THE CULTURAL JACKDAW

The Tech Philosophers

Technology companies are becoming the most influential brands on the planet, they impact our daily lives and are inventing the future.

So it's good to know that some of the people behind these businesses have good intentions. This a great article about Reid Hoffman - the billionaire co-founder of Linkedin, early investor in Friendster and Flickr and a board memer of Zynga, Airbnb and Mozilla - who always dreamt of becoming a philosopher:

" I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be." Within months of starting his course, however, Hoffman concluded that "spending one or two decades answering a professional philosphical question" might not impact sufficiently on the world. "I realised that academia wasn't the right platform - it didn't have enough scale," he says. "So I decided I would be a software entrepreneur."

Then I was reading about 16 year old Nick D'Aloisio who created Summly, he said "I'm interested in app design and where the business is going, but philosophy is my thing."

I think if the world's technology companies are increasingly being run by inventors / investors who have a passion for philosophy that can only be a positive for all of us.

Smart Cities

There's little denying that urban life is the future.

This huge shift is driving a fascinating change in the way cities are being built. The last great burst of city design was naturally inspired by the car, but in today's digital world city planners and architects are increasingly designing cities with the mobile phone and other technology as inspiration.

All of this is leading to the emergence of 'smart cities' being built where the live organism of that city can be accessed and viewed by the public. I've noticed a few interesting projects lately that have looked at this growing social trend.

Sense and the City was a recent exhibition at the London Transport Museum that explored how emerging technologies are changing the way we access and experience London and compares this with past visions of the future.

This is an interesting short documentary called 'Thinking Cities' that looks at the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in the Networked Society:

 

And (unsurprisingly I think) Amsterdam and Stockholm are leading the way as new models for smart cities of the future.

Standing For Something

The most ground-breaking cultural movements of the last 100 years have all stood for something.

Pioneers, misfits and leaders use manifestos to inspire action and explain their vision and worldview.

This amazing book collects the manifestos from the movements that have changed our world; from communism to dadaism. It's an important cultural legacy all bound in the pages of one book.

'The Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power . . . it is the first great modernist work of art.'

Marshall Berman

And here is the fascinating manifesto for the Internet called A Declaration of the Independece of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow, written in 1996.