Many of the largest problems now confronting technologically advanced societies are not failures of engineering, they are consequences of its success.
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technique, technology, tesseract
Tag: innovation
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Innovation?
Organizations routinely announce their commitment to transformation, innovation, and adaptability. They build glossy strategies, launch “future-focused” initiatives, and proclaim agility as their core value. Yet in practice, the opposite emerges: the institutions most loudly declaring innovation are often the most rigid. What blocks them is not lack of intelligence, talent, or resources—it is the stifling […]
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Academia Abhors Cleverness
Academia abhors cleverness—but only the kinds that don’t reproduce its current coinage of acceptable thought. What gets protected is the signalling, not the insight. Language becomes currency; cleverness that fails to replicate the prevailing mintage of disciplinary and political vocabulary is filtered out. It’s not conscious—most of the time, it’s reflex. The institution doesn’t select […]
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How Not to Transform Your Organization
Do not bring in celebrity CEOs or tech demigods expecting salvation. Their job is to extract value, convert resilience into quarterly numbers, and then leave before the smoke clears. The cycle is predictable: hype, short-term metrics, collapse. The organization becomes a ladder, not a habitat. Transformation isn’t about flashy interventions or heroic (ie human, organisational) […]
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University Lies
Universities, for all their pomp and architecture, are backward-facing institutions addicted to the rituals of their own inertia. They speak of innovation but train compliance. They gesture toward the future while embedding students—brilliant, strange, misaligned students—into the bureaucratic tedium of a past they dare not question. This isn’t education. It’s archival maintenance. The lecture hall […]
Responsibility is significant. Aligned factors: the most disruptive feature of new technology is counter-intuitively NOT (or at least not only) the novel artefact, entity or system. It is the literally self-sustaining(!) discontinuity by and through which existing and persisting organisational or communications systems defensively lash themselves to the mast of strategic and communicative anachronisms. They […]
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Conceptual Economy
Ideas, if not analyses, are never truly or singularly of an individual. There is something of a distributed communications “field” and what is conceptually or technically intelligible, useful or valuable is adaptively filtered and percolates through it. The value of a good (or great) idea is amplified by the presence and persistence of less-than-stellar ideas […]
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The Value of Good Ideas
Fear to speak our mind tends to stifle and suffocate good ideas and give bad ideas and wilful ignorance free rein. It is also worth mentioning that bad ideas have an unfortunate tendency to self-replicate much faster than good ones. The only real solace here being that when there are many bad ideas in play, […]
That our failures and our successes are intimately entangled applies as much at nascent planetary technological civilisation level as at any other. Interesting, also, to conjecture that our greatest failures (in microcosm and at scale) are generally in and of a partisan adversarialism that as reflexive psychological and existential compulsion cycles and oscillates through this […]
There was a mystical thread of thought in medieval philosophy called “apophasis”. This is an “un-saying” and reductive process of abstraction and recursively self-inflected introspection that may arrive at a goal of finding whatever is left after everything else is removed – God, enlightenment, essence, reality, certainty, truth; take your pick. Of course, we find […]
…and yet the persistent absence of intellectual creativity is a necessary condition for its acquired significance and perceived value. A principle of scarcity in economics resonates. That said, I’m not certain that the boundary conditions between intellectual theft and ethical practice in any autonomously self-propagating sociotechnical (information) system has been, or perhaps ever could be, […]
Unable to focus on singular topics or projects for very long, was Leonardo da Vinci an embodiment of innovation as a specialist generalist for the information age, 500 years too early; or, was an information and technology revolution 500 years too late? Beyond wistful anecdotes and instructive historical vignettes, it is useful to consider that […]
Daedelus Kite 