“Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society… The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it’s technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways… There’s nothing at … Read more
…Now, the story that I want to tell you began in 1971, in the middle of the year. I’d been going around, using this model that I have explained to you, in big companies, in agencies, in all sorts of places. And then I suddenly got a letter which very much changed my life. It … Read more
Welcome back. For those of you just joining us, I ended Part I where Stafford Beer’s Designing Freedom begins, in a “little house… in a quiet village on the western coast of Chile”. With the benefit of hindsight and history, we now know that Beer was describing the town of Las Cruces — but we’ll … Read more
“Let me tell you some things I find productive. Positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement. Honesty. I’ll tell you some things I find unproductive: constantly worrying about where you stand based on inscrutable social clues, and then inevitably re-framing it all in a reassuring way so that you can get to sleep at night. No, I do … Read more
“Speak not to me of blasphemy, man, I’d strike the Sun if it insulted me! Look ye, Starbuck: all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of their features. The White Whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. It is the … Read more
At a time when free and fair elections are a concern in democracies around the world, we need to be vigilant when it comes to ours being undermined. — Kelvin Goertzen, 23rd Premier of Manitoba, 23 August 2019 Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand,Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d: Cut … Read more
…Ah. Yes, well then. Hmm. Me? Oh, fine, thanks. How have you been? Alright, okay fine. Well, my last post to this blog was published in November 2019, so I guess the first big update I have to share is that I’m bald now. ‘Bald’, yes – a bald man. It’s not so much that … Read more
I’ve been loath to write on the topic of Search Engine Optimization (or “SEO”) since opening my consultancy and starting this blog. In fact, if you flipped through the pages describing Kairos Media’s services, you’d find that they barely mention SEO at all, save for a passing reference when talking about website planning and architecture. There are … Read more
Those who know me well know that I’m something of a massive politics geek. It has been a topic of endless fascination to me ever since the age of five, when I watched the results of the second Quebec independence referendum coming in live on CBC, and none of the adults on television (or sitting … Read more
Ahhhh, the “vanity metric”: that all-purpose filler of pitch-decks, scourge of data analysts, and lifeblood of Internet marketing charlatans everywhere. Countless articles have been written warning of the danger they pose to organizational decision-making. Untold volumes of digital ink have been spilled urging marketers to focus less on the numbers that make them feel good … Read more