This isn’t the future they sold us. Thoughts on the Singularity

I’m all for the future, you know. I am confident it is vastly better than the past and I believe in the potential of science and technology to solve real problems. It is, therefore, with real anticipation that I prepare to attend the day-long Singularity University session organized by Intesa SanPaolo in Milan on May 3rd (Our future is now: Singularity University – How exponential technologies impact our lives). I like the people who’ll speak there and I love to see so much passion for the potential of technology to change the world. In short, I am a techno-optimist.

But I am also disappointed.

I’m disappointed, because science and technology haven’t kept the promises they made years ago. And I want to see them keep those promises before making new ones.

We still have solar panels so ridiculously inefficient that we need to subsidize them with massive surcharges on other power sources, or taxpayers’ money.

We still have batteries that pack so little power that your iPhone drains them in less than a day.

We still have planes so slow that it takes longer to fly today between New York and London than it took ten years ago, when you could at least book a seat on a Concorde.

We still have cars so dumb that they crash, transport systems so poorly designed that we sit in traffic jams, robots with so little artificial intelligence that a mouse outsmarts them, chemotherapy so brutal that it nearly kills you, sanitation so poor that millions succumb to cholera.

I know each of these problems is on the brink of being solved – isn’t it? But this isn’t the future that science fiction writers sold us.

Social sciences aren’t doing any better: we still have perversely ineffective political systems, massive intransparency, and gigantic corruption. We still have slavery, war rapes, and acid thrown on women’s faces if they don’t behave. Numbers tell us that poverty is declining, but it feels like we’ve just moved to a slightly better off dystopia.

Never before have there been so many minds focused on solving the world’s great problems. (Some of those same minds, I understand, are busy pursuing the transhumanist quest for immortality, a rather more crackpot strain of Singularitarianism that Carole Cadwalladr’s piece in yesterday’s Observer does not challenge enough). And never have there been so many people who can manipulate exponentially accelerating technologies in the attempt to “positively impact the lives of a billion people”. So, I remain an optimist. But I’m cautious about the new promises. Remember, we haven’t kept the old ones yet.

Towards the end of bookstores. That terrible sense of finality

When I was a student, I browsed though bookstores in awe at the world revealing itself to me within those walls. Two days ago, on the escalators at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Union Square, New York, I was hit by the terrible sense of finality that comes with visiting a place for what might very well be the last time. I made it a point to visit all four floors of the bookstore, café and magazine racks included, because I thought: I may never see a four-floor bookstore again. The next time I am in New York, there may very well be a clothing store here. And any other bookstore with four floors I may encounter in my travels is doomed. I am sorry but I want to be factual: the large cathedral of the non-specialized bookstore is over.

The writing has been on the walls, of course, for years. I have browsed through many fewer bookstores since Jeff Bezos started international shipping. I have watched museum bookstores convert into design and gift stores. Even airport bookstores, once the refuge of the bored traveler, have become much less necessary. It obviously isn’t true yet, but the other day at Barnes and Noble’s I felt like I could choose any book on any of the four floors and have it downloaded onto one of the devices in my backpack in less than fifteen seconds. (I also felt tempted to add a Nook to my gadget collection, but didn’t. I left the store without making any purchases.)

It is pointless to bemoan the disappearance of the trusted bookseller, supplanted by the faceless algorithm. It is just a fact. The other day, as I prepared to leave the store, I felt as if I were standing in an emptied house that I knew I was never going to return to. Or kissing a loved one for the last time.

The dream that failed. The Economist on nuclear power

One year after Fukushima, the Economist has published a special report on nuclear power, which I recommend you read in its entirety if you are interested in the past, present and future of power sources on our planet (article and further links here).

It is a fascinating report (pictured: Enrico Fermi), and it ventures into broader issues of technologic success and failure (emphasis added):

The ability to split atoms and extract energy from them was one of the more remarkable scientific achievements of the 20th century, widely seen as world-changing. Intuitively one might expect such a scientific wonder either to sweep all before it or be renounced, rather than end up in a modest niche, at best stable, at worst dwindling. But if nuclear power teaches one lesson, it is to doubt all stories of technological determinism. It is not the essential nature of a technology that matters but its capacity to fit into the social, political and economic conditions of the day. If a technology fits into the human world in a way that gives it ever more scope for growth it can succeed beyond the dreams of its pioneers. The diesel engines that power the world’s shipping are an example; so are the artificial fertilisers that have allowed ever more people to be supplied by ever more productive farms, and the computers that make the world ever more hungry for yet more computing power.

