Perhaps one day I will become the kind of person who reads 6,000 words on Roman aqueducts on a Tuesday evening. But right now, my Roman aqueduct browser tab sits pixels away from a live blog of a geopolitical tragedy, which sits pixels away from a Wikipedia entry for a painting, which sits pixels away from a page on pension funds, which sits pixels away from a stew recipe. The proximity of these worlds is absurd. In physical space, I would have to walk …
We look back upon the people of the early networked societies not with scorn, but with reverence. Our understanding of the second millennium was permanently changed when our excavators breached the permafrost vaults of the far north and discovered a frozen city of text and images. From the Svalbard cache, we were able to partially reconstruct the twilight of that era. The world of these people was full of invisible spirits that listened without ears and spoke without lungs. While they also built larger …
As a software engineer, I regularly use AI and tools like Copilot in my work, all well within our company’s privacy policy. In some ways, these tools genuinely boost my productivity, but they also stir up constant questions: Will automation make my job redundant? Will companies rush toward AI and leave essential manual skills behind? Yet, after years spent learning in public through this blog, I learnt to pay more attention to the past to better understand the future. History, as journalist Norman Cousins …
Articles in the series: A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Introduction (part 1) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Recurring Themes (part 2) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – What Comes Next (part 3) Our previous analysis reveals that societies selectively innovate based on their most deeply held values and most pressing constraints. AI development follows a similar pattern of selection. Just as Mesopotamian writing systems emerged for transactional clarity (tracking grain, livestock, and debts), AI prioritizes structured data over visual flair, parsing massive …
Articles in the series: A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Introduction (part 1) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Recurring Themes (part 2) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – What Comes Next (part 3) As described in the previous article, communication technologies compressed time and space, creating shared experiences across vast geographic and historical dimensions. Innovation through Constraints Throughout history, we observe a pattern where new communication methods emerge precisely to overcome the constraints of their predecessors. Consider how clay tokens addressed the fundamental …
Articles in the series: A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Introduction (part 1) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – Recurring Themes (part 2) A Timeline of Communication Patterns – What Comes Next (part 3) Smiling, touching, watching, copying, talking, listening, singing, dancing, painting, writing, and making; these are the ways we have always connected with one another. From cave paintings to the latest AI models, our methods of communication have been shaped by the culture in which we are born, power hierarchies, and the …
Metaphorical Thinking – Introduction Metaphorical Thinking – the Guest Metaphor Metaphorical Thinking – the Cloud Metaphors Metaphorical Thinking – the Web Metaphors The ethereal, shape-shifting quality of clouds makes them a perfect instrument for concepts that apply to metaphors, meditation, behavioural science, or computer science. I am on cloud nine. Every dark cloud has a silver lining. I have my head in the clouds. Cloud Computing In the remarkable Dictionary of Symbols by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, clouds are defined as “instruments of apotheosis and epiphany” and “clouds were connected with the symbolism of …
The last few years exposed more than ever the fragility of our information ecosystem. Elections, Brexit, social unrest, COVID-19 conspiracies, and the war in Ukraine have been used as disinformation operations by certain actors to undermine faith in governments, raise fear and anger, confuse and manipulate us. Disinformation is information meant to deceive (trolls posting fake news). In contrast, misinformation is false information with no malicious intent (our friends and family genuinely believe in disinformative content and willingly share it). Why is Disinformation Effective? …