Innovation Starvation, a short essay by Neal Stephenson (via Bruce Sterling) Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy,…

Closing Keynote: Vernacular Video by Bruce Sterling on how media morph over time. Chief insight I’ve read before but never heard: to look forward in time, you have to also look twice as far back into the past.

Making the rounds today is a talk by Jesse Schell, of Schell Games who is an instructor at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He also has a blog called Things I Finished. His talk is full of insights that are very vivid. Here is the video of his talk from DICE, and…

The past, we have written down and we can reference it: Barack Obama. I like him. He seems to be a straight shooter with upper management written all over him. I like that I my spidey sense doesn’t tingle with “Plastic Robot!” when I watch him speak. I would like him to be President. About…

After high school, it became something of a fetish of mine to travel from San Diego to Los Angeles and do various sightseeing. One of the things I (and my friend Chris) used to hit was the Art Center College of Design gallery. For us, Art Center was the pinnacle of cool, of talent, of…

William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview : Rolling Stone I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity’s future was that it wasn’t going to have one at all. We’ve forgotten that a whole lot of…

Alex Wright, The Deep History of the Information Age Download the audio to this talk at the Long Now Seminars page.