Edited by Pat Kane (email)


Sorry for delay - some business intervened... Normal service resumed in a few weeks -- PK


:: Business is Sport by Other Means ::

Fascinating new US blog (if you understand base-ball, which I do barely) called Management by Baseball. "Some management lessons from baseball", says the blogger, "are subtle. Sometimes though, they clang you over the head like they were Juan Marichal and you were John Roseboro." If only I knew who these people were.. could we substitute Arsene and Alex? And here's more reverse-inspiration for business from Micheal Lewis: how an underfunded team can compete with the biggies. Sounds not dissimilar to what my beloved Martin O'Neill is doing with Celtic...


:: So What Are We Wired For? ::

For living in authoritative communities (shiver)...

Or inveterate gambling?

You maps your neural pathways, and you takes your choice. Stay with Zack Lynch's Brainwaves, if you want to be kept up with the latest innovations in mind science from a players'-friendly perspective.


:: Philo-Matrix ::

I know, I know, it's very Summer 2003... But when one of my great inspirers to playful theory, the philosopher Richard Rorty, decides to write about The Matrix, I'm linking:

Maybe life is a dream. Maybe reality is utterly different from what it appears to be. Maybe human language is inadequate to represent that reality. Maybe our minds simply cannot grasp what is going on. Maybe we are just brains in vats, fed electrical impulses that alter our brain-states, thereby creating pseudo-experiences of an imaginary world.

This string of skeptical "maybes" is our heritage from Ren Descartes, an undeservedly influential 17th-century philosopher who suggested that what goes on in our minds might have nothing to do with what goes on outside them. One reason movies like "The Matrix" are popular is that people find it stimulating to work through some of the paradoxical consequences of this suggestion.

And never mind the SF-losophy...here's what some real SF writers think of a real post-human hallucination: Aah-nee in office.


:: Social Theory Plays Around ::

One can feel a new social theory emerging. I'd call it a "Second Enlightenment" moment: ie, Adam Smith and David Hume theorised as they watched the merchants and industrialists sputter into life in the 18th century. And now a rag-bag of intellectuals (almost as coffee-driven as those two) are forging equally big concepts in the face of our networked, globally reciprocating world.

I'm betting on a fusion of game theory and network theory myself:

GT: The Law of Win-Win, according to ace blogger Dave Winer; and game theory explains our scepticism about executive bonuses, from the New Yorker: "For an economy to be healthy, people have to believe the game isn’t rigged".

NT: Emergence, Schmemergence - a bright lad from I-Society lays it down on how self-organisation is over-rated as a political paradigm. Meanwhile over in Nerdistan, someone is playing with old, old tropes: "A specter is haunting spectrum policy – the specter of commons. (Apologies to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Actually, unlike communism, the commons position is neither anti-property nor anti-markets)"...


:: Play Times ::

John Thackera: down with the Creative Classes "We are in a transition to a post-spectacular, post-massified culture. It's for this reason that it would be foolish to hand over our cities to the "creative class". They just don't get it. More to the point, their business model drives them on. Our cities are over-designed because the creative classes get paid for designing things. 'Creatives' don't get paid for leaving well alone.That's a conundrum we'll need to resolve." And in the meantime, we got Massclusivity. Designers with too many patrons...

Africa's new class of power players Fascinating use of the "agonistic" rhetoric of play. And who could but support their moment of agency?

A Lester Bangsulator So you wanna fake being an indie rock fan? It's easy. Better still: why not experience playing an entirely new instrument, with the imprimatur of a big city US conductor? (He should get in touch with Dizzee Rascal...)

Playa's Ethic, part 2 The male pill - more like, the male three-monthly injection - is out, safe and effective. Could you trust your squeeze? And if you didn't remember to take your jag, you could always spill it in a moment of cyber-confession. 'Bless me, Matrix, for I have sinned...'

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