“In these spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials.” Andrew Ure Marx’s rage against the machine Another thought about the rate of change and “distruption,” this time from Karl Marx. I love…
Tag: history
We’re always telling stories about who we are, where we’ve come from and where we going. We tell stories about what’s good and what’s bad, what should be and what shouldn’t. We tell ourselves stories about what’s possible and why…
Making prominence your aim is like building a skyscraper without laying foundations: you might make something tall, but it’s unlikely to last and it will almost certainly cause damage when it collapses. Rather than trying to stick out from the…
Where does the drama of history get its material? From the “unending conversation”* that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long…
Four types of vision: Vision of what is: the good, the bad… and the missing. Vision of possibilities: seeing what could be, or what could stop being. Having a sense of contributing factors and probabilities. Moral or ethical vision: knowing…
Here’s a DC-related hitlist for the first part of 2019… images link to Amazon UK. The Invisible Killer: The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution – and How We can Fight Back – Garry Fuller A gift from Sharky. Necessary…
… producing books with ease on Gutenberg’s press did not fully unleash text. Real literacy also required a long list of innovations and techniques that permitted ordinary readers and writers to manipulate text in ways that made it useful. For…
Steve Jobs is right about changing the world. And here’s Edmund Burke with a counterpoint – for society read ‘society’, but also, ‘family’, and ‘your organisation’: Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may…