planetary scale

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The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

It does not focus on computation in the service of governance, or in resistance to governance, but rather on computation as governance. In the first chapter, I propose that we view the various types of planetary-scale computation (e.g., smart grids, cloud computing, mobile and urban-scale software, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing, and robotics, and so on) not as isolated, unrelated types of computation but as forming a larger, coherent whole. They form an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is not only a kind of planetary-scale computing system; it is also a new architecture for how we divide up the world into sovereign spaces. More specifically, this model is informed by the multilayered structure of software protocol stacks in which network technologies operate within a modular and interdependent vertical order.

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It lets us see that all of these different machines are parts of a greater machine, and perhaps the diagrammatic image of a totality that such a perspective provides would, as theories of totality have before, make the composition of alternatives—including new sovereignties and new forms of governance—both more legible and more effective. As the shape of political geography and the architecture of planetary-scale computation as a whole, The Stack is an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberately and unwittingly and is in turn building us in its own image. While it names the organization of a planetary-scale computing infrastructure, my purpose is to leverage it toward a broader program for platform design. In the depiction of this incipient megastructure, we can see not just new machines but also still-embryonic geopolitical institutions and social systems as well.

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Each is described in terms of both how it resolves the emergent accidental megastructure of The Stack into one and how the essential accident of each layer, and of the combined whole, points toward very different kinds of geosocial relations and geopolitical systems, perhaps especially those determined not by today's technology but by whatever technological regime will come after planetary-scale computation. 3.  Blur and Accident We start with questions that are as slippery as what they interrogate. In an age of planetary-scale computation, what is “sovereignty” and what is the future political geography, especially as the former is separated from the latter? How would the answers influence how we draw and divide up who and what goes where, and what shape the maps are that could do this?

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

To put this in context: Worldwide, 60 percent of the 227 largest rivers have been fragmented by man-made infrastructure, and the total number of dams blocking the natural flow of the planet’s watercourses is estimated at 800,000.1 These impound approximately 10,000 cubic kilometers of water—a quantity so substantial that it measurably reduces the rate of sea level rise (by about half a millimeter a year for the last half-century2) and even changes the mass distribution of the planet sufficiently to alter its axis and slightly increase the speed of its rotation.3 The sheer scale of human engineering activity on rivers has been extraordinary: On average we have constructed two large dams per day over the last fifty years, half of those in China alone.4 Humans have affected the water cycle in less visible ways too: Deforestation and irrigation are altering water-vapor flows over the planet’s surface;5 changes in land use and climate are increasing total planetary river runoff.6 Human engineering can have large-scale impacts—agriculture in Pakistan’s dry Indus Basin, supported by the largest irrigation network of canals and dams in the world, probably has a direct effect on the region’s monsoon.7 Due to the globe-girdling reach of modern human civilization, these regional and planetary-scale changes are perhaps unsurprising, for humanity has always had an umbilical connection with rivers and fresh water. Imperial capitals throughout history have lined major watercourses, from Nanjing on the Yangtze to London on the Thames. When water became scarce or was misused—as in ancient Mesopotamia or during Central America’s Classic Maya period—great civilizations could come crashing down, leaving little trace behind as their once unconquerable cities were reclaimed by sand or forest. Today we face the danger of overusing water resources on a planetary scale, and the consequences for our advanced civilization may be just as significant in the long run.

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Venter and his team have seemingly proved that all life is reducible to chemistry—there is nothing more to it than that. No essential life force, no soul, no afterlife. With the primacy of science, there seems to be less and less room for the divine. God’s power is now increasingly being exercised by us. We are the creators of life, but we are also its destroyers. On a planetary scale, humans now assert unchallenged dominion over all living things. Our collective power already threatens or overwhelms most of the major forces of nature, from the water cycle to the circulation of major elements like nitrogen and carbon through the entire Earth system. Our pollutants have subtly changed the color of the sky, while our release of half a trillion tonnes of carbon as the greenhouse gas CO2 into the air is heating up the atmosphere, land, and oceans.

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Instead, the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence suggests that we are fast approaching the point where our interference in the planet’s great biogeochemical cycles is threatening to endanger the Earth system itself, and hence our own survival as a species. To avert this increasing danger, we must begin to take responsibility for our actions at a planetary scale. Nature no longer runs the Earth. We do. It is our choice what happens from here. This book aims to demonstrate how our new task of consciously managing the planet, by far the most important effort ever undertaken by humankind, can be tackled. The idea for it came to me in a moment of revelation two years ago in Sweden, during a conference in the pretty lakeside village of Tällberg.

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

The mixture of strength and subtlety in the sparse landscape between the tree line and the snows clearly entrances him; when a version of that same postglacial landscape first makes its appearance on Robinson’s Mars, about a third of the way into the second volume, his delight lifts the description from the page. While many other living landscapes grace the books from then on, it is always this alpine biota, at once so enduring and so seemingly fragile, that lives in the imagination most fully, establishing a new bridge between the books’ personal and planetary scales. There’s a seeming contradiction here. The surface of Mars is extraordinarily ancient; the High Sierras are relatively young mountains, and the postglacial fell-fields above their tree lines are among the youngest of the landscapes they have to offer. But that’s the delight of Robinson’s vision.

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Changes in the extent of continental ice cover mean that the Earth’s seas are surrounded by fossil shores above and below the current ones. During the next Ice Age, today’s shores will be anything up to a hundred yards above sea level. In some places on Mars, Parker saw half a dozen shorelines parallel to each other. Most of them, though, could not be traced for long distances. At the planetary scale there were just two: “Contact 1,” which kept close to the highland-lowland boundary, and “Contact 2,” which was farther out into the lowlands. Parker saw the two contacts—to call them shorelines in print would have been a breach of geological mappers’ objectivity—as evidence that the Martian ocean, like Lake Bonneville, had died in stages.

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Clifford had imagined melt water from the poles filling the nooks and crannies of the megaregolith up to the same level all around the planet: The water table would be a sort of underground sea level and so it would be flat. The surface of Mars, though, is far from flat. It has a distinct slope, with the south pole about six miles higher than the northern plains. So if the water were to find its level on a planetary scale, that level could easily be deep beneath the southern highlands—and a few miles above the northern plains. The ocean’s shore would mark the contour at which the ground dipped below the water level in the aquifer. Northern ocean and southern aquifer would be part and parcel of the same thing. An ocean would not necessarily mean a warm climate, with clouds and rain and such.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, citizen journalism, clean water, collaborative economy, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, G4S, game design, hedonic treadmill, hobby farmer, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, mass immigration, Merlin Mann, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, science of happiness, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart meter, Stewart Brand, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, We are as Gods, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

Now a different genre of games can get us where we need to go: massively multiplayer forecasting games, or forecasting games for short. Forecasting games combine collective intelligence with planetary-scale simulation. They ask players to reimagine and reinvent the way we feed ourselves, the way we transport ourselves, the way we get water, the way we design cities, the way we manufacture everything, the way we power our lives. They’re designed to create diverse communities capable of investigating the long-term challenges we face, propose imaginative solutions, and coordinate our efforts to start putting our best ideas into action at the planetary scale. It’s a process I call massively multiplayer foresight. And future-forecasting games are the perfect tool for helping as many people participate in the process as possible.9 Which brings us to our final fix for reality:FIX # 14 : MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER FORESIGHT Reality is stuck in the present.

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In short, social participation games are turning us into superheroes in our real lives. And every superhero needs superpowers. What kind of superpowers do we need most? Collaboration superpowers—the kind that enable us to combine forces, amplify each other’s strengths, and tackle problems at a planetary scale. CHAPTER THIRTEEN Collaboration Superpowers By the age of twenty-one, the average young American has spent somewhere between two and three thousand hours reading books—and more than ten thousand hours playing computer and video games.1 With each year after 1980 you’re born, these statistics are increasingly likely to be true.

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The name Spore is itself an important clue: the definition of a spore, in biology, is “a reproductive structure that is adapted for dispersal and surviving for extended periods of time in unfavorable conditions.”8 It’s a perfect metaphor for the present circumstances of the human race. We have collectively entered into what is all but certain to be a time of increasingly unfavorable planetary conditions, largely of our own making—an unstable climate, extreme weather, and an increasingly depleted environment. We need to adapt for survival. We need to imagine planetary-scale solutions and disperse them as far and wide as possible. We need to become like spores ourselves. And there’s an explicit call to action to do so, for players who complete all five stages of the game successfully. Spore has what game developers call a “primary win condition”: a supergoal that represents the ultimate achievement in the game.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

Without oxygen from photosynthesizers, for example, there would be no fires. Organisms change their world locally for purely selfish reasons: if the advantage conferred by the ‘engineering’ is sufficiently favourable it allows them, their progeny and their environment to expand until dominant on a planetary scale. Our use of fires as a biocide to clear land of natural forests and replace them with farmland was our second act of geoengineering. Third was industry for the last 200 years. Together these acts have led us and the Earth to evolve to its current state. As a consequence, most of us are now urban and our environment is an artefact of engineering.

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Another difference was that the world was not then experiencing global dimming – the 2 to 3 degrees of global cooling caused by the atmospheric aerosol of man‐made pollution. PLANETARY MEDICINE AND ETHICS What are the planetary health risks of geoengineering intervention? Nothing we do is likely to sterilize the Earth, but the consequences of planetary‐scale intervention could hugely affect humans. Putative geoengineers are in a similar position to that of physicians before the 1940s. In his book The Youngest Profession the physician Lewis Thomas beautifully described the practice of medicine before the Second World War. There were only five effective medicines available: morphine for pain, quinine for malaria, insulin for diabetes, digitalis for heart disease and aspirin for inflammation, and very little was known of their mode of action.

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When they do mass migration is inevitable. The recognition that we are the agents of planetary change brings a sense of guilt and gives environmentalism a religious significance. So far it is no more than a belief system that has extended the concept of pollution and ecosystem destruction from the local to the planetary scale. Maybe it will grow into a faith but it is still nascent and its dogma not yet properly codified. An environmentalist with a religious inclination might ask, ‘Was the discovery and use of fire our original sin? Were we sinful to continue to pollute the planet?’ For most of us the contrite expression of ‘Mea culpa!’

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

If nothing else, I think there is a particular appreciation of the wonder of the earthsystem that can be gained only by imagining how it could be changed. The ultimate challenge is not just to picture what an earth-system subject to some level of deliberate design might be like. It is to picture a world in which you would feel happy about such a design being realized. It is about finding happiness and exercising compassion on a planetary scale – a project that will have to be as political as it is scientific or technological. The goal is to help you imagine a world attractive enough that many would welcome it, but robust and provisional enough that its creation does not require everyone to agree on every aspect of it; a world that requires neither uniformity of outlook nor the suppression of dissent, but offers ways for justice and sympathy to spread out through the human world and into the earthsystem beyond

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After the Second World War, flights to the stratosphere became much more common, and wing-borne to boot. They became less about what lay beyond, and more about what sat below; they also became much more predominantly American. In partially taming some droplets of Heard’s ocean of energy, the Manhattan Project changed the way strategists thought about power on a planetary scale. They found in the stratosphere a frontier-free high ground from which the warriors in charge of the new nuclear arsenals could look down; America’s first great expression of global power, the B-52 bomber, was accordingly named the Stratofortress. The nuclear age also realigned the interests of the military and those of scientists.

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He believed Mars to be an older planet than the Earth, and thus both a drier one – he subscribed to a theory that all planets tended to dry out as they aged – and one with inhabitants further along the evolutionary road of progress than humans had yet travelled. Humans were already using canals to join oceans and sunder continents; Martians were advanced enough to build them on a planetary scale in order to irrigate their increasingly arid planet. The motives of the Martian canal builders, Lowell thought, were as clearly seen through the telescope as the surface of the planet itself. In his refusal to distinguish astronomical observation from sociological explanation, if nothing else, he prefigured the hybridization of the human world and the earth-system that characterizes the Anthropocene.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Confident that an era of unprecedented U.S. economic, military, and cultural ascendancy now beckoned, members of an intoxicated elite threw caution to the winds. They devised—and promulgated—a new consensus consisting of four elements. The first of these was globalization or, more precisely, globalized neoliberalism. Stripped to its essence, globalization was all about wealth creation: Unconstrained corporate capitalism operating on a planetary scale in a world open to the movement of goods, capital, ideas, and people would create wealth on a hitherto unimagined scale. The second element was global leadership, a euphemism for hegemony or, more simply still, for empire. At its core, global leadership was all about order: Unchallengeable military might would enable the United States to manage and police a postcolonial yet implicitly imperial order favorable to American interests and values.

