Sarah Owen

“Non-self-coercion” is the conceptual distillation of several converging threads of what you could call productivity criticism (if not outright backlash).

In a famous paper, ‘Are ideas getting harder to find?’, Nicholas Bloom and collaborators found that research productivity has been falling quite dramatically since the 1970s. Their data suggests that it now takes 18 times as many resources as it did then to work out how to double the number of transistors on a microchip.

In a first-of-its-kind certification program titled “Business in the Metaverse Economy,” the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania will offer business professionals a six-week crash course on topics like VR technologies and blockchain-based worlds like The Sandbox and Decentraland.

People understand things through narratives, including the future. Everyone is the science fiction writer of their own life. When hoping for a good life, and thinking about what might bring that about, we are utopian writers; when fearful that bad things will happen, we are dystopian writers.

What defines new relational stages today, given they’re always mixed together with old ones on platforms eager to keep you engaged? How do you mark a new “era” when you’re keeping tabs on the day-to-day lives of hundreds of people who will never tangibly occupy your day-to-day life again?

Solastalgia is a new concept developed to give greater meaning and clarity to environmentally induced distress.