There has been no such expansive setting for nuclear technologies. Their history has for the most part been one of concentration not expansion, of options being closed rather than opened.

The Internet of the Future: Nouveau Monde 2.0, Paris, October 21, 2011

I had the pleasure to represent Italian Angels for Growth yesterday at a seminar held at the French Ministry for the Economy, Finance and Industry in order to advance the G8 Deauville agenda for the digital economy. It is a bit unusual for me to participate in a governmental event, but since the invitees were “Ministers for the digital economy, leading firms, start-ups, venture capitalists, bloggers and think tanks”, I thought at least it would be a place where interesting people gathered.

“New World 2.0: Concretizing the Internet of the Future”, or “Nouveau Monde 2.0″, was indeed packed with content and not too long on rhetorics. I had to miss the opening session on Thursday night, which dealt with Democracy 2.0 and saw Minister Eric Besson, the event host, engaged – quite empathically, I am told – with a number of Tunisian bloggers. (Here is a short interview he gave about Nouveau Monde 2.0).

Friday started with a discussion on network infrastructure that is by now familiar to me from working in a telco (I almost felt like crying out: “Those numbers on video traffic on cellular networks? They’re not tomorrow! They are practically today!”) and was framed by Cisco’s Robert Pepper, who showed projections from the Visual Networking Index leading us into the “Zettabyte Era” by 2015. Two key facts here: the volume of data transmitted around the world is increasingly driven by consumers, not businesses; and the biggest consumer demand is for video, in its many incarnations (short- and long-form, recorded and real-time, and so on). It is, also, a remarkably global demand: according to Google’s David Drummond, half of the views for videos uploaded from France this year were due to users ouside France. The question is, obviously, who’s going to pay for the networks we need to put in place. There was a full range of policy options represented on stage: the most laissez-faire was probably the U.S., whose Department of Commerce representative, Lawrence Strickland, maintained that regulators’ job is to “get out of the way”, but nevertheless admitted that there is at least one case, rural broadband, where the government should step in. The most interventionist? Not Sweden, not Finland, but Australia, where fruitless haggling with the incumbent, Minister Stephen Conroy told the audience, led the government to give up in frustration and launch a Newco tasked with building the National Broadband Network out of taxpayers’ money; one guesses that having Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea as “neighbors” and competitors tends to sharpen resolve. The proceedings were lent gravitas by European Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who reminded us that not only do we have a financial crisis to solve, but we must also find the resources to invest in our digital future. She deplored the lack of a single digital market across the Union (think of the mess that national copyright systems have gotten us into), and shone the spotlight on the recent Commission recommendation to establish a €9.2bn “Connecting Europe Facility” (here’s how it should work). Kroes was the star of the session: in a way, at at time when almost all politicians seem to think desperately short-term, she seemed to show how politics should care for the long run. (I am, needless to say, a fan of her commitment to put more “girl power” into technology).

The second session was moderated by entrepreneur, angel investor and independent board member Sherry Coutu, and focused on privacy on the Internet: “as a mother, I worry about these things”, she said in introducing the panel. Barbs were exchanged, as expected, between Simon Davies of Transparency International and Elliot Schrage from Facebook. Schrage was also challenged by the audience, notably when Tunisian journalist Emna Ben Jemaa took Schrage to task about a number of decisions on Tunisian pages made, or rather not made, by Facebook administrators during the Arab spring: if you followed the hashtag #NMwww, you could almost hear the Twittershphere cheering her on.

The third session, introduced by Alcatel-Lucent CEO (and former BT CEO) Ben Verwaayen, took on the issue of the digital divide. In opening the panel discussion, Mr. Verwaayen admitted that even in the West we are absolutely nowhere with “Internet for all”, and asked whether spectrum is treated as a strategic scarce resource or a milk cow for finance ministers. Again, representatives from places such as Japan and Sweden shared the stage with politicians from Kenya and Morocco. Digital inclusion is a tough challenge, both in terms of infrastructure and in terms of awareness and culture: there are lots of inspiring experiments going on, from tools to get cashew nuts to market at the right time in Ghana to telecommuting after the quake in Japan, but no one has any easy answers.

