Fighting through the decline

  • The madness of trusting the consultant class and the illusion of nice things.

    I’ve been reading The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington after hearing Collington talk about it on Tech Won’t Save Us. The interview made me start to question a lot of the hype cycles I bought into throughout my…

  • It’s carbon all the way down.

    Last year I got into an argument with some colleagues about the concept of “decarbonization” for transportation. What does the term actually mean? Nowadays, the most common definition for “decarbonization” is usually something squishy that includes stopping or reducing carbon gasses in the atmosphere. It’s a soft term in this regard – perhaps because policymakers…

  • Preserving knowledge in the face of extinction

    I try not to be too catastrophic about the impending climate collapse, but it’s hard. Ecosystems are degrading, large parts of the planet are becoming uninhabitable, and societies are fraying. Yet here I am trying to preserve research, data, and information for posterity like somebody is going to find a report about automated vehicles from…

  • The Role of Information Professionals in the unfolding Apocalypse

    This morning the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds until midnight. It’s never been this close to midnight before – but with the real threats of nuclear war, climate collapse, increasing rise of fascism, global economic inequality, and the resulting social unrest it isn’t really a surprise that they moved…

  • The political economy of public agencies manifest in the morass of bad services

    In the spirit of using this place to bookmark ideas to work through concepts and stuff, here it goes. Tuesday at TRB I was in several discussions about how the structural dysfunction of organizations (DOTs) manifest in their data programs. I then commented that the silos of different departments a manifestation of organizational history, and…