Neal Stephenson - author of Snow Crash and one of the inspirators for the web, Metaverse and Multiverse - shows us his views on (inner) geeks, science fiction, different genres, tv, cinema, books and taking your audience more seriously on an intellectual level to boost identification. Hurray for all the geeks !
A great historic, knowledgeable, funny and original overview of digital media in general and how they thrive. Now and in the future. Open/generative or closed systems ? In case you are interested in the evolution of the internet, this video is for you. But also in case you want to protect your privacy or if you are a developer for Facebook. Based on the book Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain. Highly recommended!
WOW, just saw this 1 hour presentation and Q&A with George Lakoff on Authors@Google, one of my favorite channels in YouTube. He just released a new book The Political Mind. Very powerful and clear presentation on neurology, psychology, mirror neurons/empathy and its impact in politics. What is most striking to me is the clarity, especially the second part of this talk covering topics like nurturing kids and Obama. Highly recommended !
I am reading a remarkable, high-impact, deep, original, inspiring and profound book from MIT called Theory U written by C. Otto Scharmer. It is difficult to summarize this outstanding book due to its enormous richness but in my view and experience it is in the league of the works from Jared Diamond, Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold. It is a spiritual, personal and business journey combined. Very special indeed. And it resonates with an incredible amount of my own experiences and observations, especially within my intensive Twitter community as a transformative, open ended journey since March this year.
I just can't stop reading it, every page is so full with ideas. Some hints on topics: blind spots, growth, spirituality, innovation, creativity, leadership, change management, web 2.0, globalization, communities, learning, smart mobs, evolution of organizations, democracy, capitalism, open source, emergence, complexity and many examples from private life, politics (Iraq) and business.
Referenced leading authors are among others (be prepared for a long shot): Brian Arthur, Argyris, Senge, Brand, Carr, Castells, Christensen, Coase, Collins and Porras, Dalai Lama, de Geus, Florida, Friedman, Fukuyama, Gladwell, Goethe, Habermas, Hagel, Hamel, Handy, Hawken, Heidegger, von Hippel, Maslow,
Minsky, Mintzberg, Morgan, Nietzsche, Nonaka, Peters, Prahalad, Putman,
Sen, Sheldrake, Soros, Steiner, Tolle,
Sun Tzu, Varela, Trompenaars, Weick, Wheatley and Wilber. And all combined in a structured and new way...amazing.
Highly recommended ! This clearly is my favorite book of 2007, no doubt about that :-D
To me Bruce Sterling is one of the most inspiring speakers around. In September, 2007 his latest book will be released called Ascendancies - The Best of Bruce Sterling. I pre-ordered it. Here you can watch his presentation and powerful vision during the LIFT Conference on different important emergent trends like GeoWeb, RFID, Augmented Reality, mobile search, mobile social networks, Internet of Things and sustainability.
Highly recommended as this is in my view one of his best presentations I have seen so far.
Once in a while I give a recap of classic, important articles. In the past, you could see recaps on this blog of God is the Machine by Kevin Kelly, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us by Bill Joy, We Are The Web by Kevin Kelly and The Long Tail by Chris Anderson . I saw reread an article on Edge written by Jared Diamond on the differences in human development on different continents. Just like his book (Pulitzer Prize winning) called Guns, Germs and Steel, a terrific overview of the last 13.000 years in human history based on the article.
There is are a few complementary book to Guns, Germs and Steel. One is called Conquests and Conflicts: An International History by Thomas Sowell. Another The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community by William McNeill. Both highly recommended. McNeill shows us the increasing role of cooperation, community and interdependency. Sowell documents the case of how geography (harbors, arable land, navigable rivers, freedom from monsoons and tropical disease) and ideas/culture (fundamental beliefs and principles widely shared or disseminated) make the world what it is today. The key distinction among human communities is "human capital", the spectrum of individual and collective learned behaviors that produce distinctive patterns of skills and attitudes. The positive form of this capital is based on flexibility/receptivity to cultural transfers and willingness to apply those transfers in different contexts. Sowell shows that these cultures are more competitive and resilient.
