Tag Archives: Society

Communism is dead. Long live (corporate) Communism!

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in business, capitalism, future, human capital, knowledge, management, philosophy, society

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Communism

The sensible consensus is that communism became all but extinct with the end of the Cold War. I say it may be so, but the mindset that fueled it continues to live unhindered. Your next thought may be that I am referring to North Korea. But I have something much closer to home in mind: the U.S. corporate sector. Yes, you didn’t misread. I will dare to say that the mindset of the corporate sector in 2014 is eerily reminiscent of communist thinking.

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Business – a form of human expression

30 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in business, human capital, society

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The tagline “people are our most valued resource” has been so abused by the corporate world that it no longer means anything to anyone. I suspect that in the near future it will be eventually qualified as an offensive truism, and rightfully so. The sooner it disappears off the face of the planet, the better of humanity at large will be.

The debate on the humanism of business continues to be part of a public discourse infused with various degrees of political innuendo – see the 99% movement, the shareholder value argument, etc.

I propose a simple new take on what business is: a form of human expression.

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Measuring our way into meaninglessness, stagnation and crisis

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Crisis, future, human capital, innovation, problem solving, science

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I posit excessive measurement is the culprit behind the world’s biggest problems, as well as the likely initiator of its future crises. It is the largest hidden systemic risk to our future livelihood. Our obsession with quantity is the very incarnation of the materialistic credo, a worldview focusing on physical resources and antagonist to a knowledge economy.

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Modern society as an inertial machine

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Crisis, future, human capital, learning, society, technology

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Conspiracy theories vs. idiosyncrasies

I for one am no big fan of conspiracy theories. I see them as the construct of minds unable to grasp modern life’s intricacies. The fact that few of us manage to agree within the same family leaves me suspicious as to the proliferation of occult groups with the coherence to pull the world’s strings – that is assuming they would possess the means. I have however become convinced that society doesn’t need conspiracies to create its own self-imposed idiosyncrasies which in turn come with a hefty price.

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Big idea 2014: the world still defenseless against mediocrity

05 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by in democracy, future, human capital, society

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From Ivy League scholars to country presidents, mediocrity permeates society’s highest echelons. Indeed, we remain defenseless against it in the 21st century. We are hard at work battling world financial crises, poverty and social inequality even as we produce mediocre leaders who proliferate populist, symptomatic, efficient but not effective “solutions” to these and other pressing issues. Democracy itself, the most advanced social construct to date, is no match for mediocrity. I propose keeping mediocrity in check is a much more effective way to go about our world’s progress. We would first need to understand how it evades society’s filters.

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Understanding how politics works could help move us forward and avoid political stand-stills

03 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in Crisis, democracy, knowledge, society

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So we’ve all been assisting to the political circus in D.C. over the last few days. Which prompted me to write a brief piece about how I think politics works. My hope is that shedding some light on the dynamics governing the politician-electorate relationship can help raise the bar for the political construct which seems to have sunk quite low as of late.

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On candles, fences and being human

09 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Emerging Markets, paradox, society

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It may just be our society’s biggest irony that we crave that which does not make us happy: certainty and predictability. Have you ever asked yourself why we tend to find a candle more romantic than a light bulb? A light bulb is obviously more reliable and more predictable! What does a candle have that a light bulb doesn’t? It flickers! It embeds randomness, unpredictability, and in that sense we see it as closer to human nature! We subconsciously are attracted to anything that is as we are: imperfect and fragile! Yet we consciously understand the taming of our environment as the elimination of anything uncertain. When are we going to learn to embrace uncertainty? When are we going to reconcile our subconscious and conscious mind?

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Patterns and meta-patterns – the key to an enlightened life

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in philosophy, society

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In my previous blog contrasting creativity and planning I described the creative act as the probabilistic intersection of thought “patterns in the making” and the circumstantial experiences which completes their meaning. A life spent surfacing new patterns is an elevating journey that frees one from the grayer reality of zero sum games unfortunately still prolific in our supposedly civilized society. It is also a fulfilling endeavor that brings man closer to his rightful place in the cosmos as an implicated observer, as a “function of the universe itself” in Buckminster Fuller’s words.

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What’s beyond the knowledge economy shouldn’t scare anyone

22 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by in capitalism, complexity, Crisis, future, human capital, society, technology

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The love-hate relationship of humanity with technology seems to be universal across ages. We love the benefits that technology brings, but hate it when it threatens our jobs, or forces us to learn new skills faster than our comfortable pace.

In the words of Clayton Christensen, one could say that technology is slowly disrupting human labor (and I include here knowledge work). The latest scare for humanity is the so called “technological singularity”, where artificial intelligence learns how to design improved versions of itself, and so exponentially surpasses human intelligence, leaving us humans well…irrelevant. Popular author Kurzweil predicts the year for this around 2045. Less extreme viewpoints still see automation as a major disruptive force to social order as even knowledge workers will be out of jobs in the next few decades. And so the fatalists wonder: how do we deal with the social implications of a few billion unemployed – will anarchy be the norm in 2045?

While the logical thread leading to a fatalist view of the future may seem sound, it is in fact plagued with serious flaws based in a misunderstanding of the differences between silicon and carbon-based intelligence.

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