Daily Archives: January 31, 2015

Maybe Call it the “Bucky”

Montreal Biosphere, Canada“[We will do] more and more with less and less until eventually [we] can do everything with nothing.”

There should be a prize for the biggest contributions to the datafication of our world. Datafication involves replacing physical infrastructure with virtual or simply changing the relative value between the physical and data properties of any product or service.

For example, Netflix might have been nominated for such a prize when they shifted their business model from being about disks in the mail to being about streaming of content. They removed the physical aspects of their business and left only data. This is a critical trend in our world, and the largest contributors to it should be recognized and rewarded.

R. Buckminster Fuller called this process “ephemeralization.” Maybe the prize should be named after him.

Hallucinogens 2.0

psychadelicgirlIn spite of their reputation as being dangerous and their classification as illicit drugs, hallucinogens may have a lot to offer. Historically, they have played an important role in certain mystical and spiritual traditions, and they have been seriously studied as a potential means of coming to a better understanding of how our minds work.

And it has been suggested that they are one of the secret ingredients behind the success of Silicon Valley:

R. U. Sirius talked about this a bit on the most recent edition of The World Transformed. On the other hand, there is this quip: “Many people tried acid. Only one became Steve Jobs.”

Maybe what we need is Hallucinogens 2.0, a technology for safely and reliably tapping into the parts of our brains that hallucinogens are known uniquely to impact. We need a computer interface into our own brains to provide the insights of a hallucinogenic trip without the risks.

Anybody working on anything like that?