Archive

…And the Disability Revolution Will be Tweeted

I do dis­abil­i­ty and sex­u­al­i­ty edu­ca­tion. And activism and advo­ca­cy around sex­u­al­i­ty and dis­abil­i­ty issues, and repro­duc­tive health issues. And I want to teach the world that peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties have the right and abil­i­ty to give and receive pleasure.

The Conversation #39 — Richard Saul Wurman

Conversation has been con­sis­tent­ly a mod­el in my head of being human. For quite a while I’ve spo­ken about how we’re not taught at any time in our life how to ask a ques­tion, and how to talk on the phone. And most peo­ple think they know how to ask a ques­tion, and they know how to talk on the phone. And yet I found that 98% of ques­tions are either bad ques­tions or speech­es. And most phone calls are terrible.

Institutions in the Age of Algorithms, and Why We Still Need Them

If you look at human his­to­ry all the way through, we orga­nize our­selves in dif­fer­ent ways. Tribes, reli­gions, guilds, states, more recent­ly com­pa­nies and net­works. And what these insti­tu­tions do is they sort of cod­i­fy val­ues and beliefs, and they they trans­port them across the gen­er­a­tions. So we see this phe­nom­e­non that when you cod­i­fy val­ues in insti­tu­tions, you give those val­ues longevity. 

The Platonic Network

I want­ed to give you a lit­tle bit of per­spec­tive on Otlet’s broad­er vision, which I think is in a way even more inter­est­ing as a ref­er­ence point for think­ing about some of the changes we’re see­ing today as our lives are increas­ing­ly reshaped by tech­nol­o­gy and net­works. What Otlet offers is a dif­fer­ent way into that space, and a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about what a net­worked world could look like.