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"Once we had our data, we divided it up into works set in the Near Future (0-50 years from the time the work came out), Middle Future (51-500 years from the time the work came out) and Far Future (501+ years from the time the work came out)."
"Which is great when you're in one of the fields that's meant to serve as the grand and inspirational challenge. For the rest of us, though, this is trickle-down science: the best and the brightest get fired up to be rocket scientists, or high-energy particle physicists, and those who aren't quite the best or the brightest, well... they can study condensed matter physics, or something less inspirational. They'll still be an upgrade over the riff-raff who are presumably populating those fields now. You know, the ones motivated by wanting to save the world from cancer, or hunger, or pestilence.
Not only is this kind of insulting to those of us who have chosen to make careers in fields that aren't driven by Big Science, it's not remotely sustainable. If getting people to go into science and engineering is dependent on something as ephemeral as "inspiration," we're forever going to be careening from boom to bust."
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A sustainable solution to the supply of scientists and engineers can't be built around lightning-in-a-bottle scenarios like the Apollo era space race, where an exceptional combination of military goals and national pride happened to align with science for a time, spurring great progress. It's great if it happens, but as David Kaiser documents in How the Hippies Saved Physics, it had a cost for the generation of physicists who were coming along just as the national security establishment started to lose interest. It looks a little like the same sort of thing might be happening in the life sciences, where a huge influx of cash into the NIH drove unsustainable growth for a while, and the flattening out of those budgets is creating a big problem for young researchers.
"To ask questions about how to live life, to question whether you should be doing what you are doing, is indeed admirable. But to conclude that a positive attitude can solve all problems is naive and denies the possibility to enact change, when necessary, on your circumstances."
"These facts do not provide much evidence for the thesis in Why Nations Fail that China’s leaders constitute a self-serving and venal “extractive” elite. Unfortunately, such indications seem far more apparent when we direct our gaze inward, toward the recent economic and social trajectory of our own country
Against the backdrop of remarkable Chinese progress, America mostly presents a very gloomy picture. Certainly America’s top engineers and entrepreneurs have created many of the world’s most important technologies, sometimes becoming enormously wealthy in the process. But these economic successes are not typical nor have their benefits been widely distributed. Over the last 40 years, a large majority of American workers have seen their real incomes stagnate or decline."
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However, although American micro-corruption is rare, we seem to suffer from appalling levels of macro-corruption, situations in which our various ruling elites squander or misappropriate tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth, sometimes doing so just barely on one side of technical legality and sometimes on the other.
Sweden is among the cleanest societies in Europe, while Sicily is perhaps the most corrupt. But suppose a large clan of ruthless Sicilian Mafiosi moved to Sweden and somehow managed to gain control of its government. On a day-to-day basis, little would change, with Swedish traffic policemen and building inspectors performing their duties with the same sort of incorruptible efficiency as before, and I suspect that Sweden’s Transparency International rankings would scarcely decline. But meanwhile, a large fraction of Sweden’s accumulated national wealth might gradually be stolen and transferred to secret Cayman Islands bank accounts, or invested in Latin American drug cartels, and eventually the entire plundered economy would collapse.
Ordinary Americans who work hard and seek to earn an honest living for themselves and their families appear to be suffering the ill effects of exactly this same sort of elite-driven economic pillage. The roots of our national decline will be found at the very top of our society, among the One Percent, or more likely the 0.1 percent.
"The more I study technology, the more I tend to the view that it is a single connected whole. Recurring motifs like container ships can turn into obsessions precisely because they offer glimpses of a cryptic God. An object for the devoutly atheist and anti-humanist soul to seek in perpetuity, but never quite comprehend.
I go on infrastructure pilgrimages. I write barely readable pop-theology treatises with ponderous titles like The Baroque Unconscious in Technology, and I do my little dabbling with math, software and hardware on the side.
But I still haven’t seen It. Just an elbow here, a shoulder blade there. And I make my modest attempts to measure those distances."
"David closes by returning to his original question: why were old knowledge systems so fragile? These systems assumed knowledge was bounded, settled, orderly and proceeded step by step. But that’s not what knowledge feels like in the age of the internet. It feels unbounded, overwhelming, unsettled, messy, linked and governed by our interests. And those properties are the properties of what it means to be human in the world.
“Networked knowledge may or may not be truer about the world, but is is truer about knowing… This crazy approach to knowledge feels familiar to us, because it’s how we tend to know.” He closes with an observation that’s both hopeful and unsettling: “What we have in common is a shared world about which we disagree, not a common knowledge we share and can collectively come to.”"
"Is the participant-level even the right perspective from which to try to identify an explanation? I don't think so. Were conditions in this factory harsh because this owner was hostile or cruel towards these particular workers? No, rather because the competitive environment of profitability and accumulation created an inexorable race to the bottom. So we can't explain this factory's working conditions by referring to specific features of this factory and its owner. This logic is spelled out very clearly in Capital, and it is a system-level characteristic."