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In effect, the so-called Free World served as a prototype for the way a globalized world might work, with barriers to trade, travel, and investment reduced and norms governing interaction between states and citizens codified. By fostering a shared (if uneven) prosperity, these arrangements had enabled the United States and its allies to best the Soviets and their allies. Replicating on a planetary scale the success achieved during the Cold War seemed an obvious next step. What had worked in the West would surely work in the East and the South as well. Although in the near term the embrace of globalization might create winners and losers, losers would have both incentive and opportunity to retool and get with the program.

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When the Cold War ended, American elites had their chance to do just that and failed miserably. They misread the conditions and propagated a set of deeply flawed policies. Seduced by the perception that history had reached its intended conclusion, members of that elite persuaded themselves that neoliberalism implemented on a planetary scale, an approach to global leadership centered on the use or threatened use of armed force, and the abandonment of individual self-restraint—all of this unfolding under the aegis of presidents able to decipher the signs of the times—would deliver humankind to the Emerald City of prosperity, peace, and perfect freedom.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

More broadly, we will need to purposefully encourage innovation around alternative means of distributed communication that preserve the great strides we have made to connect individuals to each other and to vast stores of information on a planetary scale, without at the same time manipulating them towards their basest instincts. Prioritizing security of the global communications ecosystem as a whole — one that is distributed, secure, and open — would help pivot away from how it has been increasingly treated: as a “domain” to be fought over (and often seen as collateral damage) in the zero-sum game of interstate competition. An alternative “human-centric” approach to cybersecurity strives for indivisible network security on a planetary scale for the widest possible scope of human experience, and seeks to ensure that such principles are vigorously monitored and defended by multiple and overlapping forms of independent oversight and review.469 * * * If there is anything the COVID emergency makes clear, it is that we are living in a shared habitat, a true “global village,” diseases and all.

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The gradual rollout of fifth-generation cellular technology, known as 5G, will dramatically increase the speed and broadband capacity of cellular networks, fuelling an even greater volume of data circulating among a larger number of networked devices. The combined effect of each of us turning the most intimate aspects of our digital lives inside out has created a new emergent property on a planetary scale that has taken a life of its own — derived from but separate from us, a datasphere. “Social media” (strictly understood) refers to the breed of applications that emerged in the past decade and a half, thanks largely to the extraordinary business innovations of Google and Facebook, and gave rise to what the political economist and business management professor Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism.”

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Early in my career I became familiar with signals and other electronic intelligence gathering, and was quite shocked to discover how some states had secretly developed sophisticated means and elaborate tools to intercept and monitor telecommunications and other network traffic. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its partners in the “Five Eyes” alliance (United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) were doing so on a planetary scale. While marvelling at this capacity (and putting aside legal, ethical, and other reservations), I wondered why a variation of it, based on open-sourced public research, couldn’t be developed and used to turn the tables on governments themselves: to “watch the watchers” and reveal the exercise of power going on beneath the surface of our communications environment.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Various research groups have used Alchemy or their own MLN implementations to solve problems in natural language processing, computer vision, activity recognition, social network analysis, molecular biology, and many other areas. Despite its successes, Alchemy has some significant shortcomings. It does not yet scale to truly big data, and someone without a PhD in machine learning will find it hard to use. Because of these problems, it’s not yet ready for prime time. But let’s see what we can do about them. Planetary-scale machine learning In computer science, a problem isn’t really solved until it’s solved efficiently. Knowing how to do something isn’t much use if you can’t do it within the available time and memory, and these can run out very quickly when you’re dealing with an MLN. We routinely learn MLNs with millions of variables and billions of features, but this is not as large as it seems because the number of variables grows very quickly with the number of entities in the MLN: if you have a social network with a thousand people, you already have a million possible pairs of friends and a billion instances of the formula Friends of friends are friends.

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If the world is Wikipedia, we can extract the entities it talks about, group them into classes, and learn how classes relate to each other. Then if someone asks us “Is Arnold Schwarzenegger an action star?” we can answer yes, because he’s a star and he’s in action movies. Step-by-step, we can learn larger and larger MLNs, until we’re doing what a friend of mine at Google calls “planetary-scale machine learning”: modeling everyone in the world at once, with data continually streaming in and answers streaming out. Of course, learning on this scale requires much more than a direct implementation of the algorithms we’ve seen. For one, beyond a certain point a single processor is not enough; we have to distribute the learning over many servers.

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., 34–38 Machine learning, 6–10 analogy and, 178–179 bias and variance and, 78–79 big data and, 15–16 business and, 10–13 chunking, 223–227 clustering, 205–210 dimensionality reduction, 211–217 effect on employment, 276–279 exponential function and, 73–74 fitness function and, 123 further readings, 297–298 future of, 21–22 impact on daily life, 298 effect on employment, 276–279 meta-learning, 237–239 nature vs. nurture debate and, 29, 137–139 Newton’s principle and, 65–66 planetary-scale, 256–259 politics and, 16–19 principal-component analysis, 211–217 problem of unpredictability and, 38–40 reinforcement learning, 218–223, 226–227 relational learning, 227–233 relationship to artificial intelligence, 8 science and, 13–16, 235–236 significance tests and, 76–77 as technology, 236–237 Turing point and, 286, 288 war and, 19–21, 279–282 See also Algorithms Machine-learning problem, 61–62, 109–110 Machine-translation systems, 154 MacKay, David, 170 Madrigal, Alexis, 273–274 Malthus, Thomas, 178, 235 Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, 16 Mandelbrot set, 30, 300 Margins, 192–194, 196, 241, 242, 243, 307 Markov, Andrei, 153 Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), 164–165, 167, 170, 231, 241, 242, 253, 256 Markov chains, 153–155, 159, 304–305 Markov logic.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Air: Lethal Domes Air … from Johannesburg to Tehran, to Delhi to Jakarta, isn’t about aesthetics, or even possible climate change at some point in the future: it’s about life and death now – Timothy Doyle and Melissa Risely, Crucible for Survival, 2008 Humans, increasingly, manufacture their own air. For a species which expires without breathable oxygen within two or three minutes, this human manufacture of air is of incalculable importance.1 Human existence comes only after breath.2 The process of the machinic manufacture of air happens in a variety of related ways. On a planetary scale, three centuries of rampant urban-industrial growth mean that the earth’s atmospheric composition is radically different from what it was in the mid eighteenth century. Greenhouse gas data provides the most startling examples here: CO2 levels in 2011 were 40 per cent higher than those in 1750; nitrous dioxide levels were 20 per cent higher; atmospheric methane rates were 150 per cent higher.

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The national pollution crises in the summers of 2013 and 2015 in Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia, for example, were caused by Sumatran slash-and-burn forest fires in Indonesian rain forests to create space for palm oil plantations.39 In 2015, Indonesian fires created such smoke problems in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand that states of emergency were declared and half a million acute respiratory tract infections were reported in these countries. At first sight the airscapes above European, Japanese and North American cities appear to be cleaner and less deadly than those in Asia. On a planetary scale, this has been achieved partly through a massive geo-economic shift across the horizontal terrain of the earth’s surface. The huge and filthy extractive and manufacturing complexes that sustain consumption in North American and European cities is now largely offshored – strung out across China, East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and even Australia.

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They are exemplars of a widening range of efforts, at a variety of scales, to try and make good air privately available to those who can afford it, amid an increasingly lethal exterior.76 Crucial questions surround such an incremental and haphazard privatisation of urban air through the spread of air-conditioned spaces and enclaves designed against a deteriorating exterior. Clearly, such projects inevitably become self-defeating at the urban and planetary scales. Beyond their sometimes negative impacts on those inside – who can succumb to poor health through problems such as ‘sick-building syndrome’ – these interiorised capsules of privatised air contribute disproportionately to the deterioration of the planetary climate outside their engineered bubbles.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

The duo decided to run a modest electric current through a sealed vessel of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor—a mixture of gases thought at the time to mimic Earth’s ancient atmosphere. After only a week the Urey-Miller experiment had synthesized a “primordial soup” of organic compounds—sugars, lipids, and even amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Acting over millions of years on a planetary scale, such reactions could easily synthesize the organic ingredients for life from inorganic chemical precursors. On our own planet, the fossil record suggested that life must have already been thriving only a few hundred million years after our planet cooled from its formation; it seemed to have appeared as soon as it possibly could.

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Mercury astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the planet, predicted that within a century we would have linked atomic power plants to “anti-gravity devices,” fundamentally rewriting the laws of physics and revolutionizing life and transportation on Earth and in the heavens alike. Another Mercury astronaut, Scott Carpenter, expressed his hope that the anti-gravity “scheme” would help humans colonize the Moon, the Martian moon Phobos, and Mars. The prominent astronomer Fred Whipple suggested that Earth’s population would have stabilized at 100 billion, and that planetary-scale engineering of Mars would have altered the Red Planet’s climate to allow its 700,000 inhabitants to be self-sufficient. The director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight, Dyer Brainerd Holmes, suggested that in 2063 crewed vehicles would be reaching “velocities approaching the speed of light,” and that society would be debating whether to send humans to nearby stars.

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In his view, it was life itself that actively, unconsciously maintained the Earth’s habitability by closely coupling and coevolving with the world’s geophysical systems. The coupling was so close, he argued, that at the largest scales differences between living things and their inanimate environs became indistinct, and the world could rightly be viewed as a complex system analogous to a planetary-scale organism. He called this union of the biosphere and the rest of the Earth “Gaia” after the goddess of Mother Earth in Greek mythology. With a collaborator, the American biologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock went on to author a large body of literature further developing the theory. Kasting’s contribution to this debate came from his study of carbon cycles for his PhD thesis, which was on the rise of oxygen on the prebiotic Earth.

Fire and Ice: The Volcanoes of the Solar System by Natalie Starkey

active measures, carbon-based life, COVID-19, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, global pandemic, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, lockdown, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, supervolcano

I’m talking here about factors like crushing pressures, vacuum or extremes in temperature, to mention just a few. They not only affect how a volcano erupts, but what happens to the material, or magma, it brings to the surface. Nevertheless, if scientists are to understand the inner workings of planets, then looking at what happens on the surface is a great place to begin. It’s a case of planetary-scale bookkeeping, documenting past events in order to piece together their history. Active planetary bodies literally spew out their insides, which offers a glimpse of what they contain. Scientists just need to be mindful of how the seemingly bizarre environments of these foreign worlds affect the volcanoes they host, and the materials they produce.

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Aluminium-26, for example, with a half-life of just 700,000 years, was almost all decayed away within about the first 100 million years after the formation of the planets. However, this doesn’t mean that such shorter-lived isotopes have had a lesser effect on planetary evolution. During the time that aluminium-26 was active and generating heat, it was an incredibly effective source of planetary-scale warming. The heat produced was enough, in fact, to melt the planetesimals within which it was contained, turning their rocky interiors into molten rock, or magma. This was probably the case even on much smaller objects like the asteroids, such is the effectiveness of aluminium-26’s heat production.

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The problem with a planetary body cooling too quickly is that once its insides have passed the point where they are no longer able to convect, the planet won’t be capable of fuelling significant geological processes at its surface. A planet that is cold inside, with no volcanism, is a dead one. Nevertheless, without planetary-scale cooling in the first place, we would never have seen volcanic features on these bodies either. In terms of making a life-giving, geologically interesting planet, the planet must cool at just the right rate such that a sustained level of volcanic activity can be maintained, and not too quickly that the activity dwindles away and the planet dies.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

I just want to encourage you to examine your relationship to your devices—which are, after all, the robots we spend the most time with. It’s odd to think of our devices as robots. But our phones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches, PCs, and connected home devices are, in fact, conduits for some of the most advanced forms of AI ever created. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have built sophisticated, planetary-scale machine-learning algorithms whose entire purpose is to generate engagement—which is to say, to short-circuit your brain’s limbic system, divert your attention, and keep you clicking and scrolling for as long as possible. These technologies have fundamentally changed what it means to use a device.

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Consequentialism Some of the most valuable skills in the future will involve thinking about the downstream consequences of AI and machine learning and understanding the effects these systems are likely to have when they’re unleashed into society. We now know some of the unintended consequences of planetary-scale AI systems like Facebook and YouTube, and how the engineers and executives who conceived those systems failed to appreciate the ways the products they built could be misused, exploited, and gamed. Most of these systems, I believe, were not intentionally designed to create harm. Instead, I think their founders and engineers were idealists who thought that having good intentions mattered more than producing good outcomes.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

We collectively run the network, a network no one owns, or rather everyone owns. Our contributions can’t be sold, nor do we have to be marketed to while we make and play games within one extended interconnected space. The Greater World is the largest co-op in history, and for the first time we have a hint of a planetary-scale governance. The game world’s policies and budget are decided by electronic votes, line by line, facilitated with lots of explaining, tutorials, and even AI. Now over 250 million people want to know why they can’t vote on their national budgets that way too. In a weirdly recursive way, people create teams and co-ops within the Greater World to make stuff in the real world.

