I haven’t been able to find a literacy campaign earlier than King Sejong the Great of Korea‘s 1443-1444 Hunminjeongeum (“The Correct/Proper Sounds for the Instruction… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (7): History’s First Mass Literacy Campaign?
I came across this translation of Dilemmas via Marginal Revolution. I enjoyed the insights, pithy irony and slightly mysterious turns of phrase.* Here’s translator David… Read More »Qin Hui on the Illusion of Capitalism, and Socialist Market Economies
The use of the word Capitalism to describe what goes on in free market economies – usually in opposition to Socialism or Communism – has… Read More »On Getting-Rid-of-Capital-ism
Not Gutenberg Gutenberg put several important pieces together in a new way in 1439(ish) when he built what most of us probably think of as… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (6): Stop Press. Who invented moveable type?
Sorry to email subscribers receiving this twice due to a scheduling error. The extra bit at the bottom is interesting! The previous post in this… Read More »Technology (16): Clustering Technologies, Clustering People (v2)
This extract comes from a much longer piece on Jerry Neumann’s blog, Reaction Wheel. Highly recommended. A Technological System is a set of technologies that… Read More »Technology (15): Jerry Neumann on technological systems and constellations of innovations
The development of spoken language was humankind’s first great networking technology.* Speech allows us to communicate thought and to think far better than we could… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (5): Literacy as Infrastructure for Thought
… for me, the only real case, or the only real evidence for what a world without technology looks like is the past and the… Read More »Technology (14): Only Forward? Kevin Kelly on tech and cities as possibility factories
This is an extract from Douglas Rae’s lecture Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and an Economic System Incapable of Coming to Rest, which unpacks some of… Read More »Technology (13): Marx, Schumpeter, Howard Head’s Tennis Racquet, and how the world melts
This post contains a few snapshots from a post by Jerry Neumann (The Deployment Age) and a great overview on the Death and Birth of… Read More »Technology (12): Rise and Fall, Part 2