Technology and the Baroque Unconscious
This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series Psychohistory| ribbonfarm
Archives for August 2007| www.ribbonfarm.com
Update – 4/28/11: the Stealth Edition has now been discontinued. Please check out the book site and buy the regular edition, available from Amazon.com. Thanks to the over 200 people who bought the Stealth Edition and get the buzz going.| www.ribbonfarm.com
This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series Psychohistory| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series Psychohistory| ribbonfarm
To diagnose somebody’s worldview, the single most effective test is to ask about their end-of-the-world opinions. You find out whether they have tragic or idealistic worldviews. You learn about their morality. You find out whether they are self-centric, ethnocentric, anthropocentric, bio-centric, enviro-centric or cosmos-centric. You get at how they ride the tension between individualism and collectivism. Attitudes towards grit and survival shine through. You get a read on their views of po...| ribbonfarm
Archives for April 2012| www.ribbonfarm.com
Archives for March 2015| www.ribbonfarm.com
constructions in magical thinking| www.ribbonfarm.com
About Renee DiResta| www.ribbonfarm.com
Archives for May 2017| www.ribbonfarm.com
Occasionally engineering provides me with startling perspectives on art. This happened for me with the third book in the Harry Potter series, the Prisoner of Azkaban, generally acknowledged to be the most accomplished of the series. Critics make a compelling case that among the movies too, Alfonso Cuaron’s treatment of this book has been the best of the lot so far, and better than even the book itself. So let me offer you a perspective on why the third book and movie are great, based on an ...| ribbonfarm
This is a guest post by Craig Roche, a data scientist and artisanal landlord.| www.ribbonfarm.com
Archives for January 2010| www.ribbonfarm.com
This entry is part 3 of 10 in the series Fiction| ribbonfarm
Archives for November 2018| www.ribbonfarm.com
One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras. The first six years of this blog were the Rust Age (2007-12). The next six years were the Snowflake Age (2013-18). We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age. | ribbonfarm
There is a short paragraph in Steven Johnson’s excellent Mind Wide Open that, for me, marks a turning point in both popular science writing about the brain, and pop psychology. Here is the bit that was an Aha! moment for me:| ribbonfarm
There are four major approaches to decision-making: deliberative, reactive, procedural and opportunistic. The first three are well-understood. Academics study them, business and military leaders practice them, self-improvement gurus teach them and hippies protest them. Ordinary people understand them in common-sense ways. Opportunism though, is both the least-understood and highest-impact approach to decision-making. Here is my immodest 101.| ribbonfarm
Note: the ideas in this post have been significantly refined and turned into a book. The treatment here is somewhat obsolete as a result, but the spirit of my revised arguments remain the same.| ribbonfarm
Do labels like “broad thinker,” “generalist,” “synthesizer,” “right-brained,” or “conceptualizer” get at aspects of a coherent personality type? Call this mind the “Da Vinci” mind for short. Recently, two rather interesting takes on such minds have appeared: A Whole New Mind (WNM) by Dan Pink and Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner. Do you have what these two authors think is the kind of mind that will dominate the future? Are you sure you want such a mind, ev...| ribbonfarm
In a previous article, I reviewed some of the troubles ailing superstring theory, as chronicled by two prominent and articulate discontents. Among the more radical suggestions for fixing physics is to get away from continuous models altogether and ask if the universe is fundamentally a discrete entity in some way. Proponents of this view — called digital physics or nearly-equivalently, digital philosophy— take on not one but two terrifying tasks. Not only must they reconstruct centuries o...| ribbonfarm
Archives for February 2008| www.ribbonfarm.com
Archives for March 2008| www.ribbonfarm.com
Archives for January 2011| www.ribbonfarm.com
This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series Worlding Raga| ribbonfarm
Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams| ribbonfarm
Archives for July 2007| www.ribbonfarm.com
Archives for October 2010| www.ribbonfarm.com
Today, January 7th, was a brutal bitch of a day, and it was a great day. Every grim reality of the cloudworker lifestyle, the dark side of everything from mobility and laptops to eating on the run and elite car-rental status, hit me with full force. Both my New Year’s resolutions were hammered by gale-force winds. The business of life hit many potholes, and the game of work threatened to fall apart on me. But I not only survived, I actually made it a better-than-average day. I made it all w...| ribbonfarm
The phrase creative destruction has resonated with me since I first heard it, and since then, it has been an organizing magnet in my mind for a variety of ideas. I was reminded of the concept again this weekend while reading William Duggan’s Strategic Intuition, which mentioned Joseph Schumpeter as a source of inspiration. Visually, I associate the phrase most with Escher’s etching, Liberation, which shows a triangular tessellation transforming into a flock of birds. As the eye travels u...| ribbonfarm