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In fact, we are running out of prefixes to indicate how big this new realm is. Gigabytes are on your phone. Terabytes were once unimaginably enormous, yet today I have three terabytes sitting on my desk. The next level up is peta. Petabytes are the new normal for companies. Exabytes are the current planetary scale. We’ll probably reach zetta in a few years. Yotta is the last scientific term for which we have an official measure of magnitude. Bigger than yotta is blank. Until now, any more than a yotta was a fantasy not deserving an official name. But we’ll be flinging around yottabytes in two decades or so.

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As far as I can tell, the impossible things happening now are in every case due to the emergence of a new level of organization that did not exist before. These incredible eruptions are the result of large-scale collaboration, and massive real-time social interacting, which in turn are enabled by omnipresent instant connection between billions of people at a planetary scale. Just as fleshy tissue yields a new, higher level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures yield new tissue for individual humans. Tissue can do things that cells can’t. The collectivist organizations of Wikipedia, Linux, Facebook, Uber, the web—even AI—can do things that industrialized humans could not.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

By becoming a premium member of Singularity University, “entrepreneurial leaders ” can learn to “envision and master the future.” Individuals who are daring enough to “improve the lives of billions of people” can join the executive programs at SU, learn the “power of exponential thinking,” and “leverage the power of exponential technologies to make a positive impact at planetary scale.” To that end, they also started the XPRIZE competition, offering grants such as $100 million for the best solution for carbon removal. With endorsers including Richard Branson, Buzz Aldrin, Tom Hanks, and Pharrell Williams, the whole project seems prophylactically insulated against buzzkill.

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., “Panic at Prodigy,” October 3, 2019, https:// globalpropertyinc .com /2019 /10 /03 /panic -at -prodigy /. 118   “game of life” : “Akasha—The Game of Life,” https:// www .playakasha .com, accessed August 10, 2021. 119   “exponential technologies … moonshots” : Singularity University, “An Exponential Primer,” https:// su .org /concepts /, accessed August 10, 2021. 119   “entrepreneurial leaders … planetary scale” : Singularity University, “Singularity University,” https:// su .org /, accessed August 10, 2021. 120   MacArthur Foundation : MacArthur Foundation, “100 & Change,” https:// www .macfound .org /programs /100change /. 122   She hated Robert Moses’s : Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (New York: Random House, 1992). 123   new urbanism now amounts to : Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Random House, 2009), 74–83. 124   Rutt has applied : Jim Rutt, “A Journey to Game B,” Medium , January 14, 2020, https:// medium .com /@memetic007 /a -journey -to -gameb -4fb13772bcf3. 125   President Eisenhower : Center for the Study of Digital Life, http:// digitallife .center /, accessed August 10, 2021. 125   “Yet in holding scientific” : Dwight D.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Since 1950 there has been an accompanying surge in ecological impacts, from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to ocean acidification and biodiversity loss.24 ‘It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change,’ says Will Steffen, the scientist who led the study documenting these trends. ‘In a single lifetime humanity has become a planetary-scale geological force … This is a new phenomenon and indicates that humanity has a new responsibility at a global level for the planet.’25 This Great Acceleration in human activity has clearly put our planet under pressure. But just how much pressure can it take before the very life-giving systems that sustain us start to break down?

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No wonder that, since 1970, the number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish worldwide has fallen by half.31 Although the global scale of chemical pollution has not yet been quantified, it is of great concern to many scientists. And human pressure on other critical Earth-system processes – such as freshwater withdrawals and ocean acidification – continues to rise towards planetary-scale danger zones, creating local and regional ecological crises in the process. This stark picture of humanity and our planetary home at the start of the twenty-first century is a powerful indictment of the path of global economic development that has been pursued to date. Billions of people still fall far short of their most basic needs, but we have already crossed into global ecological danger zones that profoundly risk undermining Earth’s benevolent stability.

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And in Kokstad, South Africa – the fastest-growing town in KwaZulu Natal – the local municipality has teamed up with urban planners and community groups in using the Doughnut to envision a sustainable and equitable future for the town.41 Initiatives like these are ambitious experiments in reorienting economic development, but is the Doughnut’s planetary scale simply too ambitious for economics to handle? Not at all: it is a scale whose time has come. Back in Ancient Greece when Xenophon first posed the economic question, ‘How should a household best manage its resources?’ he was literally thinking about a single household. Towards the end of his life he turned his attention to the next level up, the economics of the city state, and proposed a set of trade, tax and public investment policies for his home town of Athens.

Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, seminal paper, skunkworks, spice trade, telerobotics, three-masted sailing ship, uranium enrichment

No, if you want to find yourself a fossilized dinosaur, or Martian stromatelite, you better be prepared to do quite a bit of travel>LiAnd if you want prove that they’re not there, you’ll have to travel even more, because the ability to demonstrate a convincing negative result will depend upon a search of virtually the planet’s entire surface. In the end, the mobility requirements of Martian exploration are profoundly simple: to explore a planet you need mobility on a planetary scale. It’s a simple but often overlooked point. So how will the crew of our first piloted Mars mission get around? The battery-powered Lunar rover used during the Apollo program had a one-way range of about 20 kilometers, giving it a sortie range of 10 kilometers from the landing site. A manned Mars expedition equipped with equivalent transportation would be able to explore only about 300 square kilometers, regardless of the length of its surface stay, and nearly half a million such missions would be required to examine the entire surface of Mars just once.

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Where I live in Colorado, it can be winter on the north side of the house while it is summer on the south side, and it is not uncommon even on a blistering, mid-August day to come across snow nestled in a shady depression of a hill’s northern side. Without a doubt in some cold crevice, lava tube, or cavern on the north face of some hill on Mars there is ice to be found, and in regions where planetary-scale climate models say it can’t be. If you want to harvest some, though, bring dynamite. Ice at Martian temperatures can be pretty tough stuff. Still, a pure ice deposit in a nonpolar region would be a rare find. It’s much more likely that Martian explorers would come across permafrost, or frozen mud.

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(Artwork Robert Murray, courtesy Lockheed Martin) NIMF Rocketplane. (Artwork Robert Murray, courtesy Lockheed Martin) NIMFs—Nuclear Rockets using Indigenous Martian Fuels—as rocketplanes or as ballistic spacecraft would afford Mars explorers and later colonists unlimited mobility on a planetary scale. Exploration team on a partially terraformed Mars. (Artwork by Michael Carroll) The New Created World. (Artwork by Michael Carroll) Liquid water once coursed over the face of Mars and, given the technological capabilities of the twenty-first century, it may once again. Several decades of terraforming could transform Mars into a relatively warm and slightly moist planet suitable some day for explorers without space-suits, although breathing gear would still be required.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

The new IBM would focus solely on services and integration of large-scale, complex information systems. In 1995 the company abandoned its famously strict employee dress code. A decade later, in 2004, it was ready to jettison the personal-computer division that had so recently defined it. The new IBM wasn’t a staid purveyor of hardware; it was a general contractor for planetary-scale computing. Less than three years before the centennial, in 2008, company chairman Sam Palmisano had launched IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.22 If Siemens and Cisco aim to be the electrician and the plumber for smart cities, IBM’s ambition is be their choreographer, superintendent, and oracle rolled into one.

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These cities placed vastly more calls than they received, as their residents gathered information and disseminated decisions from headquarters to the hinterlands. In the 1980s New York University’s Mitchell Moss expanded the analysis to the whole world, using similar data to show how Wall Street banks and Midtown media giants were extending this informational trade imbalance to a planetary scale, exploiting new telecommunications technologies to consolidate and dominate entire global markets.26 In 2008 MIT’s SENSEable City Lab brought these studies into the supercomputer age. The “New York Talk Exchange” visualized a year’s worth of phone traffic between New York and the world carried over AT&T’s global network.

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The idea of a single, utopian design for the smart city has kept us from the hard work of building a rich and varied collection of ones that we can actually live with. Since 2008, the vision of our urban future has come to be dominated by companies that would repeat the cookie-cutter city designs of the twentieth century on a planetary scale, powered by the technology of global enterprise. Our mayors are putting their own spin on these designs, but they can’t solve all of our problems. The answer lies at the grass roots. I see it blossoming everywhere as we take these tools out into the streets and use them to reimagine and remake our world.

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

By means of a permanent tsunami of capital that rushed ceaselessly across the two great oceans to finance America’s twin deficits. The twin deficits of the US economy thus operated for decades like a giant vacuum cleaner, absorbing other people’s surplus goods and capital. While that ‘arrangement’ was the embodiment of the grossest imbalance imaginable on a planetary scale, and required what Paul Volcker described vividly as ‘controlled disintegration in the world economy’, nonetheless it did give rise to something resembling global balance: an international system of rapidly accelerating asymmetrical financial and trade flows capable of creating a semblance of stability and steady growth.

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That is, a surplus recycling scheme that would not rely on some bright officials and the unaccountable financial sector of a single country, as the Global Minotaur was, but on a well-run, global organisation that consciously and transparently sets the parameters for the recycling of goods, profits, savings and demand. Two years later, Strauss-Kahn’s daring statement appears more like ‘famous last words’ than a genuine programme for policy change on a planetary scale. Indeed, the very image of a handcuffed Strauss-Kahn being forced into a NYPD car, a few weeks after he had made that statement to the BBC, is deliciously symbolic of the flicker-like nature of the elites’ post-2008 rethink. Since then, dominant politicians, heads of the IMF and the World Bank, private and central bankers alike, generally the stewards of world capitalism, seem to have chosen to un-learn very quickly the lessons of 2008.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

CPS Energy, “Who We Are,” https://www.cpsenergy.com/en/about-us/who-we-are.html (accessed February 22, 2019). 59.  Greg Harman, “Jeremy Rifkin on San Antonio, the European Union, and the Lessons Learned in Our Push for a Planetary-Scale Power Shift,” San Antonio Current, September 27, 2011, https://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/jeremy-rifkin-on-san-antonio-the-european-union-and-the-lessons-learned-in-our-push-for-a-planetary-scale-power-shift/Content?oid=2242809 (accessed March 24, 2019). 60.  Business Wire, “RC Accepts Application for Two New Nuclear Units in Texas,” news release, November 30, 2007, https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20071130005184/en/NRC-Accepts-Application-Nuclear-Units-Texas (accessed March 14, 2019). 61.  

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

The urban philosopher Constantinos Doxiadis, pursuing his own science of human development he calls Ekistics, has predicted the emergence of a single planetary city—Ecumenopolis.21 Doxiadis gives a sociological and futurist spin to science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov and William Gibson who for decades have been imagining urban agglomerations on a planetary scale.22 Just beyond the global village, pushing out from the imagined Ecumenopolis, one can catch a glimpse of Gaia, that mythic organic entity that, in the hypothesis posited by James Lovelock, is as an evolving and self-regulating system in which biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and pedosphere all work together on behalf of a sustainable and integral planet, though whether it is urban or not, or even includes humanity, remains a puzzle.

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Without exceeding the limits of what is actually in process today—leave aside fantasies of Ecumenopolis and Gaia and interstellar migrations of cities—a realistic road to cosmopolis and a world governed by mayors lies before us. It is left to us only to determine whether we wish to take it, and in doing so, take democracy to planetary scale. For all the contradictions and obstacles presented by cities, they remain a formidable alternative to the conventional nation-state paradigm in which our thinking has been imprisoned for the past three centuries. The very term inter-national assumes that nation-states must be the starting place for inter-relational thinking.

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Before any convincing argument can be made on behalf of global governance by cities, we are obliged to ask whether such a development is going to improve or depress the condition of people in either the developing world’s “planet of slums” or the first world’s planet of radical inequalities. Do we truly wish, with our parliament of mayors, to globalize urban injustice or give corruption a formal role in governance? Does such an innovation merely replicate urban segregation on a planetary scale? Surely we would prefer to believe that, despite the harsh realities of urban life, cities over time can ameliorate the challenges of inequality and poverty and find ways to impact and even transform slums. Yet though as sites of experimentation and progressive innovation, cities continue to contribute new approaches to mitigating and overcoming inequality—some of which we will explore in Chapter 8—the truth is that urban inequality is a persistent and distressing feature of modern cities and the contemporary world, above all in the developing world, where most slums are found, and which have been hardest hit by the global financial crisis and the global economic inequities occasioned by the self-serving “austerity” policies of the wealthy (austerity for you, profits for us).

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

In addition, global scales of flow and connection dominate the discourse: technological mastery, omnipotent surveillance, real-time situational awareness, and speed-of-light digital interactions have been widely portrayed as processes intrinsically capable of endowing the US military with ‘full spectrum dominance’ on a planetary scale, irrespective of the geographical terrain to be dominated. RMA discourses have, in this sense, been signally a-geographical. Little account has been taken of the specificities of the spaces and geographical terrains inhabited by US adversaries in the post–Cold War period, or of the changes wrought through urbanization.