While Jared Diamond shows us primarily the (external) environmental factors driving the evolution of human history and development, McNeill and Sowell (also) demonstrate the impact of internal factors like cultures and (cooperative) mindsets driving this evolution. In my view it is a combination of both internal and external factors driving the our human development, complemented by luck. Furthermore, I believe in the earlier days of human development (deterministic) environmental factors were more important than internal factors like culture, ideas and mindset relative to todays' situation. Why ? The human history is all about increasing empowerment and autonomy of individuals, about increasing voluntarism, about using more and more tools en technologies. On top of that, in todays world, geography and other environmental drivers (germs, diseases, guns, etc.) seem to be less relevant for competitive advantage relative to (internal) learning capability. Access to data and information is free and more ubiquitous everyday, now it's more about participation and cooperative skills and attitudes. The only thing that complicates my analysis the (likely) future lack of (external) resources on this planet for everybody (oil/energy, food, water, etc.).
Tools are hacks. Technology changes the evolution of evolution. It is an infinite game according to Kevin Kelly. Agriculture enabled industrial evolution (see quote below from Jared Diamond) which enabled digital revolution (electricity) enabling the current biotech revolution enabling the current/coming nanotech revolution with accellerating speeds. Hockey stick curve stuff (see among others Juan Enriquez on TED in this great presentation). So what do we need to survive and gain an edge in the digital, biotech and nanotech periods ? Geographic advantages (like in Sillicon Valley/Green Valley) ? Environmentally cleaned physical spaces ? Other environmental factors like Jared Diamond describes ? Density of people ? In my view it is nowadays more about a mindset of people: openness, peering, sharing, a global scope and a heartfelt acceptance of diversity in all forms. It is basically internal. This resonates with the (some of the) findings and conclusions of Diamond, McNeill and Sowell. It is increasingly about the soft factors, although not exclusively. See my earlier post on the increasing importance and interrelationships of Identity, Authenticity and Creativity/Innovation. In my view, without these soft, internal factors we will not be able to stop global warming, resource depletion and other problems.
What do YOU think about the above analysis ? Thanks.
"We began by identifying a series of proximate explanations - guns, germs, and so on - for the conquest of the Americas by Europeans. Those proximate factors seem to me ultimately traceable in large part to the Old World's greater number of domesticated plants, much greater number of domesticated animals, and east/west axis. The chain of causation is most direct in explaining the Old World's advantages of horses and nasty germs. But domesticated plants and animals also led more indirectly to Eurasia's advantage in guns, swords, oceangoing ships, political organization, and writing, all of which were products of the large, dense, sedentary, stratified societies made possible by agriculture.
All other things being equal, the rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere. If this interpretation is correct, then it's likely to be of much broader significance. The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves. In particular, the availability of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, and the ease with which those species could spread without encountering unsuitable climates, contributed decisively to the varying rates of rise of agriculture and herding, which in turn contributed decisively to the rise of human population numbers, population densities, and food surpluses, which in turn contributed decisively to the development of epidemic infectious diseases, writing, technology, and political organization. In addition, the histories of Tasmania and Australia warn us that the differing areas and isolations of the continents, by determining the number of competing societies, may have been another important factor in human development."
Increasingly, people ask me about my favorite non-fiction books of all time. The authors with the biggest impact on my life and vision are Gary Hamel+Prahalad, Jared Diamond and Kevin Kelly.
Here we go in random order:
Chris Anderson and his readers with very insightful comments discuss DRM, piracy, (viral) marketing, digital content, cross media packaging, economics and more in this post on the Long Tail blog. I really digg the last quote below with the innovative audiobook bundle.