After the “official” conference was over, there followed a start-up evening (“Innovation Night 2.0″) put together by the outstanding team from Le Camping: three nascent start-ups and three slightly more mature ones got to present one-minute pitches and be grilled by senior executives from Microsoft, Google, Facebook… Here, the star performer was Criteo, a business that barely existed three years ago and plans to book $200m in revenues in 2011. When research reports talk about the jobs and the share of GDP growth created by the digital economy, folks like those at Criteo are the reality behing the numbers. Well done, guys!

Overall, the day felt like one of those rare occasions where my generation (the 40-year-olds), the previous generation (Ms. Kroes’s), and the younger generation (the university students presenting their start-ups in the evening) almost spoke the same language. The Ministry (where Mr. Besson holds, in addition to Industry and Energy, a specific mandate for the Digital Economy) deserves credit for creating a common space where this could happen. It was a showcase for a very dynamic France, and perhaps an example to the many other countries where participants came from.

Ada Lovelace, The Ur-Girl Geek

There’s a reason why Ada Lovelace, famous for her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and sometimes credited with the first description of a machine algorithm, is the Ur-Girl Geek. It is because she was conscious of the power of her intellect, and not afraid to wield it.

In his recent The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick quotes from her writings: to me, it is her self-awareness, her self-confidence, that stand out today:

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other et-ceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards instead of from mortality.

Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I haven’t sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do. 

No one knows what almost awful energy and power lies yet undeveloped in that wiry little system of mine. I say awful, because you may imagine what it might be under different circumstances…

[To Charles Babbage:] I do not think you possess half my forethought, & power of foreseeing all possible contingencies (probable & improbable, just alike). – I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly.

She died in 1852, at the age of 36, “a protracted, torturous death from cancer of the womb, her agony barely lessened by laudanum and cannabis.”

We celebrate the 2011 Ada Lovelace Day on October 7.

Tony Oursler. Alienation, emptiness and videosculpture

Last Sunday I visited one of my favorite places in Milan, the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea. I have had reasons to praise their exhibitions in the recent past (Yayoi Kusama, Franko B., Joel Peter Witkin and Jan Saudek). The current show – until June 12th – presents works by American videoartist Tony Oursler. From the press release:

The work of the artist, since the beginning of his career, has been dominated by themes such as violence, the relationship with media, drugs, mental illnesses, pop culture, consumerist compulsion, sex, pollution. Ourlser’s analysis is focused on how all those things affect man’s corporeity and social and interpersonal relations.

Being all of these topics in which I am rather interested, I had high expectations. They were not fulfilled.

As I walked through the exhibition, I was nagged by the persistent feeling that the artists’ technical virtuosity as a videographer creating three-dimensional animated sculptures had taken over whatever meaning he wanted to convey to the viewer. I left the show not having learned anything about the unconscious, about schizophrenia, about art, or about anything else.

Tony Oursler was also the inaugural contributor to the Adobe Museum of Digital Media, which you can visit online (www.adobemuseum.com), but which at first glance looks to me line an elaborate showcase for Adobe’s Flash.

Technology, innovation and creativity in Italy: SXSW Technology Summit

Terminal decline or lull before a comeback? That was the question on our minds as Gianfranco Chicco, Marco Massarotto, Luca Conti and I prepared for our panel about Italy on March 17 at the 2011 SXSW Technology Summit (photo courtesy of Paolo Privitera). And I like to think it’s the latter.

Our organizers asked us to address questions ranging from “Who are the leading mobile carriers / companies in your country?” and “Is there enough talent for high-tech work?” to “What companies / individuals are leaders in terms of overall creative technology?” and “What are the best resources / blogs / websites for people to learn more about new media in your country?”

I worked on the first chapter, summarizing in a few slides the key data points about the country’s human capital and technology infrastructure, and I’d like to share my speaking notes with you. (You can see my slides, together the chapters about technology innovators (Marco) and social/new media trends (Luca), at this link or embedded below.) Here’s my section of the talk – let me know where you agree and where you disagree.

