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Entries tagged with: Politics

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Teratocracy Triumphant?

Two of the most important pieces I've produced here at Open the Future concern teratocracy -- a neologism meaning "rule of monsters." The first, Fear of Teratocracy, outlines the core concept: American democracy is shifting from debates over policy to...

Teratocracy Rises

One of the fundamental jobs of a futurist is to keep an eye out for the tentative signs of emerging changes -- sometimes referred to as "early indicators" or as "weak signals" (or, in my preferred phrase, no doubt shaped...

Sanity

Yesterday, on Twitter, I posted this: When the present is filled with tragedy and idiocy, focusing on the future is my way of staying sane. That was my oblique reaction to the terrorism in Norway and the disastrous efforts to...

Not Giving Up

About ten years ago, I found myself sitting on the floor of my San Francisco Bay Area apartment, hoping that the call I was on wasn’t going to drop yet again. At the other end of the line was a...

Sent this in Email Today

There's really only been one social institution that's been able to get people to work hard on changes/solutions that they'll never see come about: religion. That leaves us with two real choices: • We figure out what it is about...

Fear of Teratocracy

What is a democracy? I've been thinking about the nature of democracy over the past few weeks, for both obvious (Egypt) and less-obvious (potential for social change under conditions of disruption) reasons. The definition of democracy that most people are...

Getting it Right

A Survival Guide to Geoengineering, my essay for Momentum, the journal of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, is now available online and via PDF. It's an exploration of what would be necessary to reduce the risks...

Hacking the Earth (Without Voiding the Warranty)

The talk I gave at the State of Green Business Forum last week is now available on video. Runs about 22 minutes. (There are some inexplicably lengthy shots of the static presentation images, but other than that, it looks pretty...

New Fast Company: 350

My latest Fast Company piece is up. 350 takes a look at the global movement to limit CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. If this sounds like I think the 350 movement is a bad idea......

The "End of Politics" Delusion

You have my express permission to kick the next person -- especially someone advocating the embrace of radical forms of technological advancement -- who tells you that they wish nothing more than to get rid of, move beyond, or otherwise...

Knock and Drag

I learned a new term in conversation last night with a former GBN'er now involved in voting access work: knock and drag. ...if volunteers find a [registered voter] who hasn't voted, the volunteer is not to leave the doorstep until...

Nanopolitics

Two reports out this week hint at a new political alignment in the coming decades. Both reports focus on nanotechnology, but have implications well beyond. Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows a strong correlation between moral doubts about nanotechnology...

Thank You

Even thousands of miles away, the intensity of this moment is incredible....

Dear Mr. President...

The good folks at Worldchanging asked me to offer up a hundred words for what the new president of the US should do in the first hundred days in office. I figured that most of the folks they asked would...

Presidential Insights

Time magazine's Joe Klein has a lengthy interview with Barack Obama, covering a variety of subjects. One section that leapt out at me, of course, was Obama's observations about energy, the environment, and the bigger picture: The biggest problem with...

Massively-Multiplayer Decepticon

A new pandemic is sweeping the planet. Police fired on secessionist demonstrators in Oregon. The Chinese government is trying (unsuccessfully) to suppress news of eco-terrorists bombing multiple coal-fired power plants. We're looking at climate refugees numbering in the tens of...

Feedback, Tipping Points, and Hard Choices

I have one thing to say: depopulation is not a global warming strategy. Here's what leads me to that (seemingly obvious, but apparently not) observation. We know these to be true: Feedback effects ranging from methane released from melting permafrost...

On the Record

Whenever I talk about the participatory panopticon, one issue grabs an audience more often than anything else -- privacy. But the more I dig into the subject, the more it becomes clear that the real target of the panopticon technologies...

SimPolitics

The hard-right Swiss People's Party -- the SVP -- is not known for its subtlety. I took the picture to the right, a campaign billboard for the SVP, when in Zurich last month; to be fair, while I ran across...

Sock Mobs and Sock Bots

Doug Rushkoff has come up with a clever neologism: Sock Mobs. It refer to the gang of bogus names and voices -- usually the work of a single person -- that can swarm the comment sections of blogs and other...

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