John Naughton's article looks at the long term impact of the internet, comparing the advent of the 'net to the advent of printing. As Naughton points out, the internet is a lot more than the web.

Leads me to a thought train: printing is more than books. To understand the internet, a potentially useful exercise is to think about the impact of printing on developements in western Europe and the world.

"Firstly, there should be no central ownership or control – no institution which would decide who could join or what the network could be used for. Secondly, the network should not be optimised for any particular application. ... The implication of their (Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn) design was that if you had an idea that could be implemented using data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked. And you didn't have to ask anyone's permission."
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"He warned that we may soon see "sudden, unexpected changes that have serious ramifications for the overall well-being of humans," including the capacity of the planet to support people. "This is further evidence that we are well on the way to the next great extinction event."


'The "fundamental and comprehensive" changes to marine life identified in the report include rapidly warming and acidifying oceans, changes in water circulation and expansion of dead zones within the ocean depths.

"These are driving major changes in marine ecosystems: less abundant coral reefs, sea grasses and mangroves (important fish nurseries); fewer, smaller fish; a breakdown in food chains; changes in the distribution of marine life; and more frequent diseases and pests among marine organisms."
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"The 7 billion inhabitants of Earth currently speak about 6000 different languages. That may seem a healthy multitude but it turns out that just five of these languages dominate. More than half the population speak English, Russian, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish. These together with the next hundred most popular languages account for 95 per cent of speakers. A mere 5 per cent of the global population speak the rest and two thirds of these lingos are in danger of extinction."
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"The lawsuit raises the interesting legal question of whether the mere act of connecting with other professionals on a social networking site constitute a violation of non-compete and non-solicitation contracts, Jackson wrote. "Does the mere existence of a network of professional contacts equal solicitation?" wrote Jackson, who declined to be interviewed for this story citing conflict issues."
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“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”
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There are camps of environmentalists who decry efforts to manipulate nature, challenges from religious groups that see the Singularity as a version of “Frankenstein” in which people play at being gods, and technologists who fear a runaway artificial intelligence that subjugates humans.
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Is the only way to extend perception through technological mediation? Can there not be a transcendence using existing mental technologies, a al the Dalai Lama?

"A search for repetitive patterns of behavior and computations of normal distribution curves are a big part of the physical sciences. However, financial markets are not driven by changes in natural forces but by human phenomena, with all their implications for herd behavior, for wide swings in emotion, and for political intervention and uncertainties."
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Marina Abramovic at the end of her 3 month sit at the MOMA:

I learned so much about my body. I learned that in your body you have so much space and you can actually move inside that. There is space between organs, there is space between bones, there is space between atom and cell, so you can actually start training yourself to breathe a kind of air into that space. And then I understood that the pain is actually not having space, it’s when organs and everything press inside, so by breathing air you can make the pain just disappear.

The technology of introspection (meditation) providing additional sensory awareness to the five traditional, ego senses. It also reminds me of the long sessions of Korean zen.
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Testimony by James Galbraith to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the failure of economics to include the study of fraud as an operative contributor to financial collapse.
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Fraud is a part of the network. By ignoring fraud, the economists don't have a network and so their view is necessarily incomplete.

This article about memory research and foraging sparks the idea of human development from hunter/gatherer to agriculture. In most history books, industrial production is considered a third step in human development. But is it really? In terms of brain functions, I can see a qualitative difference between hunting and planting, but I'm not sure I see a qualitative difference between agricultural tool making and industrial tool making.
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Industrial about getting bigger and bigger. Post-industrial about getting smaller and smaller.
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