Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #69

The very best

The problem with market share.

This is an unpublished piece I just found. It was last modified on September 25, 1999, less than a month after Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine and I finished writing The Cluetrain…

I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has had an unspoken overarching agenda—it has…

Imagine a black dot on white paper. A visual representation of duality. Which is something and which is nothing? Is the black dot the object of substance? The figure that has boundaries and…

Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, is fond of saying that you don’t win a Nobel Prize by following the rules. Until Joi, Reid Hoffman and I started working to craft the Media Lab’s $250,000…

The LFP example is based upon a real-world event. I say “based” because I usually take time to disguise the actual event to protect any guilty parties. In this case, the haphazard and stumbling CEO…

Skin in the Game is necessary to reduce the effects of the following divergences that arose mainly as a side effect of civilization: action and cheap talk (tawk), consequence and intention, practice…

A number of folks noted that they were not familiar with the concept of the Blue Church and wondered what was meant by it. The Democratic Party? Liberalism? Progressivism? As I mentioned in SA:2017…

The new technological environment of business is marked by conflicting constraints and value-creating relationships that change rapidly and constantly. It is a complex environment. In complex…

Moving beyond a world of diminishing returns.

A few weeks ago I published my essay on the Meaning of the Platform Organization. It was an effort to synthesize two essential aspects of my recent professional experience and fields of…

Data and Society

In The Adpocalypse: What it Means, Vlogbrother Hank Green issues a humorous lament on the impending demise of online advertising. Please devote the next 3:54 of your life to watching that video, so…

Sending people to jail because of the inexplicable, unchallengeable judgments of a secret computer program undermines our legal system.

Twitter plans to roll out a new privacy policy on

The app “changes friendships and makes them more transactional,” one user said. “It’s nickel-and-diming everything, literally.”

It was a much-needed breakthrough when the FDA last week OK'd personal genomics company 23andMe selling genetic tests directly to consumers. In 2013 the agency had banned the startup from releasing disease-related information. Now we should finally see a consumer-driven marketplace for genomic data.

Zeitgeist

I’d like to propose that we are already fighting World War III. We are not merely getting perilously close or or waiting for the other shoe to drop. We are in it. We are in fact neck deep in the next…

What is valuable in society and how shall we protect it? This report, written by David Bollier, draws upon three days of discussion by twenty thinkers and activists convened by the Commons Strategies Group.

Innovation

Facebook, Adobe, Autodesk and Planet Labs all have started creative residency programs in the last year, but they are nothing new. Artist-in-residence programs started over a century ago and ranged…

Corporations are approaching innovation processes and methods in different manners, we’ve seen catalogs of over 70 examples. Here’s a sample of the most common methods that we’ve commonly heard in…

Field Notes on Innovation and Intrapreneurship is a series of post written for Intrapreneurship World. Issue #1, an updated version of the field notes which were included in Daniel Egger’s Future…

Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the Black Death.

Renaissance Florence Was a Better Model for Innovation than Silicon Valley Is

Silicon Valley is obsessed with happiness. The pursuit of a mythical good life, achievement blending perfectly with fulfillment, has given rise to the quantified self movement, polyphasic sleeping, and stashes of off-label pharmaceuticals in developers’ desks. Yet Andrew Taggart thinks most of this is nonsense. A PhD in philosophy, Taggart practices the art of gadfly-for-hire. He...

The venture capitalist explores how to shape an innovative mindset.

In 1860 Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt released his book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Up until that point the term ‘Renaissance’ was not widely used as the label for what we now…

2017 was a tumultuous year, but despite some stops and starts, innovation in finance is only gaining more momentum. As the year saw changes in financial

Future of work

Org Physics: How a triad of structures allows companies to absorb complexity

Over the past decade, I have been a leading advocate for a transformation in work. One of the most critical aspects of the changes I have argued for is the rejection of business practices founded on…

Obliquity, as Kay defines it, ‘describes the process of achieving complex objectives indirectly’. The idea is derived from the philosophic principal that trying to find happiness directly seems to…

My doctoral research was focused on learning how managers were able to consistently produce effective outcomes while surrounded by continual disruption and upheaval. Once I started field interviews…

Gregory Bateson wrote that the major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and how people think. Mainstream economics still sees the economy and society as…

In the last few years we’ve recognized that a startup is not a smaller version of a large company. We’re now learning that companies are not larger versions of startups. There’s been lots written…

You were born into the world, and as your eyes opened for the first time, you saw a blank canvas with many possibilities. Of course, you didn’t yet have the linguistic tools to describe it that way…

We’re beginning to see what the next generation of successful companies will look like.

