This story is fascinating. So there’s this e-commerce company that basically asks second- or third-tier Chinese manufacturers to do their worst, and advertises it to you. If you’re willing to wait 14 days for delivery, it’s dead cheap. This suggests they may even be manufacturing on demand and air freighting, eliminating inventory as far as…
Read More Cat blindfolds, salted caramel, and algorithmic kitschDavid Davis’ sensational confession that he hadn’t done the Brexit impact assessments and in fact hadn’t bothered to read the halfbaked document pulled together after it became clear he couldn’t get away without releasing something gave me an insight. There is a huge cultural divide in the country between two forces we could call the…
Read More The Two Cultures 2017: Merit versus BrillianceI was reading this post about White House CoS John Kelly trying to control Trump’s consumption of #snackable #edgy #content and failing when it reminded me of something. Trump Twitter is like Cyberfolk but shit. To unpack a bit, while cybernetics pioneer and blog icon Stafford Beer was working on Cybersyn, Chile’s experimental real-time planned…
Read More Cyberfolk But Shit: Trump and the Stinking PondThis Adam Tooze post about Egyptian surrealists mentions the curious way the era of the World Wars put British-occupied Egypt, a peripheral, semicolonial territory, into the middle of the world. The logistical circuits of the First Globalization had been cut across and reconfigured. Although Suez had been important for decades, now there was also a…
Read More Excuse for a cool map postSo, people have been going on about “Singapore” again. Last week I had to look up information about Singaporean data protection laws – that’s life in the private sector, folks! – and I found something interesting. Brexit fans are very keen on the idea that you could somehow be a “business hub” outside the EU…
Read More SingaporeI took these photos of Berlin’s forever-delayed airport terminal this summer. It’s just turned out a few days before the latest attempt to announce an opening date that the thing is still nowhere near ready after 2000 days of delay and twelve years of construction. Meanwhile, the executives bicker, the stakeholders wrestle for power, and…
Read More What if reality was more like software? Visit to a failed smart cityChris Dillow asks why politicians seem to be so hopeless today. I tend to think of this as a consequence of the great divergence, the gapping-out of inequality across the developed economies since the 1980s. Why? Consider this guy. That’s right – an eccentric billionaire, giving away fivers! This used to be a stock cartoon-strip…
Read More The theory of the eccentric billionaire, and why politicians got so awfulA quick thought after this twitter conversation: Important point: if your product is information, your productivity is definitionally proportional to demand https://t.co/oulNUf2oNS — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) October 15, 2017 There is quite a large set of firms for which productivity is fundamentally demand-driven. This is a distinct point from Verdoorn’s law, the argument that productivity…
Read More Demand-determined productivityEveryone’s talking about this, and I agree with the point in the kicker: Still, it is less often we think about Bannon simply as a media executive in charge of a private company. Any successful media executive produces content to expand audience size One thing the Buzzfeed article shows, although it doesn’t call it out…
Read More The year the journalistic sewer changed handsI have just been re-reading Dr Mike Martin’s An Intimate War, his anthropological study of the conflict in Helmand the British army was inserted into. Something that struck me this time round: Martin’s account of the role of rumours and conspiracy theories, what we might now call fake news. Martin reports encountering many people who…
Read More Fake news and the Afghan war