Sparks 👁️

But every modern business model is depending on the same old industrial age premise of making money by getting rid of people, or at least people with skills. That’s what the assembly line was for: get rid of skilled craftspeople, and create a factory system where unskilled, low-paid workers can be trained in minutes and replaced just as fast if... See more

That is, we’ve traded our craftsmenship for management. We now are less immersed in the exact pieces we’re putting together and more interested in the outcome of the work. To us, programming has now become a means to an end, instead of an end in itself.

In taming the world, we have tamed ourselves

In a world that is completely without rituals and wholly profane, all that is left are consumption and the satisfaction of needs.

Soon after I first posted this essay in a blog some 15 years ago, a young man approached me to ask if I minded him reposting it. I asked him where that would be. He and some others had launched a site called ‘Generation’. Its aim was to prepare for the coming war between the generations by assembling useful documents and providing a forum for... See more

Technology should be a force for good, but we don’t live in a world of wise elders who release it gradually to keep pace with our maturity as a species. Dissonance arises from the desire to believe in technology as a shared human endeavour for the greater good, while knowing that most world-changing technologies are injected into society’s... See more

“Children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves.” - Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn