I’ve moved my site here from whimsley.typepad.com. This site contains the complete blog (including comments) from the Typepad site, but many of the links will take you back to the old place, which exists in archived state. There are RSS and email subscription buttons up there on the right.
A few updates after my "self-assessment" post.
First, I've received a dozen or so really helpful and constructive emails from a number of people. It's been good for the ego, and it's definitely given me encouragement to keep at this for a while yet. Sincere thanks to those who wrote (I think I've got back to everyone, but forgive me if I missed one or two). Also, thanks to Henry and Brad for the free labour on their blogs.
Second: I'm in the middle of moving the blog from here to a shiny new installation at tomslee.net (which has been a stub of a site for a few years). I'll post here when that's done.
Third: in the days after that last post I received one invitation to speak at a conference, one acceptance of a talk at a second, and an invitation to write a multi-book review. Whining in public seems like a good way to go.
Finally: for those looking for No One Makes You, the publisher has this to say:
In the US: the book is available new at B&N (though it displays an old cover we assure you it is the correct edition). … Continue reading
Attention conservation notice: self-involvement.
Update: Comments are closed because, in the light of morning, this looked like fishing for compliments (with added whining!) But no! It is merely an aide-resolution, to get myself moving forward in 2013.
New Year. Time to take a realistic look at the state of my writing.
The goal of my writing was to have an impact, however small, on issues that matter to me. I had been an activist in a number of political, union, and social justice organizations, and writing seemed to be a way to continue to contribute that fit into a new stage of my life. I've been trying to write in my spare time for roughly 15 years now. When I started, my children were entering school; now they are adults.
The first half of that 15 years was spent writing and studying/researching No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart. Whimsley started off as an attempt to promote the book, but soon moved into technology & politics, where it has stayed ever since.
The total cost of this writing project to me and my family is now well into six figures in foregone income: several years ago I "negotiated" a four-day … Continue reading
Dear Tim Wu,
Has something happened to your brain? Can your short article in the New York Times, Apps to Regulate Apps, be the product of the same grey matter that produced the excellent “Who Controls the Internet?” and the admirable “The Master Switch”? What’s going on? I hope it was a momentary lapse and I hope you will change your mind about this sloppy and potentially damaging piece.
You were writing, as you know, about AirBnB and Uber: two new “peer-to-peer” companies building big businesses around apps that let you “book a car ride or rent someone’s apartment using your smartphone or computer”, and apparently breaking a few laws along the way. You write that “no one can deny that these apps are responding to real demands and helping cities become easier to live in and visit”, and you place them on the side of Progress, and the Future; in contrast, the reactions of cities who have banned these apps “recall Ned Ludd’s response to the automated loom”.
While you do acknowledge that there are complaints about the companies, you decide that “many of the complaints are anecdotal”. But complaints are always anecdotal unless someone tallies them, and tallying … Continue reading
Wikibollocks entry for today comes from Grist magazine, a "source of nonprofit, independent green journalism", who just ran a piece on peer-to-peer sharing which includes sentences like this.
We’re choosing peer-to-peer because we want to do business differently. We actually kind of want to pretend like we’re not doing business at all.
Some questions for Grist.
Look, Grist, I … Continue reading
We interrupt the posts on identity and uprisings to bring you this not-so-handy print-off-and-keep companion for readers of Steven Johnson’s new book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age. From here on, the author is “SBJ” and the book is “FP”. Page numbers are in parentheses.
Attention conservation notice: 3,000 words of amateur rumination on the problems with agent-based theories of uprisings. Part of a series about identity, institutions, and uprisings.
In the torrent of debate over the causes and dynamics of the "Arab Spring" uprisings, one of the strongest currents has its source in cascade models of uprisings. The starting points for these models are Mark Granovetter's simple and abstract Threshold Models of Collective Behaviour and Thomas Schelling's similar ideas in "Macromotives and Microbehaviour". If a population of individuals is presented with a choice between A and B, and if each will choose A only if some number of other people (their "threshold") also choose A, then very small differences in the distribution of thresholds can lead to very different results. In some cases, everyone chooses A, in others everyone chooses B, in others, the population is split. One spark sputters; an identical spark starts a prairie fire.
Timur Kuran and Susanne Lohmann used these ideas to explain the sudden and surprising uprisings of 1989 in Eastern Europe. Both drew attention to the paucity of information in an authoritarian state, about what others believe and about the nature of the state itself. Highly motivated protesters with a … Continue reading
