Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #67

The very best

In 2015, I took a swing at assessing the shape and state of our global challenges. Looking back, that essay is still well worth a read, but it is high time for an update. While many things have…

Keith Yamashita and his team at SY Partners have spent nearly a quarter century helping individuals and companies transform, but 24 years in, business is better than ever. When you’ve got decades of…

We’ve created an internet that senses, thinks, and acts. How can we protect ourselves if it goes wrong?

Corporations are the dominant mechanism by which economic activity is organized. Whether there are opportunities for social innovation in the corporate world is hence a key question for the…

Turn off your autopilot. Do something different. See what happens. For more information please visit http://liminalthinking.com

The way we want to make sense of the world around us often has to do with causality. The question we ask is what caused “something” to happen. There is a variable, the “it,” that happened, that is…

In his 2016 book, You Belong to the Universe, Jonathon Keats sets out to release Buckminister Fuller from “the zany sci-fi designs…

Yesterday, Steve Bannon clearly articulated what many people have felt and known for quite some time when he told journalists, “You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party… The media’s the…

Donald Trump may push us into another war.

“But the press was clapping and laughing, they loved it.” — a commenter defending Trump’s first press conference. “But there were people in the audience clearly laughing at his jokes and clapping, so…

Today is the day we switch the system on. Am I nervous? Of course I am. There could be indexing failures, field mismatches, table schema conflicts, a Russian hack… I’m kidding. We know how to build these things. We built the biggest one in the world, remember. As the last incumbent would have said—”Nobody builds...

Unfortunately, it’s no contest. Here’s what psychology tells us about life under a leader totally indifferent to the truth.

Americans will have to fight for their civilization and the right to ask why.

Cliodynamics is a new "transdisciplinary discipline" that treats history as just another science. Ten years ago I started applying its tools to the society I live in: the United States. What I discovered alarmed me.

Two decades ago in 1996 with the advent of the Netscape browser we entered the first connected age where the key connection artifact was the web link. Click on a link and you found yourself in a different space and experience including the ability to shop. The companies that were built on best exploiting the…

Data and Society

The Facebook Journalism Project comes after company accused of failing to tackle misinformation and at a time when newsrooms are cutting costs

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Zeitgeist

As it turns out, this past week was the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. You will be mistaken if you think I am alluding to various political gatherings that

Dzhangal is a new book by photographer Gideon Mendel, released to provide an alternative portrait of residents of the Jungle refugee camp in Calais, F...

For nearly 20 years, communications group Edelman has been gauging the public’s trust in key institutions like business, government, and the media. You don’t need a survey of more than 33,000 people in 28 countries to know that there is an anti-establishment mood sweeping the globe, but the numbers are even more stark. In short,...

Innovation

Nestled in the heart of Copenhagen’s meatpacking district, among the hipster hangouts and design start-ups lies Space10 - a research hub and exhibition space for testing product prototypes and ways of boosting consumers’ well-being.

When Tesla Motors [NASDAQ: TSLA] CEO Elon Musk recently won Motor Trend's Person of the Year award, the iconic car magazine described him as: "A charmer and con

The work could lead to a new approach to the study of what is possible, and how it follows from what already exists.

'A disruptor is only a bad thing if you didn't see it coming.'

Google, Microsoft and a host of labs and start-ups are racing to turn scientific curiosities into working machines.

If ever there was a Valley cliché overdue for retirement, it’s our cherished narrative around “disruption.” You know the story: Well funded Startup is attacking this or that Huge Market where Big…

In this slim volume by Klaus Schwab, founder of the organisation behind Davos, corporate-speak disguises a harsh reality

Boundaries seem to be continually pushed in business, nothing seemingly is standing still, yet we are faced with many things that stay caught up in not being changed. Something has to change, we need to jettison old ways and establish new ones. In with the new in 2017, out with the old. I continue to…

Everywhere you look today, platform businesses are in the news. Most of the stories focus on what platforms do. Some highlight the value they provide in terms of ease and convenience in connecting with needed resources. Others focus on the...

Future of work

SARAH GREEN-CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green-Carmichael. How is it that you can come away from a full day of work with that unmistakable feeling…

Internet Culture

Keith Yamashita and his team at SY Partners have spent nearly a quarter century helping individuals and companies transform, but 24 years in, business is better than ever. When you’ve got decades of…

FinTech

Digital Disruption - Revisited is a follow up to the hugely successful Digital Disruption report from last March which looked at whether we were at the tipping point on digital finance and concluded that we weren't quite there in the US or Europe but had already passed it in China. This new report looks at the investment that venture capital firms have put into the FinTech world - what regions have gotten the most VC investment, what sectors they're investing in and what business models are pref

Direct link to the Digital Disruption just above this one. Great CITI study

Two senior executives from the global bank describe their recent journey.

Fintech firms have started to enter the $14 trillion mortgage market in creative ways.

Masayoshi Son has pledged to create jobs, but a small group of former Deutsche Bank executives are looking beyond just tech start-ups for investing the mammoth fund.

KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Société Générale and UniCredit also signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Brussels.

Richard Gendal Brown, R3 Chief Technology Officer, provides an overview of R3 and its year long journey leading up to the open sourcing of Corda, the only distributed…

Disruptive change typically goes through three waves: Wave 1: Everybody says that this is revolutionary. This is the initial hype wave. The basic ideas are right, but the timing is way off. Wave 2: Everybody agrees that this is evolutionary. This is when realists point out that change takes a lot longer than the…

It will take years to transform business, but the journey begins now.

Ant Financial, the financial technology company controlled by billionaire Jack Ma, stepped up its international expansion by buying U.S. money-transfer service MoneyGram International Inc.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are among the backers of a new $27 million fund, announced today, that's aiming to promote..

The WELL: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2017

Update: in my excitement, it’s fair to say that I’ve exaggerated the idea of this as an ‘intelligent’ system – at least so far as we would think about human intelligence and decision making. Make…

Google and others think software that learns to learn could take over some work done by AI experts.

Post Capitalism

A new report by Oxfam warns of the growing and dangerous concentration of wealth

Art related

For decades, galleries were cluttered with jigsaw-like arrangements of artworks—until the early 20th century, when the White Cube was born.

As a frequent reader you probably know that I work on a portfolio tool called Semplice. And with the year 2016 ending we looked at all the 104 handpicked portfolios in our showcase and picked the 13…

Learn more about Canada Council's commitment to supporting and amplifying the arts through digital technology

diana scherer has developed a process by which plant roots are grown into intricate, textile-like patterns.

When there’s no more room to grow, you shift to the virtual world. Sundance Film Festival has traditionally been the home for challenging films that are willing to test the boundaries of independent cinema. But in an era where entertainment is no longer confined to the limitations of a screen, it’s time for these risks...

After spending 20 years and $15 million on an ambitious new project in Colorado, contemporary art superstar Christo will give up before its completion—and he blames US president Donald Trump. The 81-year old Bulgarian-born artist announced on his website yesterday that he would stop work on a colossal installation called Over The River, Project for the Arkansas River, State of...

Herzog and De Meuron's new philharmonic in Hamburg, Germany is an impressive feat of technology.

The graphic novel has become a literary phenomenon, but the name doesn't adequately describe the medium's flexibility, diversity and potential.

Private View: Julian Schnabel

Life's most meaningful experiences can leave us tongue-tied. What can be said, let alone understood, about the unsayable?

Other

She walked with the clink of a chastity belt. “DOMESTIC CREATURES” is published by Justine Musk