A “marginal cost” is a business […]
I found another oldish notebook. It’s about the edge of chaos. The more lightly shaded left hand edge is absence, null, non existence. The dark shaded right hand side is total chaos, randomness. The sharp line down the middle is the edge of chaos – where things are balanced, interest lies, life grows. There are […]
Drifting in the sea of political beliefs, left and right don’t seem to have any meaning any more. It’s possible to make up new axes. Alas, these aren’t grounded in real views of the population, instead they’re distorted by the politics of their creators. Luckily, there is a way of finding actual axes by experiment, […]
Thanks to the excellent Thinking Liverpool [1], a lunchtime talk about the history of libraries caught my eye. I mention the history of public libraries worryingly often. I make an analogy between libraries in the age of the printing pres and the modern need for equivalently novel public institutions in the age of the networked […]
I found some notes I’d written at the start of this notebook, a few months old. I used to campaign in Cambridge for more Fairtrade coffee and chocolate. That was a “closed” tactic, as opposed to an “open” tactic like open source software or open data. It worked – even the best selling chocolate bar […]
The fabulous Redecentralize Conference was organised by Ira and a bunch of other volunteers. Its subject – how do we make the net resilient, private and fun again? It was an unconference, so I decided to do a session on a personal itch I’ve had for the last few years – file synchronisation and backup. […]
The topic of how to make our information society safe and fair regularly comes up in conversations. I think we need some quite big, radical things. They’ll need new public service Internet organisations to implement. This is my high level view list. 1. Access to culture “People have too much knowledge already: it was much […]
This mad dash bad mixen fun up down world. Forces smash hither and fither, 7 billion of us strange qualia, doing, being human. Web culture, open source culture… sucked out of academia, hacking, sharing, making, funning, building. Just late enough for usability to be just there just cheap enough. Smashed with. Political culture… burnt out, […]
How is she going to vote? My friend (let’s call her F) just doesn’t know. This isn’t unusual – about 20% of voters are like her (see Q3). She needs to work it out fast. She doesn’t like polling stations, so has a postal vote. She has to decide this weekend – or she’ll get […]