droughts and margins

Droughts kill societies. Along with using up resources, the straight out vagaries of nature are not amenable to our long-term goals. It's not always our own human nature that drives the death of society - although in this light these difficulties also drive our evolution.

This is important for designers because we must realize that it's important to design for the extreme users, like the cliff-dwellers of New Mexico around 1400, who are running low on water, crops, and tress, whose neighbors are coming around to kill them and steal their supplies, and who have no hope that the drought will ever end.

What kind of products and systems could help in this situation? The long now foundation begins to offer an answer, but it's even more helpful to think about extreme sustainability. What can we reuse? What can we make to last a few years longer? What can we refill or repair instead of throwing it away?

While I hope we'll be able to continue along our current trajectory and build a space elevator in the coming decades, we'll be better and safer to focus on raising the floor of the conditions that society reverts to in times of war, plague, and drought, when our complicated systems break down. There is a need to keep working on the most basic mechanisms to make them more robust and more broadly applicable. Even if we can make writing, growing wheat, or storing water 1/100th of 1% more efficient, we can transform the world.

awareness

I think the zeitgiest of the past couple decades has been about the horror and difficulties of self-awareness, how when you realize you're doing something or participating in something, it's over. But there are certain things where you can be aware and still do it, and perhaps even a state of mind that lets you be aware without destroying what you're aware of.

attention economy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

A highly relevant and timely idea, the attention economy is coming to be but not in the way expressed in this article at least. It lists some of Ronald Coase's ideas about how to implement attention transactions, but doesn't notice that tools like digg and delicious are already accomplishing it.