Sublime

Mariam Semaan is an award-winning journalist from Lebanon. She recently completed a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, where she specialised in media innovation and design thinking.

it is the accumulation of information and of our ability to process information that defines the arrow of growth encompassing the physical, the biological, the social, and the economic, and which extends from the origin of the universe to our modern economy. It is the growth of information that unifies the emergence of life with the growth of econo

Money emerges from uncertainty, capital emerges from money, and uncertainty emerges from capital.

“toy” models of economies—simple models that are so abstract they bear little resemblance to reality.

Manuel Castells, starting with The Rise of the Network Society.

These are worlds that will be revealed not by better instruments but by new models and frameworks that allow us to see the familiar world in unfamiliar ways—to transform domains described into domains rigorously quantified and observations informally sensed into those formally understood.

And they are instantiated as a distributed processing system on human beings. They don’t particularly care about human beings. Their motives are inscrutable, to the extent that they have any, except that they’d like to get bigger. They’ve run on people. They’re implemented on people. But they are not people. They are not persons in any meaningful s

located two Facebook datasets, one small and one large (and, no, they didn’t get either of them from Cambridge Analytica . . . both are publicly available), and downloaded a large sample of Twitter traffic (if you know how to do this, it is easy to do and, because Twitter is publicly accessible, it is perfectly legal).