Rough notes from Euan Semple — There’s something going on here that is bigger than any of us

What does it all mean?

Print­ing press anal­o­gy. Press changed the way we saw the world. We’ll have sim­i­lar shift in the future (long term). But: they used to burn heretics as well. Not every­one will want to adopt this.

7 years since Clue­train: lots of stuff is still the same

Change will not hap­pen thanks to tech. 

Three myths

  1. Hier­ar­chy is the only way to orga­nize stuff, from church through mil­i­tary, etc. but: hyper­links sub­vert hier­ar­chy. Once peo­ple start employ­ing them it has a dis­rup­tive effect, break­ing though hierarchies.
  2. If we take cer­tain steps we’ll be suc­cess­ful. But suc­cess got scrambled.
  3. Carte­sian anx­i­ety: stress due to sep­a­ra­tion of indi­vid­ual and rest of the world (per­spec­tive). Mis­un­der­stand­ing of evo­lu­tion, it should be about pass­ing around what works (faster), not killing off the weak.

It’s eas­i­er to do good than to do bad” — Jim­my Wales

LOVE: that’s what makes the inter­net hang togeth­er (and it’s not about the huge amounts of porn). Tol­er­ance, the need to con­nect. Reboot is very much about this. 

Inter­net cre­ates oppor­tu­ni­ties for bet­ter under­stand­ing of shared meaning.

Every­thing is moti­vat­ed by love or fear and fear is just absence of love.

He did­n’t get where he was today… by using fear.

Col­lu­sion: peo­ple don’t want to admit to what they’re doing is wrong.

Anar­chy actu­al­ly means the ulti­mate in democ­ra­cy. Is it so bad to frag­ment huge institutions. 

Every soci­ety has peo­ple that see them­selves as main­tain­ers of order (although they don’t know what that order is). 

The web cuts out the mid­dle men (main­tain­ers of order).

The idea that the online world is imma­ture and dan­ger­ous is wrong. Google nev­er for­gets. Think about the stuff you say.

Don’t com­plain, don’t say no.

Do the right thing.

Stat­ing the obvi­ous, say the way you think the world should be and it’ll turn out that way.

See­ing some­thing inter­est­ing, then judg­ing your­self if it’s valu­able enough and pub­lish­ing it. Oth­er peo­ple doing the same as an effect and on and on.

It’s not about tech. but it isn’t utopia either. You should take respon­si­bil­i­ty for what you do.

Dalai Lama quote: it’s about rela­tion­ships and being social.

http://reboot.dk/wiki/There%27ssome­thinggoingonherethatisbig­gerthananyof_us

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Kars Alfrink

Kars is a designer, researcher and educator focused on emerging technologies, social progress and the built environment.

2 thoughts on “Rough notes from Euan Semple — There’s something going on here that is bigger than any of us”

  1. Hi Kars,

    I think we were at Barcelona (reboot) togeth­er, but I’m not sure if we real­ly met. I just want­ed to thank you for putting up all your notes. I think they cap­tured the speech­es well. And they real­ly help com­ple­ment my hung-over scribbles!

    I’m in Ams­ter­dam work­ing solo under the name ‘+K.’ What I want to do is con­nect great thought and thinkers with the peo­ple involved in inno­va­tion projects. So far I’ve worked with Philips and Nike, talk­ing about the future of men and women. It’s all real­ly new actu­al­ly, so things are chang­ing rapidly.

    And you? Where are you and what would you like to do?

    Strength, and thanks, Joshua http://flickr.com/search/?q=reboot8+joshua

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