On Disrupting Wall Street
Chris has a good point early in his post on the topic: current “disruptive” innovation amounts to nothing more than a new UI for Wall Street – Mint, Square, Paypal, etc.
The rest of his post, however, assumes that individuals/groups who want to break out of the Wall Street system (read: corrupt plutocratic, isolated system), will still participate in that system… just without the gaming. That’s precisely the wrong play. (Simply put: You don’t want to piss off a parasite and then sit around where it can get you.)
Instead, you need to address the core problems with the gamed system, in this case, scale. (Scale is a function of complexity.) Bring it down, to the almost informal level, where financial services are exactly that rather than products, and you’ve addressed most problems.
There’s a lot of precedence for this kind of thing in the developing world in the form of cooperatives – much of which has tragically been hijacked by economic hitmen.
“Black Sky Thinking”
Holy shit. . A phenomenal snowmobile of the best books and thinking of the last decade in one insightful vision of the almost-now. It’s up there on the list of books you don’t want to read because books end.
Purposeful Breeding
Is Jonathan Krohn, the 13 year old conservative rock star, the first bred-to-go-viral human?
Freedom by Suarez
I listened to Daemon as an audio book. Really made me look forward to the commute I had at the time. I’m lucky I’m reading Freedom and not listening to it. I’d be cheering.
More when I’m done.