Deep Currents

The BBC has created a fascinating series of visualizations that show the pulsing heart of British civilization: its shipping lines, its air travel, its mobile phone communications, and London’s taxis. They’re launching a special program starting on August 10th to showcase it, called “Britain from Above.” It might be frightening to think of the many digital footprints we all leave as individuals in databases around the world, but that same data in aggregate is giving us a wonderfully penetrating mirror for examining how we all behave.

The following is a straightforward summary of the central arguments and facts from The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. The arguments are set up to support a cavalier attitude about energy consumption, a position that is hardly tenable in light of the need for environmental conservation and climate-change mitigation, but it contains a great deal of useful background information on the subject of energy and a several worthwhile arguments.

Central arguments

• Energy sources are nearly infinite. The energy we can access depends on how effective we are at capturing it, which we can do better the more energy we have available to begin with. Energy supplies will continue to spiral upwards and prices will continue to trend downwards so long as we keep improving our extraction technology.
• The fact that we use almost all of our energy (80-95%) in the process of purifying it is not only to be accepted but celebrated. Purifying energy is what provides us with better quality of life and the ability to acquire even more energy.
• The more we use the power-switching chips to replace mechanical energy distribution, the more our electricity demand will rise, since they will not only replace existing power switches but also enable a new round of innovation. For example, cars’ power trains will soon become electric, allowing them to run off of both internal-combustion engines and battery-stored grid electricity. Much of the American factory floor will also become electric and robotic.
• When an energy-based technology increases in efficiency it becomes cheaper and as a result is used more widely than before. To achieve a net decrease in energy usage the efficiency gains of the new technology must outweigh the increase in energy usage that results from its increased use. The best example of this is the light bulb, the improvement of which produced a panoply of lights, radios, radars, and lasers whose use adds up to a massive increase in energy usage.

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This is my latest Monitoring and Scanning Report to the leadership of the Packard Foundation on behalf of the Monitor Institute as part of the “Philanthropy and Networks Exploration” (PNE), a series of projects exploring how our rapidly-developing understanding of networks can be put to innovative use in philanthropy. The reports alternate between collections of relevant links and brief overviews of related topics. (The report writing will be handed off to another person for the time being.)

Technology-enabled activism is known for mass movements and street protests, but it is becoming a tool for creating change in less confrontational ways. The savviest leaders are using the base’s enthusiasm and creativity to advantage, encouraging co-creation of the message, recruiting virally through games and contests, and in turn displaying increased authenticity and responsiveness. The savviest campaigners also know they perform a service that operates under tight constraints: they have a short time frame to tap into large numbers of people activated by an event, and they have to provide a relevant and productive outlet where taking action is both easy, fun and satisfying. This report will highlight some of the more recent examples that illustrate the trend. Continue reading

This is a straightforward summary of military historian Robert Kagan’s most recent book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. More to come in evaluating his perspective, but it’s worth noting that the book is endorsed by McCain and that his proposal for a “League of Democracies” has been taken up to one extent or another by both presidential campaigns.

Thesis:

• Democracies wanted to believe that all ideological and strategic conflict was finished with the end of the cold war
• But nation-states remain strong and continue to compete for stratus and influence
• Great power competition has returned among China, Russia, Iran, Japan, India, and the U.S.
• The old battle between liberalism and autocracy has returned
• The conflict between radical Islam and the West has also returned
• Democracies have been divided to date and it is time for them to unite and shape the future

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Just in time for the most expensive oil in history, a sleek little three-wheeled plug-in hybrid called the Aptera has come on the market. Made entirely of super-strong composites instead of steel, the maker’s claim is that it gets 300 miles to the gallon. (What that means for a plug-in isn’t quite clear, but that’s the line.) It’s thirty thousand pounds, an amount I hesitate to translate into dollars these days, and it’s got a knock-your-socks-off body design that reminds me of something from the Jetsons or Star Trek. Then again, if it’s power and speed that you’d like instead of efficiency, there’s also the new T-Rex trike that will take you up to 150MPH and beat a Lambourghini off the line…