tag > Design
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Reflections on witnessing the latest PR events from sillycon valley players
The sillycon valley players (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) seem to be stuck in a collective hallucination that makes them believe in a heavily sanitized version of "reality", that is 99% surface gloss and 1% essentials. Their focus is on delivering nice-to-have "consumer experience conveniences" coupled with ever increasing surveillance and control - instead of meeting the urgent needs of real people. Most poignantly, sillycon valley innovations are almost excursively catering to a ultra niche "WEIRD" audience ("Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich & Democratic") that makes up only 12% of global population. As a result of all this, the next four billion people coming online are predominantly adopting technology solutions from incumbent non-weird players. It's time for sillycon valley to really "think different", or perish.
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Today in late capitalist insane comedy news...
Canon Uses AI Cameras That Only Let Smiling Workers Inside Offices (petapixel) - A related project i created in 2016: Don’t Worry Be Happy - A Emotion Enforcing Text Editor All of this is kids play though compared to the "features" that the assistance of amazon & co have to help "educate" children.
Microsoft Hits $2 Trillion Market Cap (geekwire) And still no comment or repercussions whatsoever about the nasty "Truth About Bill Gates, Microsoft, and Jeffrey Epstein" or the fact MS has helped NSA & co backdoor every PC for 30+ years.
A CCTV Company Is Paying Remote Workers In India To Yell At Armed Robbers (vice) - Just wait for pervasive central bank digital currencies, geo-blocking and robots to take off...
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John Thackara on what’s urgent
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"Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." - David Hume
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Sillycon Valley "design culture" in a nutshell. Souldead late stage capitalism at its best.
"Coffee shops in SF always look like a mix between an Apple store & a hospital waiting room"
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A Theory Of Change, by Ilya Prigogine - found via a talk by John Thackara
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Everything that is wrong with the western "progressive" design community in one tweet.
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"Don't get distracted by abstraction. Connect with real people, in real places, and do good work with them." - John Thackara
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Christopher Alexander on Generative Systems
A generating system… is a kit of parts, with rules about the way these parts may be combined. Almost every ‘system as a whole’ is generated by a ‘generating system’. If we wish to make things which function as ‘wholes’ we shall have to invent generating systems to create them. - Christopher Alexander, 1968, “Systems Generating Systems”
If you want to make a living flower, you don't build it, you grow it from the seed. - Christopher Alexander
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"The greatest challenge of science, its art, lies in asking an important question and framing it in a way that allows it to be broken into manageable pieces, into experiments that can be conducted that ultimately lead to answers. To do this requires a certain kind of genius, one that probes vertically and sees horizontally." - John M.Barry - The Great Influenza (p. 60)
