Notes on “The Origins of Political Order”
I never wrote proper notes on Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order when I first read it. I recently started the new volume, Political Order and Political Decay. The introduction to the second entry provided a great high-level reintroduction to the first, so I thought I’d put it down for the record. Notes on “The Origins of Political Order” more »
Play-Spirit, and Those Who Ignore It
I. Deviants, and The Bad Sportsman A longtime co-conspirator has surfaced with a new blog. We share a canon on game studies issues, so we thought it might be fun and productive to write back and forth about game studies a bit and see how that works. So here we go. His first article was about more »
Social Physics V: Data-Driven Society
Quick overview: Sandy Pentland subscribes to the kind of ecological view that a lot of my recent sources have espoused- an emphasis on the relations between objects, instead of on the objects themselves. He argues for a “computational theory of behavior”, using Big Data and a system of collection/observation that he calls “reality mining”: the point is to more »
Social Physics IV: Data-Driven Cities
Quick overview: Sandy Pentland subscribes to the kind of ecological view that a lot of my recent sources have espoused- an emphasis on the relations between objects, instead of on the objects themselves. He argues for a “computational theory of behavior”, using Big Data and a system of collection/observation that he calls “reality mining”: the point is to more »
Social Physics III: Organizations
Quick overview: Sandy Pentland subscribes to the kind of ecological view that a lot of my recent sources have espoused- an emphasis on the relations between objects, instead of on the objects themselves. He argues for a “computational theory of behavior”, using Big Data and a system of collection/observation that he calls “reality mining”: the point is more »
Social Physics II
This is part two (of presumably five?) of Pentland’s Social Physics. I’m roughly following the sections that the book lays out, in order. Part 0: Some immediate personal/social context, what I’m thinking about before reading. Part 1 was on the basic premise of the book This part is about the foundations of Social Physics (Social Learning, Idea more »
Social Physics I
Pulling heavily from the introduction to Social Physics. Frankly, skimming below for emphasized words and block quotes will get you the gist, but I like to shore up with quotes directly from the source. And sometimes, I like to bloviate. — I. If I were preparing to create a PBS documentary of this book, I’d probably more »
From Counterculture to Cyberculture III
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism Part 1 here: broad overview and tracing through the changing connotation of the “Computational Metaphor” from one of dehumanization and control to one of anonymity, equality, and freedom. Part 2 here: On Stewart Brand’s education and the Whole Earth Network. This more »
From Counterculture to Cyberculture II
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism Part I here: A broad overview, tracing through the changing connotation of the “Computational Metaphor” from one of dehumanization and control to one of anonymity, equality, and radical freedom. I often get bogged down in the details because there’s so more »
From Counterculture to Cyberculture I
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism intends to present a history of thought from the 1960’s into the new institutions and ideologies of the networks that rose to prominence in the 90’s. The “prequel” book traced American countercultural thought from the ’60’s back into the 1930’s [the Digital more »