Archives for July 2010| www.ribbonfarm.com
The catchphrase of Henry Chesbrough’s work on innovation (a doctrine called “open innovation” and described in Open Innovation, 2003, and Open Business Models, 2006), is “not all the smart people work for you.” The key operational message that corporations seem to take away from it though, is “buy and sell intellectual property vigorously and throw some money at universities.” Somewhere along the way unfortunately, a sophisticated reconstruction of the logic of innovation become...| ribbonfarm
For the last week, John Muir quotes have been floating into my head. Uninvited, but not unwelcome. This one in particular has been gently tugging at my attention:| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Ribbonfarm Lab| www.ribbonfarm.com
This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series Psychohistory| ribbonfarm
Our cartoon view of history goes straight from the Flintstones to Jetsons without developmental stages of any consequence in between. Hunter-gatherers and settled modern civilizations loom large, as bookends, in our study of history. The more I study history though, the more I realize that hunter-gatherer lifestyles are mostly of importance in evolutionary prehistory, not in history proper. If you think about history proper, a different lifestyle, pastoral nomadism, starts to loom large, and ...| ribbonfarm
Like most of you, I have no idea what I am doing 98.3% of the time I make a decision. Of that slice of the pie, I am actively getting it not-even-wrong 93% of the time. I bumble through on the strength of the 5.3% of the time I get it right by accident, and the 1.7% of the time a dim sense of direction lasts long enough that I can think more than one step ahead.| ribbonfarm
A series on technology in politics by Renee DiResta| www.ribbonfarm.com
Long-time reader and astute commenter, Xianhang (Hang) Zhang wrote a very interesting post a couple of weeks ago on his blog: The Evaporative Cooling Effect. It is part of a fascinating series he is doing on social software. The post explores a phenomenon that is very close to the status illegibility phenomenon I explored two weeks ago, and in fact draws inspiration from the same Groucho Marx/Lake Wobegon observations that I started with.| ribbonfarm
Self-help ideas generally belong to one of three schools of thought, whether the originators realize it or not: values-first, goals-first or process-first. Norman Vincent Peale (Power of Positive Thinking, 1952), Wayne W. Dyer (Erroneous Zones, 1976) and David Allen (GTD, 2002) are the authors of the pioneering mainstream classics of each sub-genre. Those dates are significant: the schools evolved and matured in that order, each building on the last to some extent.| ribbonfarm
About Venkatesh Rao| www.ribbonfarm.com
Once every four or five years, I find a book that is a genuine life-changer. Impro by Keith Johnstone joins my extremely short list of such books. The book crossed my radar after two readers mentioned it, in reactions to the Gervais Principle series Impro is ostensibly a book about improvisation and the theater. Depending on where you are coming from, it might be no more than that, or it might be a near-religious experience.| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 2 of 10 in the series Fiction| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series The Feed| ribbonfarm
There are certain books that invite a certain mischievous kind of self-referential review. Strategic Intuition is about that key insight which organizes a mass of simmering raw information-input into an elegant decision about a course of action. So the moment I got the book’s theme, the first question that popped into my mind was: does this book contain the strategic intuition about strategic intuition? The answer is no, but this is still a pretty thought-provoking addition to the popular l...| ribbonfarm
Throughout the last year, I’ve been increasingly troubled by a set of vague thoughts centered on the word addiction. Addiction as a concept has expanded for me, over the last few months, beyond its normal connotations, to encompass the entire consumer economy. Disturbing shows like Hoarders have contributed to my growing sense that conventional critiques of consumerism are either missing or marginalizing something central, and that addiction has something to do with it. These vague, troub...| ribbonfarm
Clayton Christenson’s seminal The Innovator’s Dilemma is now 10 years old, and its central idea of “disruptive innovation” is now part of the everyday language of innovation. Recently, I finally read the book after having loosely tossed the term around for a few years. I was shocked to discover that I had misunderstood the concept and made glib assumptions based on sloppy journalistic references. Properly penitent, I began using the term correctly and discovered, to my further shock,...| ribbonfarm
Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization is a must-read for those who want to develop a deeper understanding of a lot of the stuff I talk about here. Though I’ve cited the book lots of times, it is one of those dense, complex books that I am never going to attempt to review or summarize. You’ll just have to read it. But I figured since I refer to it so much, I need at least a simple anchor post about it. So I thought I’d summarize the main idea with a picture, and point out some quick c...| ribbonfarm
