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I just read a fascinating book by Douglas W. Allen, The Institutional Revolution, which attempts to explain England's transition from its apparently illogical early-modern institutions - aristocracy, purchased army commissions, lighthouses, private roads, even dueling - to modern institutions. And today, we see many of those institutions challenged.

"We, the biological part of the machine, are providing the tools for its uplift, we embed cameras everywhere so it can see, we implant sensors all over the planet so it may feel, but above all we nudge and we push towards a greater connectivity, all this unaware." And also: "We are on the edge of a Paleolithic Machine intelligence world. A world oscillating between that which is already historical, and that which is barely recognizable. Some of us, teetering on this bio-electronic borderline, have this ghostly sensation that a new horizon is on the verge of being revealed, still misty yet glowing with some inner light, eerie but compelling." An interesting and beautiful post, but then again, I'm not entirely convinced, more specifically about the implicit conceptualization of our own Paleo-past. I think our ancestors and many animals had something called consciousness, while all those fascinating machines and networks of today don't have any consciousness at all. The fact that we add cameras and sensors to the networks does not yet mean these networks acquire something like a body. It would be interesting to study how the proponents of cyborg-thinking conceptualize the relationship between mind, body and consciousness. Or am I mistaken here? 

"Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that "complex systems break in complex ways" - that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy."

America is transforming before our eyes, and with our focus on the short-term economic crisis, we are blind to what might very well be the most fundamental economic shift of the past 50 years: the nine-to-five, 40-hour-week job with benefits and some security is fast going the way of the compact disc.

Every page a homepage. The river of news. The infinite scroll. All have been built into the new Reuters dot com http://t.co/yGZzdJ906d - Jay Rosen (jayrosen_nyu) http://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/329962973240123394