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The United State’s hegemonic capabilities for surveilling Earth from the distant, vertical domains of air and space were deemed by the DSB to show ‘poor capability for finding, identifying and tracking’ what it called ‘unconventional war targets’, such as ‘individuals and insurgent or terrorists groups that operate by blending in with the larger society’.30 What was needed, argued the DSB report, were intimate and persistent military surveillance systems which penetrated the details of everyday urban life, both at home and abroad. Little less than a comprehensive rescaling of military surveillance would be necessary; ‘more intimate, terrestrial, 21st century ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] were required’.31 The gaze of hegemonic military power, the report contended, must not only colonize the planetary scales of surveillance; it must penetrate the fine-grained local geographies of urban and infrastructural battlespaces. Such a transformation would be temporal as well as geographical. ‘The surveillance of people, things and activities required to populated the databases needed for identification, location and tracking,’ the DSB report stated, ‘will require a persistence beyond that typical of many of today’s’ military and security surveillance systems.

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SUVs are exactly that, they are armored cars for the battlefield’.86 Such invocations of a new and deeply insecure medievalism within the militarized borderland of the domestic US city fit with the more general suggestions of right-wing foreign policy commentators such as Robert Kaplan, who speaks of the ‘coming anarchy’ on a planetary scale, which will reduce our world to an assortment of lawless ‘feral cities’,87 where only the strongest – and the most aggressively militarized – will survive or prosper. 88 Here again, deeply anti-urban rhetoric blends into geopolitical imaginations, with the SUV linking the two. As George Monbiot quipped in the Guardian, perhaps the Hummer patriots, as they lumbered around US cities in their massive vehicles, ‘should also have been demonstrating their love for their country by machine-gunning passers-by’.89 THE PENTAGON PIMPS OUT Given this general backdrop, it is not surprising to discover that, in addition to using familiar recruiting tactics such as air shows and car races, the US military has exploited the Hummer.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

At the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, geoengineering was cited as one of the top risks that the world faces. And what Wood said ten years ago at that meeting remains true today—when you think about big technological fixes for sea-level rise, spraying particles in the atmosphere to reflect away sunlight is the only planetary-scale fix we know of that could plausibly stop or slow sea-level rise. Other ideas, such as pumping billions of tons of ocean water onto Antarctica, where it would freeze and lower sea levels, or re-creating an ice-age landscape (complete with genetically engineered beasts that would be a cross between elephants and woolly mammoths) in Siberia to help reflect sunlight and keep the tundra frozen, may be provocative thought experiments, but few scientists take them seriously.

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Maybe in our increasingly rich and human-engineered world, losing some beaches and cities won’t matter so much. If the real Venice goes under, you can always visit the fake Venice in Las Vegas. And maybe Miami Beach will be nearly as awesome in virtual reality. (Then again, maybe not.) Perhaps the best we can hope for is that living in a world of quickly rising seas will turn out to be a planetary-scale experiment in creative destruction, one that forces us to abandon a lot of stupid infrastructure and stupid ideas about how to live with water—and how to live with each other—and replace them with something smarter, more durable, more flexible. After all, other than cockroaches, humans are probably the most adaptable creatures on the planet.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Although states were once thought to be powerless in the face of the Internet, the giants have awoken from their slumber. Left unchecked, these trends will result in the gradual disintegration of what is in the long-term interest of all citizens: an open and secure commons of information on a planetary scale. We stand at a crossroads, and there are several paths we can travel down. Fifty years from now, future historians may look back and say, “You know, there was that brief window in the 1990s and 2000s, when citizens came close to building that planetary library and global public sphere, and then let it slip from their grasp.”

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They will not bring malicious networks to their knees, or prevent cutthroat entrepreneurs from exploiting the domain. But, as a vision of ethical behaviour in cyberspace, they will raise the bar, set standards, and challenge the players to justify their acts in more than self-interested terms. Above all, they will focus collective attention on how best to sustain a common communications environment on a planetary scale in an increasingly compressed political space. Decisions made today could take us down a path where cyberspace continues to evolve into a global commons that empowers individuals through access to information and freedom of speech and association, or they could take us in the opposite direction.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

b One does sometimes worry that the Gouverneur Morrises of the world have ultimately been successful in preventing such knowledge from reaching most of the population. c It wouldn’t have to be based on a system of strict consensus, by the way, since, as we’ll see, absolute consensus is unrealistic in large groups—let alone on a planetary scale! What I am talking about is just what I say: an approach to politics, whatever particular institutional form it takes, that similarly sees political deliberation as problem solving rather than as a struggle between fixed interests. FOUR HOW CHANGE HAPPENS The last chapter ended with a long-term, philosophical perspective; this one aims to be more practical.

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Since the 1980s, “freedom” has come to mean “the market,” and “the market” has come to be seen as identical with capitalism—even, ironically, in places like China, which had known sophisticated markets for thousands of years, but rarely anything that could be described as capitalism. The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, the trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs. This is precisely the system that has imposed free market orthodoxy, and allowed the opening of the world to financial pillage, under the watchful aegis of American arms.

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

But now the tattered ozone layer and collapsing ice shelves are evoking a new story: we are not separate. If we take this story to heart and follow its radical implications, it offers some very good news – for the biosphere and for ourselves. Humanity has become a force of nature, a geophysical force operating on a planetary scale. We didn’t get here overnight. The story of separation, which crops up in one way or another across many cultures, has deep roots; only recently did it produce epic consequences. With the scientific and industrial revolutions, knowledge engendered power in new ways. Starting with seventeenth-century Europe, Earth was carved up into a patchwork of sovereign states.

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Ecology is the household’s management of natural resources, and economics is its management of its financial resources. The idea that my household can save money by buying inexpensive goods created through the plunder of faraway lands is no longer viable. The upshot of the global economy is that my household is now operating on a planetary scale. There is no “faraway,” no frontier save those fantasies of space colonization. We must, therefore, harmonize our resource extraction, production, consumption, and waste with our best understandings of the circle of life. In other words, we must reinvent our economies. In a quiet and often homespun way, ecovillages are marrying economics to the other four dimensions of E2C2: ecology, community, and consciousness.

Catching Stardust: Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System by Natalie Starkey

3D printing, Apollo 11, gravity well, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, the long tail, Tunguska event

Studying the planets themselves is all well and good, but they tend to make things rather complicated when attempting to unravel the timeline that can take us back 4.6 billion years to the beginning of the Solar System, when the first rocks were forming from the molecular cloud. The reason for this is that the planets have experienced vast changes in their long history since formation. They have been melted and re-formed many times over, experiencing violent impacts from space and then undergoing planetary-scale processing such as plate tectonics, of which we’ll learn more later. In fact, because of these processes, the planets have almost completely hidden away or lost much of the information about the molecular cloud from which they formed. If scientists wanted to use the planets to understand the molecular cloud, then they’d have a great deal of geological unravelling to do.

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Not only can asteroids and comets contain precious metals and water in high abundance, but these small objects can also be relatively easy to get to, with some being energetically closer than the Moon, requiring less rocket thrust to reach them. The relatively small size of comets and asteroids on planetary scales also gives them a low surface gravity which makes them easier to leave than the Moon, requiring less energy to blast back off their surfaces with a spacecraft laden with mined goodies. In addition, straightforward surface contact with some asteroids and comets may be enough to break them up, simply because they aren’t very well consolidated.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

Using instant electronic messages of 30 billion conversations among 180 million people all over the world, they corroborated the small world theory that only 6.6 degrees of separation exist between any two strangers on Earth.132 Horvitz, said: “To me, it was pretty shocking. What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social-connectivity constant for humanity.” The researchers concluded that “[t]o our knowledge, this is the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available to validate the well-known ‘6 degrees of separation’ finding by Travers and Milgram.”133 Researchers in the field of IT, communications, and social network theory are buoyed by the findings and suggest that the small world phenomenon could be harnessed to bring the human race together quickly around natural disaster relief or for political and social purposes.

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Even here, the traditional top-down flow of communication so characteristic of the TV medium has bent to a high degree of interactivity and feedback. In popular reality TV shows like American Idol, the TV audience gets to weigh in by text message to help shape the direction and story line. The dramaturgical age is upon us. Moreno could never have imagined psychodrama on a planetary scale. Nor could the early theorists of dramaturgical consciousness have guessed that one day the dramaturgical frame of mind would come to be so thoroughly internalized and externalized that a generation of young people would come to think of themselves as actors playing roles during most of their waking hours.

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While the new distributed communications technologies—and, soon, distributed renewable energies—are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. We talk breathlessly about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little of exactly why we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. What’s sorely missing is an overarching reason for why billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end? The only feeble explanations thus far offered are to share information, be entertained, advance commercial exchange, and speed the globalization of the economy. All the above, while relevant, nonetheless seem insufficient to justify why nearly seven billion human beings should be connected and mutually embedded in a globalized society.

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

It was chillingly illustrated with pictures of sleek missiles launching from craters on the Moon and of Queens and Manhattan under multiple mushroom clouds, all from the brush of Chesley Bonestell, a friend and collaborator of Richardson. The destruction wrought on the five boroughs deserved an artist used to the planetary scale; indeed, the pictures serve as companion pieces to one that Bonestell had painted the year before showing the aftermath of a meteor strike on New York. As the Moonpeople’s self-destruction through nuclear war in “Rocket Ship Galileo” made clear, the idea of the Moon as a source of mass destruction resonated with its long-standing fictional deployment as a landscape of deathliness, a place of extinction sometimes dotted with ruins.

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It also stems from the same conflict as the bomb-test sediments favoured as a marker by others and matching, Mr Grinspoon says, their “symbolic potency”. Like them, it could only have been created by an entity that had “developed world-changing technology”. As Verne suggested in “From the Earth to the Moon”, the sort of technology that allows such travel is of its nature the sort of technology that is significant on a planetary scale. Grinspoon’s suggestion has the further benefit, at least to my eyes, that if Tranquility Base marks the bottom of the Anthropocene, then the Anthropocene is a geological epoch that encompasses both Earth and Moon. That seems at once odd and reasonable. If indelible human influence means the Earth has entered a new geological age, surely it means the Moon has, too.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Contents In Detail Title Page Copyright Dedication About the Author Preface Part I: Thinking About Risk Chapter 1: A Method to the Madness A Method for Reducing Complexity A Model for Quantifying Risk The Challenge of Crony Beliefs Chapter 2: The Specter of Humdrum Calamities Unemployment and Insolvency Loss of Shelter Loss of Basic Utilities or Transportation Unintentional Injury Theft, Harassment, and Intentional Harm Illness and Death But Wait, There’s More! Chapter 3: Exploring Large-Scale Risks Natural Disasters Industrial Accidents Social Unrest and War Economic Crises Pandemics Terrorism Chapter 4: Oh No, Zombies! Uniquely Virulent and Deadly Diseases Runaway Climate Change Other Planetary-Scale Natural Disasters Exotic Physics and Miscellaneous Space Phenomena Unimpeded Rise of Totalitarian Regimes Global Thermonuclear War Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse Ghosts, Bigfoot, and the Coming Robot Apocalypse The Scourge of Extraterrestrials Looking Beyond Doomsday Part II: The Prepared Lifestyle Chapter 5: Mind Over Matter Chapter 6: Building a Rainy-Day Fund Finding Ways to Save Compartmentalizing the Funds Dealing with Debt Knowing Where to Stop Chapter 7: Safeguarding Your Savings The History of Currencies Debt as a Currency The Age of Coin Fractional Reserve Banking and Fiat Money Cryptocurrencies Revisiting Dangers to Liquidity and Capital Loss of Access to Bank Accounts Adverse Judgments Gradual Inflation Hyperinflation Confiscation of Wealth The (Monetary) Zombie Apocalypse Methods for Mitigating Risk Physical Cash Diversified Bank Deposits Bonds Simple Currency Hedges Equities Stock Options and Commodity Futures Options Precious Metals Real Estate Physical Collectibles Cryptocurrencies and NFTs Insurance Policies and Separation of Assets Portfolio Design Strategies Chapter 8: Engineering a Doomsday-Proof Career Chapter 9: Staying Alive Defensive Driving Working at Heights The Enemy in the Medicine Cabinet Alcohol and Recreational Drugs Workshop and Power Tool Safety Fireproofing the Homestead Other Dangers in and Around the Home Chapter 10: Protecting Oneself in the Digital and Physical Realm Dealing with Online Fraud Maintaining Privacy on the Internet Minimizing the Impact of Burglaries Responding to Muggings and Home Invasions Fending Off Pickpockets A Word on Kindness Chapter 11: Getting in Shape The Folly of Miracle Cures Establishing a “No Diet” Diet Calorie Restriction vs.

