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centuries-old institutions are increasingly inadequate for confronting ascendant authoritarians. Merely defending a certain sort of democracy is no way to help democracy as an ideal.

Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

Countries that used to define themselves through creating bold new institutions no longer do so—there are no recent equivalents to the NHS or the BBC in Britain; no equivalents of NASA or DARPA in the US. In much of academic life, too, you are more likely to succeed by slightly tweaking an established idea than creating a novel one.18

Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

Emilie Reiser from our team had built an app that let people take photos and GPS readings and combine the two into annotated, illustrated maps that community leaders could show to local government officials, documenting and analyzing what was wrong with local infrastructure.

Ethan Zuckerman • Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them

Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will tend to be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.

James Dale Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg • The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

The best critic possible on the book The Gift .--At the 45th International Design Conference in Aspen in 1995, Milton Glaser began a speech by arguing that the axiom “good design is good business” may no longer be useful to designers in explaining the value of their creativity to clients. He returned to the idea of “good design” in his conclusion: ... See more

Rob Giampietro • Lined & Unlined · Form-giving

the battle for quality is won or lost at the small scale

Jan Gehl • Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space

Idea Machines

Nadia Asparouhova nadia.xyz

What we build is defined and controlled by its unresolvable conflicts. In responsive design, it’s the text and image conundrum I showed earlier. In other, more grand arenas, there is capital versus labor, or collective control versus anarchic individualism. In technology, I believe it comes down to the power dynamics of convenience. To create conve... See more

Frank Chimero • Frank Chimero · The Web’s Grain

Technologies can open political doors that ordinary politics may not open alone. We see this pattern in governments’ willingness to let ridesharing apps categorically violate labor law or for nuclear weapons to justify consolidating the authority of a chief executive.