The Individual Cannot Escape Reliance on Society
The individual cannot escape his dependence on society even when he acts on his own. A scientist who spends his lifetime in a laboratory may delude himself that he is a modern version of Robinson Crusoe, but the material of his activity and the apparatus and skills with which he operates are social products. They are inerasable signs of the cooperation which binds men together. The very language in which a scientist thinks has been learned in a particular society. Social context also determin...
notesEveryone is connected to everyone else, no matter how secluded. Even our motivations, to become a CEO or a Scientist, stem from the society in which we are born.
No Such Thing as Professional Photographers
...there’s no such thing as Flickr Pro, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing really as professional photographers, when there’s everything is professional photographers. Certainly there is varying levels of skills, but we didn’t want to have a Flickr Pro anymore, we wanted everyone to have professional quality photos, space, and sharing.
1 The Yahoo CEO took a lot of heat for this comment, but there is a great deal of truth to it. With digital photography, photographs are so pervasive that professionals are now competing with a horde of amateurs.
How the Brain Handles Novelty and Routine
When faced with complexity, our first response is to retreat to the familiar, even if the familiar means failing. But in addition to reverting to what is familiar, we also have another reaction: fear.
We are hardwired to perceive real change as threatening, so we instinctively reject it. Sure, a few of us have the courage and tenacity to attack the complex, the unknown, and the risky. After all, this is hiow new discoveries are made.
But many more of us do not.
Why not?
It turns out t... notesThe frontal cortex is wired to handle novelty and the basal ganglia wired to handle routine, when we live in a world of constant novelty, is our gut reaction to oppose everything?
Shifting From Labor to Capital Reduces Demands
Finally, it’s easy to see how a shift in income from labor to capital would lead to a similar reduction in overall demand. Capitalists tend to save more of each marginal dollar than laborers. In the short run, a transfer from laborers to capitalists reduces total consumption, and thus total GDP. This phenomenon is summarized in a classic though possibly apocryphal story: Ford CEO Henry Ford II and United Automobile Workers president Walter Reuther are jointly touring a modern auto plant. Fo...
1 Because the workers automated out of jobs can't buy things.
Stereotype of Fathers in Advertising
In a recent study of sitcoms, the National Fatherhood Initiative found that fathers were eight times more likely than mothers to be portrayed negatively. In fact, if you just think of the most prominent television dads, you'll find what In fact, if you just think of the most prominent television dads, you'll find what the NFI's study—and a lot of other research—has found: that most of them are outwitted or shown up by their wives, ridiculed by their children, and portrayed as complete inc... notesFathers are portrayed as incompetent, bumbling idiots in advertising, which focuses on the importance of mothers, raising the question of cause and effect.
Esther Dyson Describes the NIIAC
The NIIAC was a well-meaning attempt to collect a diversity of opinion to make sure the emerging "NII" was useful to all Americans, and it probably did more good than I suspected at the time ... The members included the usual suspects: a librarian; a grade school teacher; a communications workers' union official; the head of BMI, a copyright agency; several telecom executives; several "content" people, including a legal publisher and a music-company executive; and old lawyer fried of the Clin... notesThis is the organization Al Gore formed to help formulate policy on how the fed could grow the Internet.