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It’s difficult to predict the proxy wars that may be fought three decades from now, and it’s hard to tell which part of Wyoming will be experiencing more temperate winters and more rain, but a financial safety net and a robust social network are some of the surest ways to maintain the ability to adapt. Other Planetary-Scale Natural Disasters Tales of natural disasters are as old as oral tradition itself; many of our most ancient myths recount the floods, droughts, earthquakes, and locusts that haunted early humans, wiped out villages, or brought entire empires to their knees. In the 1960s, the venerable genre expanded to include hitherto unthinkable predictions of environmental crises brought on by people—be it overpopulation, pollution, or resource depletion.

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web by Paul Adams

Airbnb, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, David Brooks, Dunbar number, information retrieval, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, mirror neurons, planetary scale, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, sentiment analysis, social web, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, white flight

For lots of detail about group dynamics, see David Brook’s book The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (Random House, 2011). 7. For more information on Stanley Milgram’s experiments, including challenges to his methods, see the Wikipedia article on Small world experiment. 8. See the 2008 research paper “Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network” by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz (where they analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million MSN users). 9. Quote from Stanley Milgram’s 1967 Psychology Today article “The small-world problem.” 10. In his book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Norton, 2003), Duncan Watts describes the difficulties in finding the shortest paths between people. 11.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, dematerialisation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invention of movable type, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, megacity, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, vertical integration

In Stiegler’s view, hopes for such developments were based on a misunderstanding of what was driving many processes of globalization. For him, the 1990s opened onto a hyper-industrial era, not a post-industrial one, in which a logic of mass production was suddenly aligned with techniques that, in unprecedented ways, combine fabrication, distribution, and subjectivation on a planetary scale. While much of Stiegler’s argument is compelling, I believe that the problem of “temporal objects” is secondary to the larger systemic colonization of individual experience that I have been discussing. Most important now is not the capture of attentiveness by a delimited object—a movie, television program, or piece of music—whose mass reception seems to be Stiegler’s main preoccupation, but rather the remaking of attention into repetitive operations and responses that always overlap with acts of looking or listening.

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

An especially intriguing target is helping people to understand the interactions of complex systems of systems that underlie everything from the human body to cities to the global financial industry. One thing seems certain: only through fundamental breakthroughs in physics will we be able to deal with so much complexity and uncertainty on a planetary scale. SCENARIO: DESIGNING PRODUCTS FROM THE MOLECULE UP In 1935, scientists at the E. I. DuPont Co. invented a synthetic fabric, later named nylon, that became the first commercially successful synthetic polymer. Nylon was first used as a replacement for silk in women’s stockings and parachutes but later came to be employed much more broadly in everything from clothing to gears in machines.

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, computer age, dark matter, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Joan Didion, John Harrison: Longitude, Louis Blériot, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, the built environment, transcontinental railway, Year of Magical Thinking

I am certain that on most workdays I see more people than many of my ancestors saw in an entire lifetime. I think how those I’ve seen have been scattered by the hours of airplanes, how the simplest definition of community, of sharing a space, has been disassembled, even as the plane has enabled new forms of reunions, those that take place on a fully planetary scale. By nightfall many of the people I saw in the airport or onboard my plane will have taken further flights, or will be at home, or in a hotel room like mine. Some may be driving the last miles down a narrow road, completing their journey to a place distant in every sense from the world I know, or may even now be describing their journey to the person they’ve traveled so far to see.

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But when I drove to them myself, the cloud they formed began to sort itself, to fall into place, as we say, like the pieces of a wooden puzzle. I realized that a lake I thought faced in one direction actually faced another, for example, and was close to a second location that I had never linked it to. When I learned to fly, such a sorting of idea-places onto the physical world around me happened on a fully planetary scale. What suddenly appeared in the window included not only the few cities I had flown to as a child, but everything I saw from the air that was identifiable—all the cities and mountains and oceans I had heard of or read about and dreamed of someday visiting. This sense of a formal knowledge of places falling onto actual earth and lining and connecting up, one with another, may be similar to the ways in which bodies change in the minds of medical students when they first learn how the organs and bones they’ve always known the names of are really located in three dimensions, and how they’re connected by other tissues they did not know about before medical school.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

I got back to Apple and started building prototypes.”20 What emerged was a proposed infrastructure called WorldBoard. In 1996, Spohrer wrote: What if we could put information in places? More precisely, what if we could associate information with a place and perceived the information as if it were really there? WorldBoard is a vision of doing just that on a planetary scale and as a natural part of everyday life. For example, imagine being able to enter an airport and see a virtual red carpet leading you right to your gate, look at the ground and see property lines or underground buried cables, walk along a nature trail and see virtual signs near plants and rocks.21 Spohrer raised the bar for technical difficulty by wanting to see the information in its context, overlaid on the real world.

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That transmitted information could be spatial coordinates for projecting a virtual overlay onto an object in space, or an animation, text, music, spreadsheet, or voice message. The client software that runs on users’ devices would include “a mobile capability to author and access the information associated with places on a planetary scale. A location-aware device with navigation, authoring, and global wireless communication capabilities would be needed.”26 When I started looking for similar research, I found it everywhere. In 2001, researchers at the Social Mobile Computing Group in Kista, Sweden, presented their GeoNotes system, which enables people to annotate physical locations with virtual notes, to add signatures, and to specify access rights.27 Jun Rekimoto and his colleagues at Sony described in 1998 “a system that allows users to dynamically attach newly created digital information such as voice notes or photographs to the physical environment, through mobile/wearable computers as well as normal computers. . . .

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Much of the technology yoked together in Amazon’s effort seems to have originated internally, to the extent that aspects of the program were apparently overseen personally by Bezos himself.12 Other than that this is an unusual degree of interest for a CEO to take in the details of implementation, in this respect the company is no different from the other Stacks: all of them spend billions of dollars annually generating, testing and refining new ideas, and trying to turn them into shipping products. But the Stacks also innovate by acquisition, turning the entire planetary-scale entrepreneurial community into a vast distributed R&D lab. For example, Amazon apparently developed the foundations of its drone program in-house, but when it became evident that nobody on hand had the expertise in machine vision necessary to advance the program to its next stage, they simply hired an existing team of experts, and rebuilt the drone lab around them.13 Similarly, they got a toehold in automation by buying the company that made the robots used in its warehouses, Kiva Systems.14 While this practice is commonplace throughout the technology industry, it has been raised to an art in the age of the Stacks, especially as each of them expands beyond its original core competency.

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But the random outbreaks of terror have for the most part been suppressed; some kind of corrective action is being taken on the environment, however obscure it may be; and if a brutal conformity reigns, it leaves just enough space for people to eke out the rudiments of a life they can call their own. Most choose to make of it whatever they can. The final scenario has no name. Here we find failed civilization, on a planetary scale: societies panicking in the face of the first sharp shocks of climate violence collapse back into tribal allegiances and pseudoverities of blood and soil, and never meaningfully grasp any of the possibilities presented to them by new technology. The landscape is scoured and blasted by desperate attempts to jumpstart the engines of the economy.

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon tax, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, green new deal, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, the scientific method

The anthropologist Margaret Mead, who knew something about the rigidity of cultural patterns, had understood the urgency of the problem even earlier, in 1975, when she convened a global warming symposium at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “We are facing a period when society must make decisions on a planetary scale,” she wrote. Her conclusions were stark, immediate, and unadorned with the caveats that dominated the academic literature. “Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices,” she said, “the whole planet may become endangered.”

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

The only way to reconstruct a viable human species of mind is to use tissue and cells—and why bother when making human babies is so easy? Some problems will require multiple kinds of minds to crack, and our job will be to discover new methods of thinking and to set this diversity of intelligences loose in the universe. Planetary-scale problems will require some kind of planetary-scale mind; complex networks made of trillions of active nodes will require network intelligences; routine mechanical operations will need nonhuman precision in calculations. Since our own brains are such poor thinkers in terms of probability, we’d really benefit by discovering an intelligence at ease with statistics.

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

I just hadn’t understood what they meant. The achievement of The Overstory is to make these revelations meaningful at human scale, building the connections between us and the trees around us. Powers uses the scale of arboreal life – its extent in time, as well as its size – to tell a new kind of epic story: multi-generational, planetary-scale and ecological, in the sense of deeply intertwined with and responsible to our environment. As I read it, I felt something shift in myself, a sense of having been blind all my life to events and processes, whole other lives that surround us all the time. Having always been more interested in words on pages and code on screens, I suddenly found myself leaning out of windows to touch the leaves of nearby trees, and stopping in the street to trace, with wonder, the whorls and cracks of living bark.

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Of course it all comes shimmering, bumping and concertina-ing down the aeons. Gaia theory understands the world as a synergistic, self-regulating, complex system in which organic and inorganic matter interact with one another to co-produce the conditions for life on Earth. Gaia is a cybernetic feedback system, the realization of Beer’s Cybernetic Factory at planetary scale, in which the inputs and outputs are water, air and rock, and the U-Machine is the entire biosphere huffing and puffing and wriggling and growing and adapting away. The world is not like a computer; computers are like the world. This realization opens the door to all kinds of exciting and radically different possibilities for computation, which Beer barely anticipated but would probably have massively enjoyed.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

No single agency controlled it absolutely; everyone controlled it partially. Decentralization, peer-to-peer networks, gateways, platform stacks—the principles that Baran, Davies, Cerf, Kahn, and others hit upon together in the 1960s and 1970s provided a brilliant solution to the problem of sharing information on a planetary scale. Tellingly, the solution ultimately outperformed any rival approaches developed by the marketplace. Billions of dollars were spent by private companies trying to build global networks based on proprietary standards: AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Microsoft, Apple, and many others made epic efforts to become mainstream consumer networks in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Workers writing essays, doing ‘lead generation’, designing presentations, building websites, working as personal assistants, and carrying out all manner of other jobs all get their work through online freelancing platforms that allow workers and clients to connect in a planetary labour market (Graham and Anwar, 2019). For many workers, the planetary scale of the market affords workers a significant amount of freedom in choosing where to work from, and in many cases allows them to escape from relatively constrained local labour markets. There are workers in places like Manila in the Philippines or Lagos in Nigeria who simply want an escape from the horrendous local traffic conditions (it is not uncommon to hear stories of three-hour commutes to work in both places).

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

Each works, in the language of the original Gaia paper, as “a contrivance specifically constituted for a set of purposes.” The cells that help pump blood through our bodies go to elaborate lengths to keep blood-pressure levels at an equilibrium, because stable blood pressure is important to the survival of the organism. Lovelock and Margulis saw the same principle at work on a planetary scale: the Earth itself could be seen as a single organism, with the collective behavior of every member of the biosphere contributing to its survival. It was a variation on Sir John Pringle’s “no vegetable grows in vain” homily, with mankind replaced by Mother Earth. The biosphere regulates O2 levels, and it does it for a reason: because stable O2 levels are good for the biosphere.

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

The next stage on this front should come from the Eu­ro­pean Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission, scheduled for launch in mid-2022.18 TERRAFORMING MARS By the end of this ­century, a technologically reasonable projection foresees a h ­ uman settlement on Mars, analogous in structure and functions to our current installation at the South Pole, though operating ­under much harsher circumstances. Some enthusiasts regard this as a preliminary stage in a g­ rand, planetary-­scale proj­ect to turn Mars into a planet more hospitable to h ­ uman habitation, potentially capable of supporting a population equal to Earth’s. Although Mars has barely more than half the Earth’s dia­meter, its lack of oceans gives the red planet a total land area almost equal to Earth’s, so some may claim that the planet offers equal potential for maintaining a ­human population.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In recent years, Bartlett has raised some controversy by proposing an end to immigration before the United States is engulfed with humanity. But even critics who challenge the ethical, practical, social, and environmental complexity of such a measure don’t argue with his math—especially when the scale gets so big that we lose sight of what’s happening to us. The planetary scale, for instance. In 1900, there were 1.6 billion people on Earth. Then, during the twentieth century, the world’s population doubled, and then doubled again. How much space did that leave in our bottle? How can we tell if, in fact, we’ve already filled it up? The shuttles have stopped flying from Cape Canaveral.

