Archive for the 'Politics' Category
Latest Today’s Tomorrows: Out of Destruction….
The pace of change continues to increase. Someday I feel like if I simply blink I’m in the future, that this week is different than last week is different than last month is different than last year in a way that has never happened before. I suspect some of that change is about transformation. I [...]
A Good Speech….
I am lucky enough to know one of the best technology futurists – Mark Anderson of SNS. He runs the best conference I’ve ever attended: FiRE, or the Future in Review (yes – it’s even better than science fiction cons). But that’s a different topic. He also publishes a newsletter, and a piece of that [...]
9/11/11: Changes in Latitudes, Attitudes…
The strangest things happen to writers. This morning, I woke up with an essay in my head: I gave a talk to a bunch of eighteen and nineteen year-old students at the University of Washington earlier this week. None of them were old enough to remember a pre 9/11 world. They have never traveled without [...]
New column up at Futurismic, in which I rant a bit about climate change
Stop by Futurismic and take a look if you get a chance. This was a particularly tough article to write because the problem is so diffuse and our actual knowledge so hard to quantify. Climate is a complex system full of chaotic elements and strange attractors, including political strangeness. But the fact that it’s difficult [...]
Crowd Power: Crowdsourcing Today
My newest column at Futurismic explores the power of crowds. Before I started researching this, I knew about crowd-sourcing used to get people to a particular place to do something interesting like perform the Thriller dance in mass in public, or for demonstrations (Tahrir Square). I knew about crowd-sourced translation projects. I didn’t know [...]
Thailand: The Conference
At the moment I am feeling very international as I am using a portable computer in the “ICT Experience Center” in the Seoul airport. This is relevent because after being a speaker at the FutureGov Asia conference, I came away very impressed with the clear and committed focus of South Korea on internet infrastructure (including the [...]
An Excellent Presentation on the Future
I came across as excellent presentation about the future called Future Agenda. I think it showed up via one of the people I follow in Twitter. It’s gold for an SF writer…very visual, very easy to navigate, very clean, and it fits (in general) with my understanding of likely futures based on my futurist research. [...]
The Yin and Yang of Futuring
There are a lot of us being guardians at the gate. Environmentalists warn about species extinction and loss of the wonderful world we’re lucky enough to live on. Scientists and climatologists wring their hands about global warming. Governments worry about terrorism. We need the guardians at the gate, we even need to be the guardians. [...]
The Ordinary Futurist: 2011 Predictions
Every year I play a predictions game. It’s not really good futuring since the world is way too strange for prediction except by true experts in a field, and I’m a generalist. But I still like the game. So here goes: Publishing and Creativity: Preface to this section. I’m playing here, and frankly the book [...]
Arundhati Roy: The Woman of True Words
Arundhati Roy came to Seattle last night and spoke to a sold-out crowd at Town Hall. The rest of my family stayed home in an odd resonance: the family teenager was putting the finishing touches on a school project about Gandhi. If they don’t yet, schoolchildren will be studying Arundhati. For those who don’t yet [...]
