Shouldn’t Crowdsourced New York Apartment Pushing Limits actually be an Onion headline? Either that or the core of a new ResPublica/New School Network collaboration as the Big Society’s contribution to solving the housing crisis. We’ll crowdsource it! If everyone brings a brick, we’ll have…a pile of as many bricks as users who actually bothered showing…
Read More this is what “crowdsourcing” looks likeThe Book Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the “fifties’ Soviet dream” but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties – the period from Khrushchev’s consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in…
Read More Review: Francis Spufford’s Red PlentyThe Book Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the “fifties’ Soviet dream” but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties – the period from Khrushchev’s consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in…
Read More Review: Francis Spufford’s Red PlentyAdam Greenfield responds, and anyone who uses the BOAC speedbird as their avatar is probably worth listening to: “But that becomes a political problem, something almost all geeks seem incapable of understanding, probably because its a social rather than a technical problem.” Well, “geeks” may be incapable of understanding that, Cian, but that happens to…
Read More oppression in softwareWhat Sunny said. One of the most depressing things about the Labour leadership candidates’ focus on The Very Real Concerns is that it enforces a deeply negative, ungenerous, and futile definition of what those Very Real Concerns are. If you’re concerned about – to be brutal – the labour share of national income, and how…
Read More very real concernsRichard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level is a vigorous polemic for social democracy, something we’re probably in need of as the neo-liberals recover from the 2008 experience. Unlike most such, this one is based on data – specifically, a whole battery of socioeconomic indicators that turn out to be strongly correlated with income…
Read More Premature evaluation – The Spirit LevelI have some problems with “10:10”, the latest timebound big media campaign. The first one is symbols and aesthetics. They are handing out tags made of aluminium alloy cut out of a retired B737 down at Hurn. This is meant to be recycling, and wonderfully symbolic. No. A superbly engineered artefact has been reduced to…
Read More No Future in the Cath Kidston FavelaThere is a fascinating paper here on how people believed that there was a link between Iraq and Al-Qa’ida. Essentially, if you give people enough free-floating emotional energy, they are likely to decide that if you care so much, then there must be an explanation for the holes in your logic. It’s called inferred justification,…
Read More they told me over a drink we have ways of making you thinkHas anyone else noticed that SpinVox achieved the Turing Test in reverse? Rather than constructing a machine capable of conversing in a manner indistinguishable from a human being, they constructed a company to make human beings appear to be a machine. The shock some people claimed to feel at discovering that SpinVox is people! is…
Read More der mensch maschineWhat is the legacy of the so-called “loony left”? The conventional wisdom is clear; it was all their fault, for panicking the swing voters and preventing a sensible, Newish Labour solution emerging earlier. Well, how did that work out? And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for…
Read More Loonies 2.0