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A passage in the landmark ecological boundary paper he coauthored referred to exponential growth of human activities that could destabilize systems and trigger abrupt, irreversible environmental changes that could be catastrophic for human well-being. “This is a profound dilemma,” it concluded, “because the predominant paradigm of social and economic development remains largely oblivious to the risk of human induced environmental disasters at continental to planetary scales.” Muffled in the neutral scientific tone of that turgid sentence was a scream: We don’t even realize what we’re doing! As Interstate 94 curved past gleaming downtown Minneapolis, I looked for the parking lot where the original Minneapolis Public Library once stood, a nineteenth-century brownstone where I’d passed much of my boyhood.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Having instead chosen to ignore those warnings and let emissions continue to grow, stockpiling each year in the atmosphere a generational burden, the world now faces a far more harrowing task – zeroing out emissions within just a few decades, perhaps even sooner in the absence of negative emissions and carbon removal on a ‘planetary scale’. What seemed advisable in 1988 now qualifies almost as climate denial; what counted as ambitious in 2008 is already hopelessly inadequate. And if the curves aren’t bent immediately, by 2025 even the dispiriting maths we face today will no longer be workable either. The second lesson is that success in one country is not enough, and that no one should be satisfied by nationalistic responses to global threats.

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The task of racial justice and climate justice depends on our meeting this challenge at the scale it requires: remaking the world. This is no metaphor. As the activists who challenged the colonial political system in the 1960s and ’70s realized, justice requires us to reconstruct our political and economic systems on a planetary scale. Political theorist Adom Getachew has called this ethos and ambition ‘worldmaking’. This may seem daunting, for the world is a complex thing made of many moving parts – but it is a real system that we can, and must, try to understand. It’s often poorly described with the static metaphor of a ‘blueprint’, or a chart of institutional hierarchies, while in reality our politics and economics are in constant motion.

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Nor will technology, reaching down its empathic paw, raise us from the trials and tribulations of being human. Rather, what will happen is what has already been happening: the two will continue to merge and re-make one another on the individual scale, on the institutional scale, on the social scale, on the planetary scale. Printing presses and books created a new kind of religious scholar; the Internet and Google create a new kind of student. Such changes may be profound. New human varietals will continue to emerge-indeed, "digital natives," comfortably embedded in their leT networks, may already exemplify this evolution.

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

Other, smaller pieces are faint, except when one occasionally burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere or comes close enough to the Sun to evaporate its frozen gases into an enormous tail. It is pretty clear by now that the Earth is special among its brethren in the solar system as the only planet with liquid water on its surface and life on a planetary scale. But there’s no reason to think that our solar system is unique in the Galaxy, given its hundreds of billions of stars. Unfolding Story In fact, well before they could detect extrasolar worlds, astronomers had a pretty good idea that the stuff of planets is ubiquitous. Thanks to clues from observations, laboratory studies, and computer simulations, we now have a reasonable, albeit incomplete, understanding of how the raw material comes together to make planetary systems.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

“The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialization,” he lamented. It produced a “desert of classified data.” His critique was actually a lament—he longed for the world before print, for oral culture, with its face-to-face interactions. The perfect technology would revive the spirit of that bygone culture, but on a planetary scale, transforming the world into one big, happy tribe. Or, it would become a “global village,” to use his other cliché-destined phrase—and the warmth of that village would counteract destructive individualism and all the other fragmentary forces in the world. Most promising of all the new technologies was the computer.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

This is long-zoom history: almost a century after Willis Carrier began thinking about keeping the ink from smearing in Brooklyn, our ability to manipulate tiny molecules of air and moisture helped transform the geography of American politics. But the rise of the Sun Belt in the United States was just a dress rehearsal for what is now happening on a planetary scale. All around the world, the fastest growing megacities are predominantly in tropical climates: Chennai, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Karachi, Lagos, Dubai, Rio de Janeiro. Demographers predict that these hot cities will have more than a billion new residents by 2025. It goes without saying that many of these new immigrants don’t have air-conditioning in their homes, at least not yet, and it is an open question whether these cities are sustainable in the long run, particularly those based in desert climates.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The right-hand circle shows what has happened, in Mau’s view, since the advent of nanotechnologies, genetic manipulation, large-scale digital fabrication, and even terraforming. Design expands to become the outermost ring, encompassing nature, culture, and business. From Mau’s perspective, humankind’s increasing capacities to manipulate and shape everything from the submolecular to planetary scales radically transforms what design means and signifies— in his words, that design itself “has become the biggest project of all.”8 Mieke Gerritzen, a Dutch visual provocateur, went so far as to proclaim that “Everyone Is a Designer!” in a book she designed by the same name.9 Whether we accept the hyperbole of her manifesto or not, there is much to be gained from at least thinking like a designer in this 89/11 world.

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

Two centuries later, we want to apply the British example to the energy and digital revolution. To secure rare metals supplies, mining maps need to be updated — a realisation brought on by the Chinese embargo that led to states, multinationals, and entrepreneurs scrambling for rare metals. This is being undertaken not only at a national scale, as in Smith’s time, but on a planetary scale: deposits of rare earths have been discovered in at least thirty-five countries on five continents. North Korea has some of the most abundant rare earths deposits in the world. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro wants to accelerate the production of niobium — a metal of which Brazil already produces 90 per cent.30 In the midst of the US–China trade war, Australia is multiplying its mining projects in Western Australia because, in the words of the country’s minister of defence, Linda Reynolds, ‘It is essential we have a secure source of supply, especially given the current geopolitical headwinds.’31 Bill Gates, for his part, has even invested in KoBold Metals — a Californian start-up that promises big data solutions for new cobalt exploration campaigns.32 Mining companies have already started exploring the hundreds of rare metals deposits around the world.

Humankind: Solidarity With Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, capitalist realism, David Brooks, Georg Cantor, gravity well, Ian Bogost, invisible hand, means of production, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, trolley problem, Turing test, wage slave, zero-sum game

What is being sustained, of course, is the neoliberal, capitalist world-economic structure. And this isn’t great news for humans, coral, kiwi birds or lichen. This adds up to an explosively holist political and economic agenda. Individual beings don’t matter; what matters is the whole that transcends them. We require another holism if we are going to think at a planetary scale without just upgrading or retweeting the basic agricultural theological meme, a meme that justifies a human–nonhuman boundary. Fascism is an atavistic reaction to the reality of this oppressive failure, attempting to replace the new god with a fantasy old god, “Making America Great Again.” The fusion in the fascist imaginary of Agenda 21 with the New World Order results, as in geometrical triangulation, in a virtual image of an international (Jewish) banking conspiracy.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In little over two generations—or a single lifetime—humanity (or until very recently a small fraction of it) has become a planetary-scale geological force. Hitherto human activities were insignificant compared with the biophysical Earth System, and the two could operate independently. However, it is now impossible to view one as separate from the other. The Great Acceleration trends provide a dynamic view of the emergent, planetary-scale coupling, via globalization, between the socio-economic system and the biophysical Earth System. We have reached a point where many biophysical indicators have clearly moved beyond the bounds of Holocene variability.

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

But as time went on, as technology improved, our numbers increased exponentially, and now here we are with an average of some ten people per square kilometer, our numbers concentrated in cities, and an awesome technological armory at hand—the powers of which we understand and control only incompletely. ** Because our lives depend on minuscule amounts of such gases as ozone, major environmental disruption can be brought about—even on a planetary scale—by the engines of industry. The inhibitions placed on the irresponsible use of technology are weak, often half-hearted, and almost always, worldwide, subordinated to short-term national or corporate interest. We are now able, intentionally or inadvertently, to alter the global environment. Just how far along we are in working the various prophesied planetary catastrophes is still a matter of scholarly debate.

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Community Supported Agriculture, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, fixed income, gentrification, global village, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, labor-force participation, land tenure, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Occupy movement, planetary scale, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, the market place, tontine, trade liberalization, UNCLOS, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

The NIDL is thus identified with the formation of Free Trade Zones—industrial sites exempt from any labor regulation producing for export—and with the organization of “global assembly lines” by transnational corporations.5 Relying on this theory, both the media and economic planners have relaunched the myth of capitalism as the great equalizer and promoter of “interconnectedness,” this time presumably achieved on a planetary scale. As the argument goes, we are witnessing the industrialization of the “Third World.” We are told this process will both eliminate the hierarchies that have historically characterized the international division of labor, and will also have a positive impact on the sexual division of labor. The women working in the Free Trade Zones presumably benefit from engagement in industrial labor, gaining a new independence and the skills necessary to compete on the international labor market.6 Although accepted by neoliberal economists,7 this theory has not been exempt from criticism.8 Already in The New Helots (1987), Robin Cohen observed that the movement of capital from the “North” to the “South” is not quantitatively sufficient to justify the hypothesis of a “New” International Division of Labor.

People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams by Jono Bacon

Airbnb, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bounce rate, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, content marketing, Debian, Firefox, gamification, if you build it, they will come, IKEA effect, imposter syndrome, Internet Archive, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, Mark Shuttleworth, Minecraft, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, planetary scale, pull request, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Scaled Composites, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Virgin Galactic, Y Combinator

Jono looks at those networks of human brains through many insightful angles, from animal behaviors to the very human need of belonging and connecting to something bigger than yourself. —Giorgio Regni, Chief Technical Officer, Scality What makes us unique as a species is that we seem to have an infinite ability to collaborate, from hundreds to millions of people. Collaboration, I believe, is the key to our ability as a species to solve planetary-scale challenges. People Powered provides a roadmap for us to further unlock our potential as individuals, to scale collaboration, and to increase our own personal impact. —Ryan Bethencourt, CEO, Wild Earth; Partner, Babel Ventures Copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Bacon All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be used or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture by Antonio Damasio

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, biofilm, business process, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double helix, Gordon Gekko, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, invisible hand, job automation, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, post-truth, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, Thomas Malthus

This could be the best of times to be alive because we are awash in spectacular scientific discoveries and in technical brilliance that make life ever more comfortable and convenient; because the amount of available knowledge and the ease of access to that knowledge are at an all-time high and so is human interconnectedness at a planetary scale, as measured by actual travel, electronic communication, and international agreements for all sorts of cooperation, in science, the arts, and trade; because the ability to diagnose, manage, and even cure diseases continues to expand and longevity continues to extend so remarkably that human beings born after the year 2000 are likely to live, hopefully well, to an average of at least a hundred.

The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers, Hiroko Shimizu

air freight, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, food miles, Food sovereignty, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, intermodal, invention of agriculture, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, megacity, moral hazard, mortgage debt, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, refrigerator car, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl

As Aristotle observed more than two millennia ago: “Sometimes there is much drought or rain, and it prevails over a great and continuous stretch of country. At other times it is local; the surrounding country often getting seasonable or even excessive rains while there is drought in a certain part; or, contrariwise, all the surrounding country gets little or even no rain while a certain part gets rain in abundance.” 20 This is even more so on a planetary scale. Of course, the state of transportation and information technologies at any given point in time was also crucial in moving goods around in the right amounts and at the right time. Historically, regions that could rely on maritime transportation always had a clear advantage over landlocked ones.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Though it uses the same tropes that keep Mabinogi players glued to their seats for days on end – cool graphics, missions, rewards, levels, feedback – EVOKE is designed to minimise time on the keyboard. On average, its players spend five to six hours pursuing missions in the real world for every hour spent in front of a screen. “We’re trying to take ordinary people who feel like they don’t have a positive role to play in big planetary-scale efforts and give them the sense that they can as individuals contribute to changing the world for the better,” says McGonigal. But EVOKE is also an exercise in unearthing the diamonds in the rough, the John Harrisons of social enterprise. The best players are rewarded with grant money and mentorships with social innovators.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

As the Canadian catastrophe theorist Thomas Homer-Dixon puts it in The Upside of Down, In one respect humanity is extraordinarily lucky: just when it faces some of the biggest challenges in its history, it has developed a technology that could be the foundation for extremely rapid problem-solving on a planetary scale, for radically new forms of democratic decision-making. We have only just begun to tap the web’s potential and the new ways of thinking and acting it offers us. We-Think will really make a difference when we use it creatively to tackle major shared challenges: to spread democracy and learning, to improve health and quality of life, to tackle climate change and the threats of extremism.

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

Within a matter of two or three years, we had sunk pretty much every proposed new global trade pact, and institutions like the IMF had been effectively expelled from Asia, Latin America, and, indeed, most of the world’s surface.28 The imagery worked because it showed everything people had been told about globalization to be a lie. This was not some natural process of peaceful trade, made possible by new technologies. What was being talked about in terms of “free trade” and the “free market” really entailed the self-conscious completion of the world’s first effective29 planetary-scale administrative bureaucratic system. The foundations for the system had been laid in the 1940s, but it was only with the waning of the Cold War that they became truly effective. In the process, they came to be made up—like most other bureaucratic systems being created on a smaller scale at the same time—of such a thorough entanglement of public and private elements that it was often quite impossible to pull them apart—even conceptually.

