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The Off The Shelf newsletter is a monthly digest of the blog and typically contains three things I think are worth your time this month about technology and society.

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Popular posts from this blog

Escaping the Technosphere

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One superpower of our species is the ability to quickly adapt to technological breakthroughs. We invent things, make them widely available, build platforms on which we can see further, do more. The speed at which we incorporate breakthroughs into our lives — from semiconductors to GPS — is breathtaking and inspiring. We are very good at standing on the shoulders of giants. But there is a dark side to platforms. We can be seduced — and become dangerously dependent — on technology. Greater connectivity leads to new forms of warfare. Energy and transport infrastructure makes us dependent on planet-wrecking fuels. Bacteria quickly evolve to outflank the antibiotics that save lives. These platforms allow us — metaphorically — to live at a higher level. Consequentially we have much, much further to fall if they fail. The technosphere (coined by Peter Haff ) refers to the ‘stuff’ humans have created to keep us alive on the planet, from factories and farms to planes and plastic bags. But it al
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How Stories Change the World

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“ Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it .” — Hannah Arendt When recommending fiction as a bookseller, I sometimes heard the phrase “I don’t read fiction”. On enquiring further, there was a suspicion that fiction was somehow frivolous, made up, a poor alternative to reading non-fiction, which told you how the world really worked. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of narrative to shape the world. Humans are story machines. Homo Sapiens conquered the world because we evolved to think in the abstract. Up against a nasty, brutish environment we could rehearse alternatives: war-gaming alternative scenarios to avoid worst-cases. But we were also able to share wisdom, taking our experiences and hard-won knowledge, encoding them into the prehistoric version of a meme: stories that were easy to remember, could be acted out or spread using art and language. Stories encoded everything from plants that could kill us (or keep us alive), to the histor
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Co-operation or Extinction? Retailers, landlords and the Prisoner's Dilemma

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"If the retail sector is ever to be investable again, it has to be given the chance to grow." - Mark Burlton, Cross Border Retail "Some of these large retailers are, frankly, facing imminent death from the mortal wounds inflicted by the pandemic." - Chris Keen, CFO LloydsPharmacy --- My family are often shocked by the deeply inappropriate metaphors I sometimes draw from history to describe real world problems. Natural disasters, wartime events. But it would be quite a job to ransack the arena of human history to find a metaphor distasteful enough to describe what's about to happen in retail. 'Ticking time bomb' has already become a cliche (and in any case, that 'bomb' exploded at the start of the pandemic). What we are seeing now are the foreshocks of a major earthquake which will reshape the retail landscape forever. And the faultline about to slip is between retail landlords and tenants. Tensions between physical retail and landlords have been
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