"What I want to write about here, though, is the connection between political views and attitudes toward economic foundations."
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This correlation between political attitude and intellectual orientation makes sense: rational choice is related to the idea that people are making the best choices for themselves, which in turn is related to the conservative ideas of minimal taxation and redistribution. This is not a strict logical relation—it could well be that redistribution could improve the outcomes from individuals’ rational decisions—but I see the connection. The liberal argues that the government should do X (for example, provide free preschool), the conservative retorts that parents who don’t send their kids to preschool are making an informed choice and the government shouldn’t interfere.
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This all seems natural—but I could also imagine the correlation going the other way. A key theme of conservative thinking, now and in the past, is skepticism of systematizers, utopians, and “isms” in general. It would make a lot of sense to me if a liberal such as Paul Krugman (following the example of his liberal and technocratic forebear, Paul Samuelson) to lean heavily on a rational-actor model (perhaps tweaked a bit via prospect theory etc), and conversely for a conservative to distrust the clean simplicity of utility theory and, as a conservative, feel more comfortable with the real-world ambiguities of decision making as revealed by psychology research. Similarly, I could well imagine a pragmatic conservative resisting the rationalists’ backstop claim that, even if people are not individually rational, in aggregate they act as if they are behaving according to a utility function.
"I can see several reasons for why organization theorists don’t engage with these types of, “futurist” questions. First, theories of organization tend to lag practice. That is, organizational scholars describe and explain the world (in its current or past state), though they don’t often engage in speculative forecasting (about possible future states). Second, many of the organizational sub-fields suited for wide-eyed speculation are in a bit of a lull, or they represent small niches. For example, organization design isn’t a super “hot” area these days (certainly with exceptions) — despite its obvious importance. Institutional and environmental theories of organization have taken hold in many parts, and agentic theories are often seen as overly naive. Environmental and institutional theories of course are valuable, but they delimit and are incremental, and are perhaps just self-fulfilling and thus may not always be practically helpful for thinking about the future.
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"Some things were broadly shared by “anarcho-liberals”: an anti-intellectualism that manifested itself in a rejection of “grand narratives” and structural critiques of capitalism, abhorrence for the traditional forms of left-wing organization, a localist impulse, and an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action. The worst of both worlds, the “anarcho-liberal” can neither manage the capitalist state nor overcome it, and aspires to do both and neither at the same time."
"But, as they say, that was then. This is now. The call to “improvise” comes in an entirely different context than its predecessors of ’68 and the late 90s. The sustained civic engagement; the focus on economic rights; the olive branches extended to labor; the resurrection of the general strike; hell, just the phrase “we are the 99%,” all work in concord to dispel many of the problems exhibited by the anarcho-liberal. That having been said, there are obviously profound similarities in OWS’s refusal to make demands and the character of “post-territorial” or symbolic politics. Does this matter? Probably. One hopes that it foments significant discussion, disagreement, dialogue and reckonings with past mistakes. But these concerns — i.e., worry that engaging the question of “what next?” will be forestalled by placing organizational regard over the articulation of a platform — are not a call for a return to traditional forms of political engagement. "
"Although the term “Tactical Media” may be unfamiliar to some readers, its ethos and freight are in evidence in bookstores, classrooms, activist canteens, and artist co-ops. And doubly so a decade ago. The phenomenon arose in late 80s/early 90s, unnamed, in the unholy union of techno-anarcho utopians (think R. U. Sirius, the triumphalist techno-fetishist spirit of Mondo 2000, and the brashness of industrial avant-garde) and the ascendant mode of political pranking dubbed “culture jamming” (think Adbusters and anti-advertising/anti-consumerist sentiment). In both instances there was an enthusiasm for technology, tacticality, and autonomism. And again, in both instances micro-politics replaced the macro. These were movements more preoccupied with stealth and speed than with the lumbering political processes of yesteryear. "
"Infrastructure tends to be conceived as stabilized and ‘black-boxed’ with little interaction from users. This fixity is in flux in ways not yet fully considered in either geography or science and technology studies (STS). Driven by environmental and economic concerns, water utilities are increasingly introducing efficiency technologies into infrastructure networks. These, I argue, serve as ‘mediating technologies’ shifting long-accepted socio-technical and environmental relationships in cities. The essay argues for a new approach to infrastructure that, by integrating insights from STS and geography, highlights its malleability and offers conceptual tools to consider how this malleability might be fostered. "
"In June 2010, a team of scientists and intrepid explorers stepped onto the shore of the lava lake boiling in the depths of Nyiragongo Crater, in the heart of the Great Lakes region of Africa."
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