“Globalisation empowers elites economically but disempowers them politically.”
Michael Ignatieff, reviewing Nick Clegg’s memoir in the FT.
Daily Archives: September 11, 2016
Remember, remember the ninth of September
For personal reasons I have vivid memories of 9/11, so today is always a sombre day in my calendar. But I was suddenly reminded this morning of how some of my Internet buddies rose magnificently to the challenge of the day. This is Dave Winer’s Scripting.com blog, for example. And here are Jeff Jarvis’s audio reports, as unforgettable now as they were then.
And then this memoir by the WSJ‘s John Bussey.
The long history of ‘cyber’
My Observer piece on Thomas Rid’s alternative history of computing, The Rise of the Machines: the Lost History of Cybernetics:
Where did the “cyber” in “cyberspace” come from? Most people, when asked, will probably credit William Gibson, who famously introduced the term in his celebrated 1984 novel, Neuromancer. It came to him while watching some kids play early video games. Searching for a name for the virtual space in which they seemed immersed, he wrote “cyberspace” in his notepad. “As I stared at it in red Sharpie on a yellow legal pad,” he later recalled, “my whole delight was that it meant absolutely nothing.”
How wrong can you be? Cyberspace turned out to be the space that somehow morphed into the networked world we now inhabit, and which might ultimately prove our undoing by making us totally dependent on a system that is both unfathomably complex and fundamentally insecure. But the cyber- prefix actually goes back a long way before Gibson – to the late 1940s and Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which was published in 1948.
Cybernetics was the term Wiener, an MIT mathematician and polymath, coined for the scientific study of feedback control and communication in animals and machines. As a “transdiscipline” that cuts across traditional fields such as physics, chemistry and biology, cybernetics had a brief and largely unsuccessful existence: few of the world’s universities now have departments of cybernetics. But as Thomas Rid’s absorbing new book, The Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics shows, it has had a long afterglow as a source of mythic inspiration that endures to the present day…
Time to stop firms sailing under the ‘tech’ flag of convenience
This morning’s Observer column:
The rise and precipitous fall of Theranos is a cautionary tale for our times and is beautifully told by Nick Bilton of Vanity Fair in a fascinating article that is worth reading in full. For me, though, it has a wider significance, because it illustrates a more general problem with corporations that sail under the tech banner, namely their loud insistence that any attempt to regulate them constitutes an attempt by the analogue world to stifle innovation and hold back the digital future.
At the moment, most governments and almost all mainstream media are so dazzled by digital technology that they seem unable to appreciate what’s really going on. What’s happening is that the internet and its associated technologies have morphed from exotic novelties into a general purpose technology (GPT) like mains electricity. That has two implications. The first is that the companies that have mastered the technology are moving out of the tech compound and into the wider world. This is why Apple is planning to move into the automobile business, Tesla is heading for trucking, Google is moving into healthcare, Uber is aiming to eliminate car ownership altogether and Airbnb has the global hotel business in its sights.
The second implication is that, as Anil Dash puts it in an insightful essay, there is no “tech” industry any more…