World Airmail Links

The pipeline of leak to investigation to revelation to report to reform has broken down. Technologists can’t depend on journalists to use their stuff; journalists can’t depend on political activists to fix the problems they uncover. Change doesn’t come from thousands of people, all going their separate ways. Change requires bringing people together to work on a common goal. That’s hard for technologists to do by themselves.

— Aaron Swartz, on why open data is not a cure for all of government’s ills, in When Is Transparency Useful?

It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

— Dick Brass, Microsoft’s Creative Destruction

Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

— Fraser Speirs, Future Shock [via Marco Arment]

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations.

— Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

In technology, as in most businesses, the way to make it to the top is through sales, so you end up with a situation where the CEO is a sales guy who has no understanding of technology and, for example, thinks that you can cut the development time of a project in half by adding twice as many people. I have seen this have catastrophic results.

— James Kwak on Calvin Trillin’s Theory, [via ★]

We can no longer keep up with our own creations, and so we are constructing an apparatus to structure what we think, in the same manner that we first used writing on paper to extend our memory. Now we are offloading other mental functions.

— Kevin Kelly, The Most Powerful Force in the World

I don’t know why, but techies in New York just don’t turn out for events at the same level as other cities.

— Joel Spolsky, Conferences in New York