• What I will argue today is that you should think of Italy as two countries; not in terms of geopolitics (we are celebrating today 150 years since unification), but in terms of culture, society, economics and technological environment.
• One part of the country – mostly young, mostly urban, mostly in the prosperous North (but not only: you will see later some examples of innovation leaders from the Center and South of the country) – works and feels like Bavaria or Sweden, from Internet penetration to women’s participation in the workforce. The rest, though, is very different.
• Our education system is an active contributor to this inequality:  for secondary school students, the gap in standardized OECD PISA test scores between the North-East and the South of Italy is larger than the gap between Finland and Spain. As Roger Abravanel documented in his Meritocrazia, schools in the South of Italy perform no better than the average school in Uruguay or Thailand.
• What about university education? Well, it was pretty much invented in Italy (the University of Bologna traces its roots back to 1088 A.D.) We could have performed some more upkeep, though. For many centuries, universities were by definition elite institutions; a serious push for a broader diffusion of upper education only started for good with the 1968 student movement. Yet, over 40 years later, according to OECD statistics, only about 10% of Italians aged 55-64 have obtained a university degree, and only about 20% of of Italians aged 25-34. A lot more people start university studies, but the drop-out rate is very high. Furthermore, the return on investment for those who complete a university education is over twice as high for young men than for young women. So do we, as a nation, have the skills to compete, almost ten centuries after the first place of higher learning was founded?
• I argue that spikes count for more than the general level of education; that deviation from the mean is more important than the mean. So the question is not whether everybody gets a degree, but whether the system is able to take in talented students and churn out a number of exceptionally creative people who then go on to change the world. And I believe it does: take three of our centers of excellence – the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin, and Bocconi University in Milan – and you’ll see not only that their graduates on average find jobs quickly and go on doing well for themselves, but also that many of their alumni have left a mark on the world as architects, designers, technologists, economists and entrepreneurs.  It may be a stereotype that Italy stands for creativity, but it’s hard to challenge it.
• Having talked about human capital, what does the infrastructure look like? Well, again – Italy is at least two countries. One country has broadband at home, banks online, shops online, and prints out its own boarding pass at home before going to the airport. The other one is stuck in the 20th century.
• That second country (older, less educated, less urban…) is still big enough that the most successful technology of the 20th century, television, remains the leading media technology in the country as a whole. More than half of the advertising money spent in the country goes to one media: television. TV grew through the recession, and it’s still growing. Yes, the Internet is growing too: but we’re still very far from being a market like the UK, where the Internet left TV behind two years ago. TV is the winner and we’re in a market where the winner takes all: not just the advertising money, but the nation’s collective attention.
• Fortunately, we have a vibrant telecommunication market, especially in mobile. Mobile is important not just because it’s a bigger market than fixed line, but because in the absence of a national broadband policy mobile may well turn out to be the key to reuniting that divided country I talked about. We’re already among the leading European countries in terms of mobile broadband penetration through devices such as Internet keys and dongles. The operator I work for, Vodafone, has committed to bringing mobile broadband over three years to 1,000 towns in Italy that today have no broadband access at all, fixed or mobile.
• Still, the recent recession has made it a tough ride. In 2009, we lost 5% of our GDP, and we’re merely inching back to growth, not sprinting. The investment environment took a hit. The ICT sector was hit very hard; telecommunication spend did not collapse as dramatically, but is now likely to be in its fourth consecutive year of slow contraction. As consumers have adopted recessionary mindsets, businesses have had to learn to cope.
• So what are the drivers for technology and innovation, looking ahead? For Italy, the tech lobby Assinform identifies the usual suspects: cloud computing, eGovernment, mobile broadband, tablets, SMEs. But don’t underestimate the role of Europe. The European Union as a forum, in spite of the recent debt crisis, is still a very active bureaucracy working for competition within the EU, for consumers and for citizens. It exercises both legislative power and moral suasion, such as in standardization initiatives – essentially banging people’s heads together until they agree to make sure that whatever they’re doing is interoperable with what their other fellow Europeans are doing. (GSM, as you will recall, was started in the 1980s by a bunch of postal and telecommunication bureaucrats. Who would have thought?)
• Back to Italy: are we in tune with the Digital Agenda for Europe? No, I would not say we are in tune. Our government has been preoccupied with other political priorities, such as fiscal devolution and reform of the criminal justice system. Ask any of our political leaders, government or opposition, whether a digital agenda for Italy is among their top ten priorities, and my guess is that hardly any of them will even have a clue of what you’re talking about. (Remember: they are elected, overwhelmingly, by people who watch TV.) So lobbying has started, most recently with Agenda Digitale – a plea by 100 Italian technology and media figures for the political establishment to define what we’re going to do about the digital divide -, and must continue.
• Having said all that, should you lose hope in the country? No, no, no. We do have enablers that we didn’t have ten or fifteen years ago: VCs with proven track records, incubators and seed funds started by successful entrepreneurs and managers, angel investors and angel groups. (I am a member of Italian Angels for Growth). We do have skills, creativity and talent – as shown by the many achievements of Italians around the world. We have bureaucracy, yes, and we are badly governed: but that won’t last much longer. We are proud of being Italian, and we want to fix our country. Each of us here today is doing their small or big part.

