Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks

Here is where culture enters the picture. I mean“culture” in its anthropological rather than artisticsense. What values and practices can hold people to-gether as the institutions in which they live fragment? My generation suffered from a want of imagination inanswering this question, in advancing the virtues ofsmall-scale community. Co

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And so anything that influences the culture can have a great impact on the world and on people's financial interests, and we're going to see more and more sophisticated efforts from all kinds of actors to do so systematically and deliberately. This is the darker conclusion of the importance of non-monetary social motivations - they create the battl... See more

I used to be much more of a technological determinist, where I believed that the course of history would play out according to what was technologically possible, and that technology shapes our world in a strong way. I've come to appreciate that culture actually plays such a large role in shaping our world. The ways in which people decide to use tec... See more

History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you ... See more