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

But is the answer to make unemployment in Bangladesh permanent by bringing those clothing factories “home” or to shut down the amicable global trade links between great powers that have fostered the longest stretch of relative peace the world has ever known? If Covid-19 teaches us anything, it is that we really are all in this together. Some people in the anti-globalist, or just plain nationalist camp strongly believe we should not be organizing ourselves on a planetary scale at all. Yet, given that virtually all our economic and cultural activity is now on that scale, it is hard to argue we should not also be managing our affairs on that level. Just having eight billion people filling virtually every available niche on this planet makes us global whether we like it or not.

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

Apart from this approach to fusion-powered space travel posing significant proliferation and safety risks, tests of pulsed nuclear explosion rockets are effectively banned by international treaties—so it seems much more sensible to use controlled fusion reactors to achieve similar ends. However fusion-powered rockets are ultimately achieved, research into fusion for energy will aid their development.14 Anyway, developing fusion propulsion isn’t just about exploring the universe; fusion rockets could also help us prevent planetary-scale extinction of life from happening in the first place. The major challenge in preventing a humanity-killing asteroid or comet is detecting and reaching it early enough so that mitigating action—such as steering it out of the way—can be taken. Giving an asteroid a small push early on is as effective as a big push later on.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

We know, for example, that certain societies played a role in the demise of some of the planet’s ancient megafauna, like woolly mammoths and giant sloths and sabre-toothed cats. But they never precipitated anything like the multi-front ecological collapse that we are witnessing today. It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialisation from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance. Once we understand this, it changes how we think about the problem. We call this human epoch the Anthropocene, but in fact this crisis has nothing to do with humans as such. It has to do with the dominance of a particular economic system: one that is recent in origin, which developed in particular places at a particular time in history, and which has not been adopted to the same extent by all societies.

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

A global economy is an historically new reality, distinct from a world economy.55 A world economy – that is, an economy in which capital accumulation proceeds throughout the world – has existed in the West at least since the sixteenth century, as Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein have taught us.56 A global economy is something different: it is an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time, or chosen time, on a planetary scale. While capitalism is characterized by its relentless expansion, always trying to overcome limits of time and space, it was only in the late twentieth century that the world economy was able to become truly global on the basis of the new infrastructure provided by information and communication technologies, and with the decisive help of deregulation and liberalization policies implemented by governments and international institutions.

…

It is through these globalized, strategic components of the economy that the economic system is globally interconnected. Thus, I will define more precisely the global economy as an economy whose core components have the institutional, organizational, and technological capacity to work as a unit in real time, or in chosen time, on a planetary scale. I shall review succinctly the key features of this globality. Table 2.6 Cross-border transactions in bonds and equities, 1970–1996 (percentage of GDP) Source: IMF (1997: 60), compiled by Held et al. (1999: table 4.16) a January–September. b 1982. Global financial markets Capital markets are globally interdependent, and this is not a small matter in a capitalist economy.57 Capital is managed around the clock in globally integrated financial markets working in real time for the first time in history: billion dollars worth of transactions take place in seconds in the electronic circuits throughout the globe.

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

Because it is so bright and so far from the sun, Triton’s is among the coldest natural surfaces in the solar system, with an average temperature only about 38 degrees above absolute zero (or an incomprehensible –391°F). Triton’s brightness suggested that there would be relatively clean ice on the surface, perhaps even including exotic, low-temperature ices other than water ice. And its strange backward orbit suggested that it may have been through some sort of planetary-scale trauma, such as being captured by Neptune, or had its course changed by some sort of giant impact. It was a great way to end the surface-imaging phase of a great mission—with an encounter that would be surprising no matter what was revealed. Last Port of Call. Voyager 2 flyby trajectory past Neptune.

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis by Ruth Defries

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, food miles, Francisco Pizarro, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jevons paradox, John Snow's cholera map, out of africa, planetary scale, premature optimization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social intelligence, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

More than anything else, it has saved the planet from the scorching fate of Venus and the frozen fate of Mars. It has kept nutrients for plants and animals cycling from land to ocean to deep beneath the surface to the atmosphere and back. It is the most precious, and the least appreciated, foundation for human civilization. As with Earth’s other planetary-scale features, this recycling machinery is not subject to humanity’s control. So far as is known, ours is the only planet where an atom of carbon can find itself cycling from one form to another on time scales as short as seconds and as long as millions of years. Carbon easily bonds with other elements and forms the backbone of all known life.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

Bush’s administration were initially stunned by the event, but soon found themselves swept up in a mood of soaring optimism about the future of both the Republican Party and American power. Their dream, as they launched what they called the Global War on Terror, would be nothing short of creating an eternal Pax Republicana in the United States and a similarly never-ending Pax Americana first in the Greater Middle East and then on a potentially planetary scale.’ In the way Britain has been warped by empire, so has America been warped by the Cold War. The cultural projection that was required made a historical rewriting not only necessary, but a tool of war. And so America’s fundamental myth splits into two. The first is the story of Anglo-Saxons striving for self-governance and individual liberty once they had fled draconian Europe.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

So do all manner of cultural warnings, from the hubris around which Greek tragedies are built to the lamentation of King David’s preacher: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity [. . .] the Earth abideth for ever [. . .] and there is no new thing under the sun.” But the lamentation of vanity can be false modesty. On a planetary scale, intelligence is something genuinely new and powerful. Through the domestication of plants and animals intelligence has remade the living environment. Through industry it has disrupted the key biogeochemical cycles. For good or ill, it will do yet more. We will see a lot more ills before the balance shifts conclusively to the sort of Green Swan pathways that do not lead to “global immiseration.”

EcoVillage at Ithaca Pioneering a Sustainable Culture (2005) by Liz Walker

car-free, Community Supported Agriculture, intentional community, microcredit, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, systems thinking, the built environment, transit-oriented development, World Values Survey

Roughly a decade later came a related warning from 100 Nobel Prize winners who said that “the most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed.” As these two warnings by the world’s senior scientists indicate, powerful trends are now converging into a whole-systems crisis, creating xiii xiv E C O V I L L A G E AT I T H A C A the likelihood of a planetary-scale evolutionary crash within this generation. These “adversity trends” include growing disruption of the global climate, an enormous increase in human populations living in gigantic cities without access to sufficient land and water needed to grow their own food, the depletion of vital resources such as fresh water and cheap oil, the massive and rapid extinction of animal and plant species around the world, growing disparities between the rich and the poor, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

In 1990 Chinese GDP was around US$360 billion. By 2018 it was $13.6 trillion. That is 38 times bigger. To get your head around these astonishing numbers, the UK’s GDP in 1990 was just over $1 trillion, and now it is just over $2.6 trillion. With all this GDP growth comes pollution, and in China’s case pollution on a planetary scale. Every other country in the world pales into insignificance in terms of added environmental pollution since 1990. The Europeans deindustrialised, and the US went sideways. From around 2005, the US had natural gas to substitute for coal, and hence it could both grow and limit its carbon emissions.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

During the limited decades we live on this earth, people should be free to move to locations with better opportunities and not be trapped purely by accident of birth. * * * Clearly we’re a long way from such flexible borders today, so how might we approach a well-managed system of global mobility? Like climate change, mass migration is an issue that must be managed at the global level. The globalization of human activity and the planetary scale of the issues we face demand a new era of cooperative bodies with teeth to act. We have experienced the consequences of decadal erosion in the powers of global bodies, from our failure to act on greenhouse gas emissions to our failure to vaccinate the global south against Covid in a timely way.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Drought and famine will continue to be used as pretexts to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt.42 In the wealthier nations, we will protect our major cities with costly seawalls and storm barriers while leaving vast areas of coastline that are inhabited by poor and Indigenous people to the ravages of storms and rising seas. We may well do the same on the planetary scale, deploying techno-fixes to lower global temperatures that will pose far greater risks to those living in the tropics than in the Global North (more on this later). And rather than recognizing that we owe a debt to migrants forced to flee their lands as a result of our actions (and inactions), our governments will build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt even more draconian anti-immigration laws.

…

In recent years, the society has become the most prominent scientific organization to argue that, given the lack of progress on emission reduction, the time has come for governments to prepare a technological Plan B. In a report published in 2009, it called upon the British government to devote significant resources to researching which geoengineering methods might prove most effective. Two years later it declared that planetary-scale engineering interventions that would block a portion of the sun’s rays “may be the only option for reducing global temperatures quickly in the event of a climate emergency.”3 The retreat in Buckinghamshire has a relatively narrow focus: How should research into geoengineering, as well as eventual deployment, be governed?

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

Instead of taking humans away from the planet and into space, why shouldn’t the space industry develop the ability to put heavy industry up there in the cosmos? The vast renewable energy of the sun, the raw materials found on asteroids, and the ability to protect the earth from pollution present an attractive argument for a zoning rewrite on a planetary scale. Beyond the resources, there is also the advantage of microgravity, which allows for advances in materials not available on earth; already, firms are experimenting with making ultra-fast fiber-optic cable in space because it can be constructed with fewer impurities in orbit. “It’s not rocket science; it’s simply straightforward industry,” argues Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist and former NASA engineer.

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

First put forward by the English scientist James Lovelock in the 1970s and named after the Greek goddess of the earth, supporters of the Gaia hypothesis argue that this entire system is directly comparable to what we ordinarily consider a single organism, such as you or me. Lynn Margulis is one such advocate. She writes, “Atmospheric, astronomical, and oceanographic evidence attest that life manifests itself on a planetary scale. The steadiness of mean planetary temperature of the past three thousand million years, the 700-million-year maintenance of earth’s reactive atmosphere between high-oxygen levels of combustibility and low-oxygen levels of asphyxiation, and the apparently continuous removal of hazardous salts from oceans—all these point to mammal-like purposefulness in the organization of life as a whole … Life on Earth—fauna, flora, and microbiota—is a single, gas-entrenched, ocean-connected planetary system, the largest organic being in the solar system.”

Engineering Infinity by Jonathan Strahan

augmented reality, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, post scarcity, quantum entanglement, Schrödinger's Cat, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski

The Lansford Hastings is a starship, one of the fastest mecha ever constructed by the bastard children of posthumanity. From one angle, it may take us centuries to crawl between stars; but there's another perspective that sees us screaming across the cosmos at three thousand kilometres per second. On a planetary scale, we'd cross Sol system from Earth orbit to Pluto in less than two weeks. Earth to Luna in under five minutes. So one of the truisms of interstellar travel is that if something goes wrong, it goes wrong in a split instant, too fast to respond to. Except when it doesn't, of course. When the power goes down, I do what anyone in my position would do: I panic and ramp straight from slowtime up to my fastest quicktime setting.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

Industrial poisons, greenhouse gases, and substances that attack the protective ozone layer, because of their abysmal ignorance, do not respect borders. They are oblivious of the notion of national sovereignty. And so, due to the almost mythic powers of our technology (and the prevalence of short-term thinking), we are beginning—on Continental and on planetary scales—to pose a danger to ourselves. Plainly, if these problems are to be solved, it will require many nations acting in concert over many years. I'm struck again by the irony that spaceflight—conceived in tile cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds—brings with it a stunning transnational vision.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

. ———. 2010. “Saving Energy, and Its Cost.” New York Times, June 15. Lerner, Josh. 2009. Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed—and What to Do About It: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leskovec, Jure, and Eric Horvitz. 2008. “Planetary-Scale Views on a Large Instant-Messaging Network.” 17th International World Wide Web Conference, April 21–25, 2008, at Beijing, China. Levitt, Steven D., and Stephen J. Dubner. 2005. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: William Morrow & Co. Lewis, Michael. 2009.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Like the appearance of the first oxygen atmosphere or the sudden death of the dinosaurs, this was an example of what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter termed creative destruction—the constant, often violent replacement of the old by the new, which Schumpeter saw as the very heart of modern capitalism. Many societies were ruined, and many lives destroyed. But there was creation, too, because the sheer scale of the first global-exchange networks synergized collective learning on a planetary scale, releasing huge flows of information, energy, wealth, and power that would eventually transform human societies throughout the world. Almost all the advantages lay with the resource-hungry states and empires at the western edge of Afro-Eurasia whose ships had first broken through the barriers between the world zones.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The Boston-based affective computing company Affectiva boasted in 2017 that it had analyzed 4.7 million faces from seventy-five countries.13 Another company spun out of the University of Washington named Megaface has a database of 5 million images of 672,000 people. Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, a computer science professor advising Megaface, argued that “we need to test facial recognition on a planetary scale to enable practical applications—testing on a larger scale lets you discover the flaws and successes of recognition algorithms.”14 Endless expansion of surveillance is justified on the basis that it aids machine learning. Analogue statistical techniques, such as surveys, require us to present our views and preferences in deliberate, objective, and coherent terms, often with a moment of reflection.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

The stories highlight blows to the environment—unchecked climate change, loss of tropical forests, and crashing fisheries. And they describe perils to individual freedom from tech giants and governments online, through data tracking, algorithmic discrimination, and pervasive surveillance. Even though these are challenges at a national and even planetary scale, they are basically the same as fights over Knee Defenders and droneways, parking chairs and line-standers. All are fights over who gets what and why. Only the stakes are higher. Remember that we are all using the same ownership toolkit. It contains six contested pathways to claiming ownership: first-in-time, possession, labor, attachment, self-ownership, and family.

