The Bleeding Edge. Bob Hughes

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The Bleeding Edge - Bob Hughes


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       4 The environmental cost of human inequality

       Are the rich destroying the earth?

       Inequality turns humans into a geological force

       Malthus’s mistake: not too many babies, but too much debt

       Ehrlich’s last gasp: technology and ‘eye-pat’

       The power to choose a low-impact life

       5 Ever greater impact, ever less benefit: high-tech capital’s mysterious lack of growth

       ‘Keep your nerve’ or ‘tough it out’

       Why computers have grown nothing but themselves

       Inequality: the elephant in the room

       6 The invisible foot: why inequality increases impact

       Technology plus inequality equals meltdown

       ‘Positionality’ and ‘human nature’

       Traffic waves and why faster is slower

       Computers and the positional economy: obsolescence gone mad

       The rise of financial services, trailed by women in old cars

       Putting a girl on the moon: the cost of education

       How ‘e-learning’ rebounded on the poor

       7 Enclosure in the computer age: the magic of control

       The supernatural enters everyday life: the magic of commodities

       Power over the future: the magic of intellectual property

       Computers and the making of money

       The world gets smaller and hotter

       Closing the technological frontier (or trying to)

       Other routines are possible!

       8 Sales effort: from the automobile to the microchip

       The all-steel automobile as an energy sump

       How the sales effort shaped the chip

       Moore’s self-fulfilling prophecy: chips with everything

       Dictating the future

       The visionary turn

       Embracing carnage: faith in disruption

       9 Technoptimism hits the buffers

       The toxic deWmands of purity

       Obsolescence and e-waste: a total system

       Displacing the problem to Africa

       Entropy: measuring what’s possible

       Maxwell’s demon: the spoiler in the green growth dream

       Puncturing the weightless economists

      10 The data explosion: how the cloud became a juggernaut

       Forced migration: corporate flight into the cloud

       How the web became an entropy pump

       The cost of the dotcom bubble and Web 2.0

      11 ‘The least efficient machine humans have ever built’: how capitalism drove the computer down a dead end

       The buried world of analog computing

       Clocks: why today’s computers mostly do nothing, but very quickly

       Soviet computing: diversity under scarcity and bureaucracy

       Time-sharing: another abandoned road

       Competitive pressure narrows all options

      12 Planning by whom and for what? The battle for control from the Soviet Union to Walmart

       The benefits and dangers of centralized planning

       Electrification of the Soviet Union: heteronomous planning becomes the global norm

       Linear programming, with and without computers

       The curious incident of the capitalist calculation debate

       Connection-making and the ecology movement

       Operational Research and cybernetics

       Variety engineering: the difference between amplification and shouting

      13 A socialist computer: Chile, 1970-1973

       A global crisis of inequality

       The Unidad Popular: a moderately egalitarian program

       Stafford Beer and ‘cybernetic socialism’

       How much computer hardware does a viable society need?

       Cheap, radical technology

       ‘War’ is declared

      14 Utopia or bust

       Envisioning Utopia: the world turned right way up

       Utopian practicalities: food and work

       Beauty and lower impact, from the bottom up

       Shrinking roads, expanding diversity

       Putting babies and children at the heart of the economy

       Shared work: Utopia’s powerhouses

       Community is stronger than we think: ‘Disaster Utopias’

       The Right knows the power of solidarity, even if the Left doesn’t

       Equality, truth and the experience of being believed

       The ‘apparatus of justification’

      


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