Sam Liebeskind

Humans have always known we cannot survive alone, and that to protect ourselves, we need to persuade others to care about us. We cultivate trusting reciprocal pacts with other people – blood relatives, but also friends and neighbours - through which reassure ourselves we can both care and be cared for, if the necessity strikes. These ties can have... See more

In preparing for change, many of us talk about decentralisation (or "decent" for short) but that's an abstract word that fails to evoke just how thoroughly political a project it is. There is no technical solution that can produce decentralisation on its own; decentralisation cannot be technosolutionist and succeed at the same time. The "decent"... See more

Learning is downstream of doing. The order should rarely be reversed. Most real knowledge, knowledge worth attaining, lives in the hands . It must be cultivated gradually, like a garden. Really, it must be grown. Most real knowledge is the result of doing something deliberately for a long time and steadily making small improvements. It requires a... See more

There's a fantasy popular among technologists and policymakers that community can be engineered. That if you identify the right variables and apply the right interventions, you can produce community on demand. This fantasy has a name in the urbanist literature: it's called "new town syndrome," after the observation that Britain's postwar new towns,... See more

Without trust in the decision-maker, trust in the process breaks down, and the only important question becomes, “Who decides?”

A logical extension of personal computing is a belief that everyone ought to possess maximal personal rights and make all decisions on their own.

This view runs into scale problems. One-way broadcast is relatively easy to make perform well and the shape of the problem supports low-coordination meshes (BitTorrent). Likewise, small-group chat and... See more