The Internet we want

I couldn’t quite put it in words, but there was something that nagged me as I re-emerged from two days at LeWeb ’10 in Paris (videos here). A feeling that, as we collectively build the Internet, we’re building a better and better toy for a digital elite, much like the audience in the room. And why not? Even when we innovate outside the online domain, we get excited at brain-wave exploration, solar-powered planes, and iPhone-controlled drones. We’re geeks, we like geeky stuff, and some of us like it so much that we become entrepreneurs and build it.

Then we wash our collective conscience by contributing to a children’s hospital via Facebook Causes, donating to the Homeless World Cup, or funding some third-world entrepreneurs on Kiva.

And yes, the very best of us apply their geek skills to big problems and come up with big solutions that do realistically, in the long run, have a shot at changing the world: I am thinking of Shai Agassi and Better Place. They should be applauded. The rest of us seem to be too busy making money with gaming, or coupons, or whatever the flavor of the day is.

But we still have a digital divide to deal with, it’s in our own backyard, and it’s not getting any smaller. While we live more and more digitally enriched lives each day, our next-door neighbors don’t know how to deal with their Facebook privacy settings, and don’t care. For us, the future of information in a post-WikiLeaks world is a crucial matter of civic engagement worth getting intensely preoccupied with; for the less digitally literate, it’s one more headline among the gossip in the evening newscast. Did we think that the Internet would educate and inspire people, empower the downtrodden, lift millions out of poverty and disease? While we certainly enjoy our digital toys, I’m sorry to say that very little of this has happened. The Internet hasn’t yet made a difference.

And here’s the paradox: as Umberto Eco said in a recent interview, fifty years ago the television educated the poor and entertained the rich. Today, the Internet is educating the rich and entertaining the poor.

I have always believed in the Internet as a force for societal change. But we’re not yet building the Internet we want.

Stewart Brand and Bruce Sterling in Milan: The Long Now

For several years I have followed the Long Now Foundation‘s effort to built an artifact that would be in operation for the next 10,000 years, regardless of human intervention. I had a chance to hear an update last Friday, live from one of its founders, Stewart Brand, speaking at a rather intimate event organized in Milan by Matteo Penzo and Leandro Agrò and called a a Frontiers “Concert”.

Stewart spoke briefly and thoughtfully. I enjoyed hearing him talk about discussions with his friends Danny (Hillis), Brian (Eno), and others participating in the Foundation’s plan. My (only slightly edited) notes from his talk:

• Most of the ways we had to think about the long term (religion, for one) are struggling to catch up with the speeding up of everything.
• We are in the middle of the long now – assume for the long now a span of 20,000 years. We don’t know how to think of ourselves as a civilization. We do know how to think as communities, nations, and so on. But, as a civilization, we don’t have plans for the next 10,000 years.
• “The Long Now” came from Brian Eno. Danny Hillis noticed in 1992-93 that “year 2000″ had been the future for years, and as such it had been getting shorter and shorter. Danny came up with the idea of the Long Now Clock.
• Today’s media are ephemeral – you can hardly read something saved on a disk 10 years ago. With the Rosetta project, we decided to collect all the world’s languages on a disk that would be readable with a technology no more sophisticated than an 18th-century optical microscope. Nobody had tried to collect all the languages in the world. We concentrated 30,000 pages in 4,000 languages in an accessible form on a disk. (Note: the Rosetta Disk page talks about 13,000 pages in 1,500 languages). Of course Wikipedia is our Rosetta disk right now, but it goes down if the Internet goes down. We made a physical, permanent Rosetta disk.
• For the Clock, there is a working prototype in the Science Museum in London. But it’s a dollhouse model. The real one will be underneath a mountain somewhere. Ideal mountains are out in the desert. Nevada. West Texas near Mexico. Last week we did the first blast of a tunnel in Texas.
• Brian has designed a chime system. 10-bell set of chimes. Every day the clock will play a different combination. The pendulum is a new design, but nothing that couldn’t have been designed a couple of centuries ago, and it is driven by thermal change.
• The clock won’t display the time all the time, because the energy required for displaying the time is greater than the energy needed for computing the time. Rather, it will tell you the time it was when the last person visited. You’ll turn a handle to impart some energy to the clock and find out what time it is now. The clock will handle neglect, but it will reward love.
• It’s a long way to visit the clock. Look out over the desert, the view has been there for a long time. Bristlecone pines in Nevada have lived 5,000 years.
• The clock will be like a telescope through time. The world’s slowest computer. It serves no useful purpose, unless you think that taking a long view is the responsible thing to do for us as a civilization, ore even merely intellectually engaging, or pleasant.

