Author: Kars Alfrink

If your workspace is as legible as, and aesthetically consistent with, your business card, you should suspect yourself of living a frilly life. If it is significantly more illegible and aesthetically incoherent, there’s a good chance your workspace is a space of real work.

A frill is neither an obviously non-functional aesthetic touch (that would be a flourish) nor a clearly unnecessary functional capability (that would be wasted functionality). Rather, it is a functional capability you want to signal as being a part of your life, but not actually use.

Government researchers have tagged 338 sharks with acoustic transmitters that monitor where the animals are. When a tagged shark is about half a mile away from a beach, it triggers a computer alert, which tweets out a message on the Surf Life Saving Western Australia Twitter feed. The tweet notes the shark’s size, breed and approximate location.

Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox if you’re trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn’t want to go forward at this point without it. But it’s not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.

I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument’s over. But the idea that it’s not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn’t going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that’s astonishing to me.

I had been using the Render Ghosts as way to understand something about the Internet, but it felt like the Render Ghosts, the Internet, were trying to explain something to me. The Render Ghosts are lost too, adrift in history and virtual networks, which increasingly resemble memory. We can’t hear their voices but we can see them everywhere, if we look: those parts of ourselves and others, the remembrance of things, struggling to survive in the churn of information.

Culturally, a small portion of the population will be stuffed with hormone-injected garbage (Huffington Post slideshows, Facebook linkbait and other Cheetos-like information) while the other portion lives in its own reality of tailor-made, high quality information that makes them increasingly wealthy and utterly detached. One side will be able to influence, direct and exploit the other side because one controls the media while the other is at its mercy.

In essence, I see the value of journalism as resting in a twofold mission: informing the public of accurate and vital information, and its unique ability to provide a truly adversarial check on those in power. Any unwritten rules that interfere with either of those two prongs are ones I see as antithetical to real journalism and ought to be disregarded.

MOOCs are the mp3 of education: the easiest thing to distribute over the internet, will be. Just as the mp3 has indeed disrupted the music industry, but not really music, so the MOOCs will remove much of the lecture, but possibly not broader education.