If we’re imaging a republic of humanity and we’re imagining it in the condition or morphological freedom, then we’re going to have to imagine a much wider range of human embodiment than we even imagine now.
A realistic view of human nature recognises that we are a species that have evolved to be friendly, that this is our true superpower, that we can cooperate on a skill that no other species can, and that we need to reconnect with this superpower if we want to do anything about the great challenges that lie ahead of us.
We’re dependent on ever greater magnitudes of technology, when I feel that real power comes from a willingness to reform your behaviour. If we outsource fundamental aspects of human existence in return for the illusion of control over our nature, I think we disempower ourselves.
Ultimately, there’s a reality out there and for me, science—and physics in particular—is the best way of understanding the nature of that reality.
I think there is a global growing movement of what I think of as time rebels, who are challenging that idea of linear time, extending our horizons beyond our mortality. A hundred years, a thousand years ahead. Ten thousand years ahead. Their voices are becoming stronger and stronger.
Hype only has power in its illusion and if more people started from a mindset of critical thinking, hype wouldn’t have its power.
You know, we need to think about collective action and collective solutions. We need to envision a new paradigm for how society should be governed.
What we need is a new philosophy of technology that is much more integrated with our understanding of culture and human processes.
We are such a globally successful species in terms of our numbers and spread that we really do need to reassess our relationship with how we sit on the planet. I think we’ll get there, but we won’t get there quite as quickly as we might like.
It’s largely my theory that the post-internet innovation won’t be like AR or AI or whatever; another technological revolution. I think the revolution after the internet is consciousness—human consciousness. The networked organism of all of us. I don’t mean that in a singularity kind of way.
Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. Malamud:... Read more →
When we look back at our history here in Europe, we often celebrate the romanticized version of that history and forget the import that that romanticism often cloaked. For instance when we have films, when we read the books of Alexandre Dumas, particularly The Three Musketeers, all we see are three (plus one) swashbuckling, sword-bearing gentleman usually of an exquisite handsomeness. And there's an evil cardinal, Cardinal Richelieu, lurking in the background. But the idea that France was just like this for no apparent reason is something that we never really really investigate. Read more →
The things that I designed made it so that the network would…you know, be self-fixing and self-organizing. There's a lot of things that other people designed that are fancy features that work if you've configured them exactly right but if you make mistakes it just will be horrible. And so I've tried to talk to people like that sometimes, and they claim their customers love to configure things and they never make mistakes. Read more →
I think that Damian asked me here in large part to talk about this essay from last spring in Places Journal that begins pretty timidly with this line, I don't know when the myth of designers as climate saviors began, but I know that it's time to kill it.
Which as you can imagine got me invited to lots of dinner parties at Harvard. Read more →
The Web once seemed much more a platform for creativity, exploration, and simply the idea of viewing the source of the document and using the ideas that are contained inside of it, is completely gone now. Why you can't view the source of an app, for instance, is disheartening to me. Read more →