In the first two parts of this series, we talked about the archetypes that inhabit organizations (Sociopaths, Losers, Clueless), what they do (the Gervais Principle) and how (the four languages). In this part, we’ll use a somewhat unorthodox take on the idea of arrested development to explain why the three groups behave as they do, and use that to predict the outcomes of individual interpersonal interactions.| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 3 of 12 in the series Narrativium| ribbonfarm
Perhaps it is professional burnout, but lately I’ve been getting extremely tired of all the stupid things people say about innovation. Especially stupid positive things. A great deal of the stupidity in the conversation about innovation is driven by the desperate urge to be original for the sake of being original. There is a pervasive, unexamined assumption that originality is always a good thing. Copycats, by Oded Shenkar is a delightful little book that takes on a project that I strongly ...| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 10 of 15 in the series Psychohistory| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 9 of 15 in the series Psychohistory| ribbonfarm
The digital economy has taught us a lot about one extreme of pricing: zero. The price-point of zero is a place where weird things happen. We now know what it is to have our attention productized in three-way attention markets. We understand what it means to devalue to a zero price, things which required nonzero effort to produce. Perhaps most importantly, we know what it is like to constantly be inundated by advertising, the sine qua non of zero-point economics. The zero-point economy ha...| ribbonfarm
I’ve been experimenting lately with aphorisms. Pithy one-liners of the sort favored by writers like La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). My goal was to turn a relatively big idea, the sort I would normally turn into a 4000-word post, into a one-liner. After many failed attempts over the last few months, a few weeks ago, I finally managed to craft one I was happy with:| ribbonfarm
A few weeks ago, I learned about something called crash-only software (ht, Robert Greco). This is software that has no normal “start” or “stop” mechanisms. It can only be stopped by crashing it. Often this means unplugging the computer physically. It can only be restarted through some sort of failure-recovery routine, with a hard reboot being the most extreme kind. There’s a whole theory of crash-only software design apparently.| ribbonfarm
The Heirloom Lounge| www.ribbonfarm.com
This entry is part 6 of 10 in the series Fiction| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 1 of 10 in the series Fiction| ribbonfarm
Over the past few months I read Hannah “Banality of Evil” Arendt’s difficult and idiosyncratic (somewhat unnecessarily so) but highly rewarding 1958 classic The Human Condition. This slide-deck is a deep-dive attempt to apply her philosophy to the post-software-eats-world human condition, which I call the computational condition. Maybe digital condition or post-technological condition would be better, but I like alliteration.| ribbonfarm
There is a saying that goes back to Milo of Croton: lift a calf everyday and when you grow up, you can lift a cow. The story goes that Milo, a famous wrestler in ancient Greece, gained his immense strength by lifting a newborn calf one day when he was a boy, and then lifting it every day as it grew. In a few years, he was able to lift the grown cow. The calf grew into a cow at about the rate that Milo grew into a man. A rather freakish man apparently, since grown cows can weigh over 1000 ...| ribbonfarm
Recently, one of my projects went through a rapid, but nearly imperceptible phase change. It went from being an “innovation-first” project to being a “marketing-first” project. The marketing hat feels at once comfortable and uncomfortable, familiar and unfamiliar. It feels like listening to unfamiliar lyrics set to a familiar tunes. This disconcerting feeling of being caught up in the dance of a yin-yang pair has had me pondering the best-known Drucker quote (from The Essential Drucke...| ribbonfarm
We began this analysis of corporate life by exploring a theoretical construct (the Gervais Principle) through the character arcs of Michael and Ryan in The Office. The construct and examples provide a broad-strokes treatment of the why of the power dynamics among Sociopaths, the Clueless and Losers.| ribbonfarm
The fundamental question of life, the universe and everything is the one popularized by the Verizon guy in the ad: Can you hear me now?| ribbonfarm
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I’ve decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com domain and all links will remain active, but there will be no new content after November 13th, 2024, which happens to be my 50th birthday. There will be one final roundup post before then, and perhaps a shortish epitaph post. And the main page will switch to a static landing page. But after that date, this will effectively be a museum...| ribbonfarm
I tend to split what you call infinite horizon into two parts:| ribbonfarm
I ran across the alarming phrase intellectual menopause a few months ago in John Gall’s Systemantics, and it naturally stuck in my brain given I’m pushing 50 and getting predictably angsty about it. The phrase conjures up visions of a phenomenon much more profound and unfunny than the more familiar one we know as midlife crises. It sounds much worse than merely buying a sports car and chasing younger women. And if you chase down the idea, it turns out it is worse. And sadder. And unfunnier.| ribbonfarm