Bruce Sterling came into town from Turin, where he spends quite a lot of his time these days, to speak after and in homage to Steward Brand, “a gurus’ guru”: “to meet a guru whose disciples are gurus (e.g., Kevin Kelly, the author of What Technology Wants, is a disciple of Stewart’s) is rare.” Here are my notes from Bruce’s talk.

• Stewart has hundreds of ideas. The Long Now Clock seems whimsical, but the Foundation has been working for 25 years now. I kept thinking they would get bored. Brian bores easily. Danny bores easily. Stewart is a polymath. But they won’t stop. They will find successors. They will build it.
• Twelve years ago, I was at an event with the Long Now Cabal and told them that, when the Long Now Clock was built, someone would build a bigger one. Who would want to build a bigger one? (1) the Mormon Church. If you know about the Mormons, you also know that they have the world’s vastest trove of genealogical records buried in the desert; (2) Scientology. Scientologists have a ludicrous theology, one that would look silly in a B-movie; they are wealthy but narrow-minded people. (3) The Piedmontese. People in Piedmont like digging tunnels through rocks and are good at it. There’s even a cult that dug a private temple underground in the 1970s, the size of the Duomo.
• Stewart recently wrote a book about saving our civilization from decline. Genetic modification is necessary. So is nuclear power. I’m willing to argue against it, but it’s worth reading Stewart’s ideas. We’re not in the 1960s or 1980s anymore. There were few moral ways in the 1960s that you could support nuclear. In the 1980s, people in Europe realized they were pawns in the end of the Cold War, Europe was gaining nothing. We have an echo now that affects our attitude towards nuclear power. But let me make at least a weak argument in favor of nuclear: coal is more dangerous than Chernobyl, in a drawn-out way. It is obvious that European weather is destabilizing. Nuclear is the mildest form of geoengineering. Climatologists have given up on public policy and are working on geoengineering. Some schemes are insane and dangerous. Desperate people will do desperate things, and nuclear power is just about the least scary technical intervention. The second least is genocide: kill about 50 per cent of people – genocide is really cheap and Europeans know very well how to do it – and you’ve solved the climate change problem, at least for a while. Compared to that, nuclear power is actually quite appealing. It takes 20 years to build nuclear plants; uranium reserves will last about 60 years, then there will be some thorium, so that’s not a permanent solution either. When the uranium and thorium have run out, we’ll be back to where we are now.
• If I were Italian, would I trade dependance on oil for dependance on uranium? I’d probably want to go into cellulosic ethanol. Nobody knows how to make it cheaply. You need to have genetically modified bacteria. If you can figure out how to do it, you’d be a nice regional power, like Brazil.
• These are not happy times. We don’ t have good political news in Texas and California, no answers to offer the rest of the world. It’s in the hands of Brazilians, Indians, Chinese.
• I hope Italians will not fold their hands. You ought to behave as a wiser society.

We do, indeed, live in a very short now. Every day, yesterday’s political debate is flooded out by today’s scandal. And politicians’ mental horizon – as climate change economist Valentina Bosetti pointed out yesterday in her talk at TEDx Lake Como – is at most the next few years, until they stand for reelection. Who can take the long view and think about the next decades and centuries? It’s up to us: as members of this civilization, as parents and grandparents, as consumers, as citizens. So we ought to listen to folks like Stewart Brand and his disciples. Thanks to Frontiers of Interaction for bringing him to Milan.

“Pimp” as a badge, TV culture and iPhone apps

Today I was notified via email that I can earn thee “Pimp” badge on Glue.
Well, no thanks.

It is bad enough that our TV culture turns pimping into a glamourous endeavor, without our social tools and iPhone apps doing the same. And then one wonders why more women aren’t involved in the technology world. They don’t want to have to get a pimp, I guess.