Delighted to be part of H plus magazine's party at the end of the decade (I contributed an essay on Play and Transhumanism to the publication earlier this year). Amid some provocative contributions, here's mine:
Best of the Decade
"The architecture of open, end-to-end networks that was made manifest by the internet. Despite many attempts at commodification and control, the Net’s democratic and participatory ethos has been maintained right through the oughties. My feeling is that this resilience is because the internet is our ultimate “ground of play” — a mirroring of that balance between individual freedom and collective robustness that forges the character of complex mammals, and a structural reinforcement of the conditions of neoteny, or child-like playfulness, for adult humans. If this is the Net’s real anchor, then I think we’re in for even more surprises and richnesses to come."
Worst of the Decade
"Our developed-world inability to respond to the ethical and institutional challenge of the Net makes us seem permanently trapped in the same mine-thine Cartesian mindset that has undergirded all our grief about intellectual copyright, crime networks, and the collapse of the work ethic in organizations. What worries me is that we’ve blown our opportunity to create a new social contract for the world through web culture, to blend Eastern and Western conceptions of self and environment through the socio-technical practice of our networks and digitizations. An authoritarian, Confucian-inflected capitalism coming out of China may prove to be the new post-individualist model for progress — maybe most crucially in Africa."