In an economy, people essentially produce goods and services for people. Companies are theoretically intermediary organizational forms that arrange the development, production and delivery processes…

Imagine going to work at 7:30 every night and spending the next 12 hours inside a factory where your job is to insert a single screw over and over again.

In the brain there are neurons that link as a result of being active at the same time. This firing together creates a connection. On the Internet there are servers and people that are linked in…

Internet Culture

The architecture and design of the years-in-the-making Apple Park are brilliant. How it fits into the world around it? Not so much.

One day, not too soon — but still sooner than you think — the smartphone will all but vanish, the way beepers and fax machines did before it. Make no mistake: We're still probably at least a decade away from any kind of meaningful shift away from the smartphone. (And if we're all cyborgs by 2027, I'll happily eat my words. Assuming we're still eating at all, I guess.)

FinTech

How do you figure out what Bitcoin is worth? From the market? It’s hard for an normal person to know what to to do. On the one hand I read that this opaque marketplace is being manipulated by a…

(Phys.org)—Researchers have found that some of the current financial policies aimed at increasing the stability of financial networks may actually be driving them toward instability. The problem arises because these policies ...

The Media is going crazy about Bitcoin, Ethereum and the rise of crypto markets. Entrepreneurs from the sector have kind of a Rockstar status raising millions of USD in seconds through ICOs. However…

We were inspired by apps like WeChat that are driving a large volume of digital payments in China. We wanted to build something for the rest of the world that works on open protocols. Token is…

'Does it have anything to do with vintage?' Millennials don't know what Fintech is, and that's a problem for both Millennials ànd the industry. What's to be done?

Google Ventures launches first European fintech investment

In 2014, we wrote that “Bitcoin is more than money, and more than a protocol. It’s a model and platform for true crowdfunding — open, distributed, and liquid all the way.” That new model is here, and…

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Debunking the myth of a superhuman artificial intelligence: Hyper-intelligent algorithms are not going to take over the world for these five reasons.

Elon Musk is famous for his futuristic gambles, but Silicon Valley’s latest rush to embrace artificial intelligence scares him. And he thinks you should be frightened too. Inside his efforts to influence the rapidly advancing field and its proponents, and to save humanity from machine-learning overlords.

There has been a lot of talk over the past months about AI being our best or worst invention ever. The chance of robots taking over and the following catastrophic sci-fi scenario makes the ethical…

Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li discuss the promises of artificial intelligence, and how to diversify the field, in a Q&A with Backchannel’s Jessi Hempel.

What happens when diagnosis is automated?

In a 2004 conversation I had with Google’s co-founders, Larry Page was talking about his vision for the future of search. “Eventually you’ll have the implant,” he told me, “where if you think about a…

Well, let’s be completely honest: the current startups landscape is incredibly messy. Venture capitalist, angels, incubators, accelerators, private equity funds, corporate venture capital, private…

At that time, it provoked debate from technologists and policy makers alike about the rate in which technology may make humans obsolete. At least in saying Humans Need Not Apply, we leave the door…

Artificial intelligence is making the limits of human knowledge painfully obvious

We already have a way to teach morals to alien intelligences: it's called parenting. Can we apply the same methods to robots?

Post Capitalism

Political shocks, security shocks, climate shocks – however unstable the world seems now, things could get a lot worse. But we can unite for a better future

Art related

To the extent that she has been celebrated and discussed, it may seem there is little room for fresh insights into the life and work of Frida Kahlo. Bu ...

Winy Maas

Well, it's actually science, but for James Bridle science and magic aren't that distinct.

Brutalism, the architectural movement that started in 1952 with the completion of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseilles, better known as Unité d’Habitation, divides opinion like no other form of…

I have recently been reading Alex Kerr’s intriguing book, Lost Japan. It was a serendipitous moment picking it up in the local bookshop. What a book about such an amazing life journey. It is the…

Other

How the superrich have funded a new class of intellectual.

You might not recognize their names—they're too busy working to court the spotlight—but you'll soon hear about them a lot. They represent what's next.

According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the ‘self’/‘other’ ...