"As Tim O'Reilly puts it, obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
In principle, I'm in favor of free. Free digital products can be great marketing for a superior (or at least complimentary) analog version. In music, free digital songs can create demand for concerts. In my case, a free ebook can created demand for the actual print book or my speeches. Cory Doctorow gives away his books and says that it's a clear net positive, and even business authors such as Seth Godin have tried it for the promotional phase of a book release with success.
But an audiobook is not as clear a case for free as an ebook. Perhaps the best compromise would to be to have a code printed in each hard-copy version of the book that would allow the buyers to download a free audiobook, so they could choose whether to read the book in print or just listen to it in the car, saving the hard copy for reference. This would cost practically nothing and presumably there'd be very little overlap with the dedicated audiobook buyer, who usually don't buy the hard-copy version."
Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins
(MIT) must be
one of my all-time favorite business books. Just finished reading it. Just
awesome ! This is a milestone book integrating the thoughts, ideas and insights
from seminal works like Howard Rheingolds' Smart Mobs, Yochai Benklers' Wealth of Networks, Chris Andersons' The Long Tail, Joseph Pine IIs The Experience
Economy and David Weinbergers/Doc Searls' The
Cluetrain Manifesto.
Not only integrates but extends in certain ways as can be seen below in some
quotes from this amazing book. Themes in the book are: reality TV, machinima,
Current.tv, gaming, transmedia storystelling, fan culture, The Matrix,
mash-ups, The Sims, alternative reality games, Idols, Survivor, Big Brother,
beta reading, Star Wars, anime, Harry Potter, Twin Peaks, The Apprentice, Lord
of the Rings, fair use policy, comics, DRM, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon,
X-Files, Pokemon and Yellow Arrows. Highly recommended reading !
“Transmedia storystelling is the art of
world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume
the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media
channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups and
collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come
away with a richer entertainment experience. The new knowledge culture has
arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down.
Think of these debates as exercises in popular epistemology. As we learn how to live within a knowledge culture, we can anticipate many such discussions centering as much on how we know and how we evaluate what we know as on the information itself. Ways of knowing may be as distinctive and personal as what kinds of knowledge we access but as knowing becomes public, as knowing becomes part of the life of a community, those contradictions in approach must be worked over if not worked through.”
A new book called Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams will extend and deepen (some of) the ideas from the great author Yochai Benkler in his milestone book called Wealth of Networks. More in this post from Yahoo. I strongly believe these collaborative efforts will impact more companies, sectors and economies moving forward. At the end of the day we will witness in my view a rebalanced economy with markets, hierarchies and (especially) networks. What we can see emerging right now, is that the non-profit nature of these open source initiatives evolves into monetary rewards for the greatest problem solvers and idea generators. As a result, this will strengthen the trend towards globalization of individuals and their enterpreneurship. This book will become a bestseller I assume. Recommended by Eric Schmidt / Google.
"When Rob McEwan became CEO of Goldcorp, he and company geologists
knew that their property contained untapped resources "thirty times the
amount Goldcorp was currently mining". But with 55,000 acres, nobody at Goldcorp could figure out where to
look for the buried treasure. To avert a wild goose chase, McEwan
shared on the Web Goldcorp's geological data going back to 1948 and
offered $575,000 in prizes to those who could come up with the best way
to find and extract the gold.
Participants in the contest found 55 drilling targets Goldcorp had not identified. Eighty percent hit pay dirt. "In fact, since the challenge was initiated, an astounding eight million ounces of gold have been found" and in four years Goldcorp's cost of production dropped 600%.
Tapscott and Williams say Goldcorp took advantage of a new economic paradigm they call wikinomics: a word combining economics and Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. This model of wealth creation is based on collaboration and sharing the authors call peering.
P&G is near its goal of sourcing "50% of its new innovations from outside the company." It says that for every good scientist on salary, there are 200 outside whose skills should be harnessed.
InnoCentive is a website where companies offer money for solving scientific problems posted online. Freelance scientists can earn up to $100,000 per solution."
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