As Hit Makers author Derek Thompson explained in an interview with Forbes, for something to go viral means the product or idea in question “spread through many generations of intimate sharing.” People who liked it shared it with other people, who in their turn shared it with other people, who in turn shared it with other people, again and again in short sequence, rapidly multiplying the number who saw it (and shared it) in a manner analogous to the spread of an epidemic from Patient Zero.
Of course, for anyone looking for an audience — and who isn’t? — the…
I have long regarded what we so inaccurately call “self-help” with deep distaste.
Ultimately, the reason for all that is that its premises are deeply at odds with reality.
Self-help culture assumes that life is some kind of individual test where individual outcomes accurately reflect individual virtue, or the lack thereof. It assumes that one is in total control of their life, that their problems are entirely of their own making, that all they need is the generic “one size fits all” advice it offers to enable them to unmake the problem and live the life they want.
You can…
As those who follow such matters are well aware, the conventional wisdom regarding self-driving cars has changed profoundly in a few years’ time — from matter-of-fact expectation that they will shortly be a large and swiftly growing part of everyday life, to sneering dismissal of the prospect of their appearing anytime soon, and perhaps ever.
To be fair, I do not know that those who dismiss the technology are wrong. Indeed, I acknowledge that the present lowered hopes reflect our having painfully acquired a better understanding of just how tough a task it actually is to develop a car that…
As I have remarked before, techno-hype seems to periodically go boom and bust — and we are living in a moment of bust as expectations surrounding carbon nanotube-base chips, self-driving vehicles, virtual reality, and much else are proving to have been exaggerated. …
Just a few years ago it was the conventional wisdom that self-driving cars were here, in a big way (almost), with people investing a lot of time and worry in how we would deal with the fact.
Today it seems the conventional wisdom that they are very far away at best, and perhaps never coming at all.
Putting it bluntly, the complacent, credulous optimism of 2015 has given way to smug, know-nothing sneering.
It is a swing from one extreme to the other — with a good deal of irrationality involved in the current, pessimistic appraisals, maybe as much as…
Back in the 1970s NASA developed a nine-level system of “Technology Readiness Levels” (since widely adopted by other American and foreign agencies) as a way of measuring just how far a technology has progressed from concept to reality.
Level 1, the lowest, indicates that the “basic principles” of the technology have been “observed and reported” — that, at the risk of putting it crudely, someone is telling us that a technology is feasible “in theory.” …
Recently I found myself revisiting those ideas current a decade ago about the possibility of an “exodus to the virtual world” in which, finding playing MMORPGs far more satisfying than our daily offline existences, millions of people forsake this world for some other.
I have to admit that I found such arguments implausible, simply because economic necessity forces us to stay stuck in this world.
Still, considering the history of science fiction it does seem to me that attitudes have changed over time, and particularly after we had our first contacts with “virtuality.” Conventionally the response we were conventionally “supposed”…
About a decade ago I was coming around to the conclusion that, certainly as judged by the expectations of the ’90s and the unceasing hype inflicted on us by the press, the actual rate of technological change has been wildly overhyped.
I have, of course, found that not only is this not a popular opinion, but that people tend to jump right down your throat when you express it. And sure enough, right after expressing exactly that opinion on a radio show I received an e-mail contesting it. …
A favorite argument of the detractors of renewable energy-based electricity production is the intermittency of the sources — the fact that the sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. They also point to the impracticality of storage of solar and wind-generated electricity on any significant scale, given sheer cost. And they hold on the basis of these facts that any attempt to meet a significant portion of need from those sources results in there either being a surplus of electricity when it may be unwanted, or a scarcity of electrity when it is needed. The…
In recent years I have devoted more attention to the subject of neoliberalism — defining the concept, examining its practical enactment (particularly in the U.S. and Britain), and considering the resulting economic record from such standpoints as world and national economic growth, and industrialization.
By and large what we see in the world today is profound disappointment in the idea and its application — sufficiently so that any candidate standing for election publicly owns to neoliberal sympathies and intentions at their peril, with the right turning more nationalist, and the center-left taking the other approach of denying it has ever…
Nader Elhefnawy
Nader Elhefnawy is the author of the thriller The Shadows of Olympus. Besides Medium, you can find him online at his personal blog, Raritania.