I don’t like or use the term scientific method. Instead, I prefer the phrase scientific sensibility. The idea of a “scientific method” suggests that a certain subtle approach to engaging the world can be reduced to a codified behavior. It confuses a model of justification for a model of discovery. It attempts to locate the reliability of a certain subjective approach to discovery in a specific technique.| ribbonfarm
I like to make a distinction between imagination and creativity that you may or may not agree with. Imagination is the ability to see known possibilities as being reachable from a situation. Creativity is the ability to manufacture new possibilities out of a situation. The two form a continuous spectrum of regimes in simple cases, but are disconnected in complex cases.| ribbonfarm
Ever since I got a bout of Covid a couple of years ago (late 2022), I’ve noticed memory problems of a very specific sort: Difficulty remembering names. Especially people names, but also other sorts of proper nouns. This is especially marked when it comes to remembering names of actors or authors, or not-too-close friends and family.| ribbonfarm
Did a ribbonfarm meetup in Bangalore last night, the first ever in India. Thanks to Abhishek Agarwal for organizing. I think this is the first meetup I’ve done since the last Refactor Camp in 2019. It was kinda last minute, which is why I only posted on Substack rather than here (some sort of signal there 🤔).| ribbonfarm
One of the biggest changes in my personality with middle age is that I no longer really enjoy travel beyond local weekend getaways. Almost no destination has a pain/novelty ratio that makes it worth it. On the one hand, I’ve traveled enough that few places hold the promise of real novelty and stimulation. On the other hand, even though travel has gotten way more convenient overall (smartphones, eSIM cards, cashless payments, Uber, Google Translate — though at the expense of phone-loss anx...| ribbonfarm
I’ve long held that civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary. The incomprehensible can be scary but the arbitrary tends to be merely exhausting. Unless the stakes are high, such as in paperwork around taxes or passports and visas. Then the exhaustion becomes tinged with anxiety. Either way the steady increase in arbitrariness creates, in the name of progress, a growing ocean of mind-numbing details you just have to know. Or figure out the hard way by re...| ribbonfarm
In thinking about decision-making under stress, most people focus on fight-or-flight responses. Both fighting and fleeing are obvious courses of action that inherit a clear sense of direction from the characteristics of the threat itself, and are energized by the automatic mobilization of emergency reserves by an acute hormonal response. It’s barely even a decision, since you’re likely to pick one or the other very quickly and intuitively.| ribbonfarm
I did not expect to see auroras in the Seattle area. Or ever in my life without a special bucket-list effort I had no particular intention of making. Though now I might. It feels a bit like I’ve just seen giraffes in the wild without going to Africa.| ribbonfarm
I’m a little late to the party, but I just finished the wonderfully imaginative There Is No Antimemetics Division (2020) by qntm. The premise is that our world is full of things with antimemetic pr…| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 12 of 12 in the series Narrativium| ribbonfarm
At the straw market in Nassau, in the Bahamas, — famous for stuff like the straw handbags below — I recently encountered a distinctive culture of bargaining that made me stop and ponder the subject (on a beach, aided by rum). The pondering resulted in a neat little flash of insight that allowed me to synthesize everything I know about the subject in a way that surprised me. The short version: game-theoretic and information-theoretic approaches to the subject are something between irreleva...| ribbonfarm
Each of them – and they constitute 80% of humanity – is born the most beautiful baby in the world. Each is an above-average child; in fact the entire 80% is in the top 20% of human beings (it’s crowded up there). Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live.| ribbonfarm
Of all the remarkable things about our species — and there are many — perhaps the most striking of all is our ability to band together and act as a united, coherent superorganism. E pluribus unum. From many, one.| ribbonfarm
We need to reinvent hyperlinks in a cozy idiom for the contemporary dark forest online environment before web2 platforms succeed in their decade long quest to kill them (though they don’t deserve all the blame for hyperlinks being increasingly suboptimal constructs). I trace the origins of this effort to Google’s Amp product which had “faster mobile user experience” as the casus belli for the disproportionately belligerent war on links, which is now starting to look like the Drug War ...| ribbonfarm
This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Lunchtime Leadership| ribbonfarm
My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I’ve watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I’ve watched the show obsessively because I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space.| ribbonfarm