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

What is the right granularity of space and time over which to calculate Φ? Is it neurons and milliseconds, or atoms and femtoseconds? Could an entire country be conscious – and would one country be more conscious than another? Could we even consider the interactions of tectonic plates over geological timescales as integrating information on a planetary scale? It’s important to recognise that these challenges – including that of measuring intrinsic information, rather than observer-relative, extrinsic information – are only problems for us as scientists, as external observers, trying to calculate Φ. According to IIT, any particular system would just have a Φ.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

It is particularly pernicious because it involves so many activities of daily life, affects the entire planet, does so for decades and even centuries, and, most of all, because none of us acting individually can do anything to slow the changes.”3 In their alarming book Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet, authors Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman predict “the potential for planet-as-we-know-it altering changes.” They frame the challenge correctly: “First and foremost climate change is a risk management problem, a catastrophic risk management problem on a planetary scale.”4 This disaster should catch no one by surprise. Reports on climate change fill books, documentaries, podcasts, newspapers, magazines, social media, films and television talk shows. Why then so little meaningful action? So many science fiction films portray alien threats that erase differences among people who are united in defense of humanity.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

And now with the victory of Donald Trump it has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm, first explored by Rousseau, between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality. The contradictions and costs of a minority’s progress, long suppressed by historical revisionism, blustery denial and aggressive equivocation, have become visible on a planetary scale. They encourage the suspicion – potentially lethal among the hundreds of millions of people condemned to superfluousness – that the present order, democratic or authoritarian, is built upon force and fraud; they incite a broader and more apocalyptic mood than we have witnessed before. They also underscore the need for some truly transformative thinking, about both the self and the world.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

Finally, and most important, I am greatly indebted to the scores of researchers who shared their time, their scientific findings, their philosophical insights, and their hopes for the future of humanity with me. INTRODUCTION A LITTLE OVER TWO DECADES AGO, I WROTE a book, Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse, in which I looked closely at prevalent and generally accepted predictions of imminent planetary-scale environmental dooms. I analyzed the psychological appeal of doom, how predictions of disaster function as a political technique aimed at frightening people into handing over power to self-selected elites who want to enact drastic transformations in social and economic institutions. As I explained in my introduction twenty-two years ago, I was initially fascinated by these prophecies of global catastrophe because I had believed them.

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Carnegie compared industrial society with the Native American Sioux tribe: the wigwam of the chief was, he said, virtually the same as the “poorest of his braves,” but there was a huge difference between “the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer.” The contrasting homes reflected “the change which has come with civilization,” Carnegie wrote. In the twenty-first century, the gaping chasm between rich and poor was measured in much greater detail and on a planetary scale. The world’s 2,153 billionaires were wealthier than 4.6 billion people in 2019, and the richest twenty-two men in the world owned more wealth than all the women in Africa. The average American annual income of $65,118 was equal to the income of 50 Pakistanis or 129 Afghans. The stewards of the Rockefeller Foundation feared that philanthropy alone couldn’t come close to solving global poverty.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

The number of nations that beat inflation—containing the annual rate of price increases to less than 5 percent—rose from 16 in 1980 to 103 in 2006. This was the same high-growth and low-inflation “Goldilocks economy” that America enjoyed in the 1990s, only with much faster growth and expanded to a planetary scale, including much of the West. It was a chorus of all nations, singing a story of stable high-speed success, and many observers watched with undiscriminating optimism. The emerging nations were all Chinas now, or so it seemed. This illusion, which in large part persists to this day, is fed by the fashionable explanation for the boom—that emerging markets succeeded because they had learned the lessons of the Mexican peso crisis, the Russian crisis, and the Asian crisis in the 1990s, all of which began when piles of foreign debt became too big to pay.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Whether in Beijing, Berlin, or Burundi, whether an oil major or a family farm, everyone can see, objectively, what is happening to the climate. Data brings clarity. Pessimism aversion is much harder when the effects are so nakedly quantifiable. Like climate change, technological risk can only be addressed at planetary scale, but there is no equivalent clarity. There’s no handy metric of risk, no objective unit of threat shared in national capitals, boardrooms, and public sentiment, no parts per million for measuring what technology might do or where it is. There’s no commonly agreed on or obvious standard we can check year by year.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

But it turns out that something as seemingly mundane as next-day delivery could not happen without many of the most transformative technologies developed in the past one hundred years. Explaining how tapping a button on your phone yields pretty much any consumer good you could want, at your doorstep, within twenty-four hours also necessitates explaining how all the innovations that make it possible—and the people who use them—come together in a planetary-scale clockwork mechanism whose behavior is impossible to understand without building it up from its smallest constituent parts. The landscape of technologies and systems we’ll traverse ranges from the sublime—the solution of impossible mathematical problems, the nanotechnology of microchips—to the mundane—the perfection of highways, shipping containers, the architecture of large ships, management of ports, and the speedup of all manual and mental labor.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

REIMAGINING THE SELF IN A DISTRIBUTED WORLD MATTHEW RITCHIE Artist Will it happen? It already has. With the gradual fusion of information-storing-and-reporting technologies at the atomic and molecular scales, and the scaling up of distributed and connected information-storing-and-reporting devices at the social and planetary scale (which already exceeds the number of human beings on the planet), the definitions of both machine and thinking have shifted to embrace both inorganic and organic “complexes” and “systemic decisions” as interchangeable terms—mechanically, biologically, physically, intellectually, and even theologically.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

This distinction may seem puzzling, and I must explain it further, using the so-called anthropic principle. The anthropic principle was named by the mathematician Brandon Carter in 1974 and expanded by the physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler in their book on the subject.67 The anthropic argument is usually applied to the cosmos, and I’ll come to that. But I’ll introduce the idea on a smaller, planetary scale. We exist here on Earth. Therefore Earth must be the kind of planet that is capable of generating and supporting us, however unusual, even unique, that kind of planet might be. For example, our kind of life cannot survive without liquid water. Indeed, exobiologists searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life are scanning the heavens, in practice, for signs of water.

ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, call centre, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kinder Surprise, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Because if it’s true that a kilo of cocaine in Colombia is sold for $1,500, in Mexico for $12,000 to $16,000, in the United States for $27,000, in Spain for $45,000, in Holland for $47,000, in Italy for $54,000, and in the UK for $77,000; if it’s true that the price per gram varies from $61 in Portugal to $166 in Luxembourg, going for $80 in France, $87 in Germany, $96 in Switzerland, and $97 in Ireland; if it’s true that on average 1 kilo of pure cocaine is cut to make 3 kilos that are then sold in single-gram doses; if all this is true, it’s also true that whoever controls the entire chain of production is one of the richest men in the world. Cocaine traffic today is managed by a new middle class of mafiosi. They use distribution to gain control of the territory where it is sold. A game of Risk on a planetary scale. On one side are the areas where cocaine is produced, which become fiefdoms where nothing but poverty and violence grow, areas the mafias keep under control by generously doling out charity and alms, which they pass off as rights. No development, only profits. If someone wants to better himself, he demands riches, not rights.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Ask his legion of followers about Ethereum, and they’ll tell you it’s a “blockchain-based, arbitrary-state, Turing-complete scripting platform.”1 It has attracted IBM, Samsung, UBS, Microsoft, and the Chinese auto giant Wanxiang, and an army of the smartest software developers in the world, all of whom think that Ethereum may be the “planetary scale computer” that changes everything.2 When Buterin explained “arbitrary-state, Turing-complete” to us, we got a glimpse of his mind. Listening to music is very different from reading a book or calculating the day’s revenues and expenses, and yet you can do all three on your smart phone, because your smart phone’s operating system is Turing complete.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

When humans lived in small groups, when our weapons were comparatively paltry, even an enraged warrior could kill only a few. As our technology improved, the means of war also improved. In the same brief interval, we also have improved. We have tempered our anger, frustration and despair with reason. We have ameliorated on a planetary scale injustices that only recently were global and endemic. But our weapons can now kill billions. Have we improved fast enough? Are we teaching reason as effectively as we can? Have we courageously studied the causes of war? What is often called the strategy of nuclear deterrence is remarkable for its reliance on the behavior of our nonhuman ancestors.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Quartz, as we discovered back at Seiko, is one such. The seconds presented by a quartz-based timekeeper were unvaryingly precise seconds; and the seconds they soundlessly accumulated turned into precise minutes, precise hours, precise days. And yet, just as with Maxwell’s argument against using a human-scale or even a planetary-scale basis for defining the meter and the kilogram, so in the latter half of the twentieth century it became clear that though quartz is good enough for the average consumer of time, it is manifestly not good enough for the scientist, nor for the national metrology institutes around the world. Which led to the evolution of the standards that are in use today, and which employ one or more members of the more recently invented families of atomic clocks.

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

As Mike was neither its writer nor its addressee, it was hard to understand how he had acquired it, but there it was, a brittle photocopy on the notepaper of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. It was addressed to Mark Burdman of the Labor Committees and signed by Stanislaus Tomkiewicz. “Cher Ami,” wrote Tomkiewicz, “you earn my respect and my sympathy for having been the first (after me) to have understood the relationship of Michael Vale with supporters of order on a planetary scale.” The CIA again. On my last day, I accompanied Michael to his doctor. He was awaiting some test results. He emerged beaming from the appointment, clutching an envelope of X-rays that were the evidence of his good news. To celebrate, we went for lunch at Les Deux Magots, the famous haunt of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Iron Sunrise by Stross, Charles

blood diamond, disinformation, dumpster diving, Future Shock, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, loose coupling, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, phenotype, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, quantum entanglement, RFID, side project, speech recognition, technological singularity, trade route, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say “past masters” for a reason — they’re not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet (in one another’s backs). For most of the past forty years, New Dresden has been ruled by a sinister lunatic, Colonel-General Palacky, chairman of PORC, the Planetary Organization of Revolutionary Councils. Most of Palacky’s policies were dictated by his astrologers, including his now-notorious abolition of the currency and its replacement with bills divisible by 9, his lucky number.

Jennifer Morgue by Stross, Charles

Boeing 747, call centre, Carl Icahn, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, disintermediation, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, Etonian, haute couture, interchangeable parts, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, operational security, PalmPilot, planetary scale, RFID, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, stem cell, telepresence, traveling salesman, Turing machine

James Bond was a creature of the Cold War: a strange period of shadow-boxing that stretched from late 1945 to the winter of 1991, forty-six years of paranoia, fear, and the creepy sensation that our lives were in thrall to forces beyond our comprehension. It's almost impossible to explain the Cold War to anyone who was born after 1980; the sense of looming doom, the long shadows cast by the two eyeball-to-eyeball superpowers, each possessing vast powers of destruction, ready and able to bring about that destruction on a planetary scale in pursuit of their recondite ideologies. It was, to use the appropriate adjective, a truly Lovecraftian age, dominated by the cold reality that our lives could be interrupted by torment and death at virtually any time; normal existence was conducted in a soap-bubble universe sustained only by our determination to shut out awareness of the true horrors lurking in the darkness outside it an abyss presided over by chilly alien warriors devoted to death-cult ideologies and dreams of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

Yet we are disinclined to recognize the underland’s presence in our lives, or to admit its disturbing forms to our imaginations. Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving. We are presently living through the Anthropocene, an epoch of immense and often frightening change at a planetary scale, in which ‘crisis’ exists not as an ever-deferred future apocalypse but rather as an ongoing occurrence experienced most severely by the most vulnerable. Time is profoundly out of joint – and so is place. Things that should have stayed buried are rising up unbidden. When confronted by such surfacings it can be hard to look away, seized by the obscenity of the intrusion.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Recent history is littered with examples of unfounded fears being ramped up to unimaginable proportions: Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, SARS, MERS, West Nile Virus…all destined to kill everyone on planet Earth, only to peter out after a few weeks once the media gave up on them for not having a high enough kill rate for their tastes. There will be another, and another after that, and none will end humanity, but the media will give it their best effort to try and sell that potential outcome because nothing puts eyeballs on television news programs quite like the potential of impending death on a planetary scale. A Viral Victory How do the fascists compel thousands and millions of people to meekly go inside, give up their lives, and their livelihoods without a squeak? FEAR is one answer. Military police are being deployed by the thousands to keep the people in check. Women, children, and babies are all subjected to heavily armed men in full combat gear, ready to tear apart families and put them on trucks to quarantine camps or worse.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve