A year ago, almost to the day, I got an email out of the blue from Lucy Shortis, who runs the office of my favourite artist, Tom Phillips. She said some nice things about a very old blog post of mine, and asked if I would consider writing a “short biography of Tom” for a […]
Reviews
School it Yourself: Review of The Edupunks’ Guide and How to Set Up a Free School
We’re in one of those periods when real change in education might be possible. This doesn’t happen very often. Here’s why. Education is probably the single most powerful means by which our societies and our cultures reproduce themselves — institutions, values, character and differentials… the works. Hence the number of interest groups with a stake […]
On ecosystems, Adam Curtis and positions of power
I have a chronic habit of reaching more for biological metaphors for to help describe how we inhabit a world of abundant technology and media. Two decades ago, when I was working on large IT systems in the civil service, Ian Franklin and I suggested a shift from thinking about these systems as engineering interventions […]
The Whys and Wherefores of Creativity and Sharing: Review of Making is Connecting
One of the beauties of David Gauntlett’s Making is Connecting is the way it develops a fundamentally simple idea with successive layers of richness and power. The cover captures the kernel of the book: the core thesis that making (with hands and brain, resourcefully) is connecting (in terms of relationships, meaning, learning); the context that […]
Open, trusting, generous: review of Monkeys With Typewriters, a book on leadership
As I made my way through the first third of Monkeys with Typewriters, I was vaguely aware of a tut-tutting from my inner voice, an occasional rolling of my inner eye. “Sheesh, this social media stuff wants to be seen as shiny, new and transformative,” they seemed to be saying, “but really it’s just another […]
University of Death by Sean McManus: A Review
There’s a pivotal scene in University of Death where the muso-technology geek at the heart of the story struggles to persuade the venal record industry boss to buy-in to a groundbreaking new scheme that will change the industry forever. To accomplish this, the geek plays the boss a new composition, which has been engineered to […]
Counterculture, Cyberculture and Innovation: the strange case of Stewart Brand
A couple of years ago, at the end of this post on the crossover between Web 2.0 and anarchism, I wrote that I’d started reading Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and suggested I might be blogging about some of the ideas in […]
Fighting cultural surplus: a review of Bill Drummond’s 17
When Brian Eno released his Generative Music 1 album — music that is created ‘on the fly’ by a computer following a set of rules that Eno programmed, released on floppy disk, and now virtually unplayable on any current hardware — he wrote “I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at […]
Why the net won’t turn us all into social isolationists
Last year Cass Sunstein produced a revised version of his book Republic.com, titled — with crushing inevitability — Republic.com 2.0. In it, he critiqued the impact of the net on democratic discourse and public spaces. His dystopia is one where we all subscribe to the Daily Me, a filter that presents us only with the […]
Review of Barb Jungr: Walking in the Sun
Back in November — it may have even been October — a CD arrived in the post, addressed to me at DJ Alchemi Ltd. It was the new Barb Jungr album, Walking in the Sun. Now Lucy and I both count ourselves as Barb fans, so this was an unexpected pleasure. But it was also […]