Archive

A Future with­out Waste

What I want to tell you is that in 2050 we don’t even have waste any­more. There will be no waste in 2050. Everything will be seen as a trea­sure, because we will have cre­at­ed what some smart peo­ple call a cir­cu­lar economy.

Ex Oriente Make
The Future of Maker Culture is Made in China

Making took rise at a moment when peo­ple began— Not just schol­ars but also media—pub­lic media and peo­ple work­ing in the tech industry—began cri­tiquing ear­li­er visions and ideas of the knowl­edge econ­o­my and say­ing the knowl­edge econ­o­my, or ideas like the cre­ative class as prop­a­gat­ed by Richard Florida, were sharply cri­tiqued because they did not deliv­er what they had orig­i­nal­ly promised.

The Things of the Internet
Reflections on Object Culture and Internet Culture

The Internet meme frame­work is a use­ful way to under­stand a cer­tain range of object pro­duc­tion, a cer­tain sort of infor­mal pro­duc­tion that com­bines net­worked modes of pro­duc­tion sim­i­lar to shanzhai or the hat print­ing, with the glob­al reach of the Internet and glob­al ship­ping ser­vices as well. The abil­i­ty to move bits and atoms with just as much ease and efficiency.

Hardware, Software, Trustware

The cul­ture gap at the cen­ter of the debate we’re hav­ing today is a cul­ture gap between peo­ple who build hard­ware and peo­ple who build soft­ware. And those cul­tures have been diverg­ing since the 1950s.

Decoding Workforce Productivity: Brian Ballard

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is ush­er­ing in a sig­nif­i­cant increase in con­nect­ed machines, con­nect­ed prod­ucts. And at the same time, the peo­ple who are stand­ing next to these high­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed machines are ulti­mate­ly con­nect­ed in their home lives. They car­ry a cell phone that’s man­ag­ing their smart car, their smart home, their smart sys­tems. But they have almost no inter­ac­tion with the sys­tems at work.