“In 1903, Cray­ola had eight col­ors in its stan­dard pack­age. Today, there are 120, along with spe­cial packs like Gem Tones and Sil­ver Swhirls. What hap­pened? Above, from Weather Sealed, shows the grow­ing color selec­tion (and a few color retire­ments) in the stan­dard pack­age from 1903 to now.”

“Lovers of lit­er­a­ture, gram­mar and lan­guage, this is the place where you can work together to improve future gen­er­a­tions of tech­nol­ogy. By indi­cat­ing rela­tion­ships between words and phrases you will help to cre­ate a resource that is rich in lin­guis­tic infor­ma­tion.
Sim­ply reg­is­ter a user­name and pass­word and you can get started.”

“Why? No one makes money off of cre­at­ing pri­vate com­mu­ni­ties in an era of “free.” It’s in Facebook’s eco­nomic inter­est to force peo­ple into being pub­lic, even if a few peo­ple break up with Face­book in the process. Of course, it’s in Facebook’s inter­est to main­tain some sem­blance of trust, some appear­ance of being a trust­wor­thy enter­prise. I mean, if they were total bas­tards, they would’ve just turned everyone’s con­tent pub­lic auto­mat­i­cally with­out ask­ing. Instead, they asked in a way that no one would ever fig­ure out what’s going on and voila, lots of folks are pro­duc­ing con­tent that is more pub­lic than they even real­ize. Maybe then they’ll get used to it and accept it, right? Worked with the news­feed, right? Of course, some legal folks got in the way and now they can’t be that force­ful about mak­ing peo­ple pub­lic but, guess what, I can see a lot of people’s con­tent out there who I’m pretty cer­tain don’t think that I can.”

“It’s a dra­matic and human expe­ri­ence. The kind of expe­ri­ence that they make movies about.

So let’s make a movie.

It’s ten­ta­tively titled Acro Camp. Four pilots from dif­fer­ent walks of life and around the coun­try gather in Michi­gan in May or there­abouts to take over a Part 61 flight school for four days and fly aer­o­bat­ics for the first time.”

“Until and unless West­ern exec­u­tives begin to aggres­sively chal­lenge these assump­tions and awaken to the poten­tial of insti­tu­tional inno­va­tion, they will remain vul­ner­a­ble to attack. They must begin to rec­og­nize that the most promis­ing forms of inno­va­tion emerg­ing in devel­op­ing economies are not at the level of indi­vid­ual prod­ucts or ser­vices but rather at a much deeper level – novel approaches to scal­able peer learn­ing shaped by insti­tu­tional innovation.”

“West­ern exec­u­tives (think CEO) may be hav­ing dif­fi­culty grasp­ing the changes that Hagel describes because they run counter to cul­tural trends emerg­ing among this gen­er­a­tion of transna­tional elites ( not just big busi­ness). Increas­ingly, for­merly quasi-​​meritocratic and demo­c­ra­tic West­ern elites in their late thir­ties to early six­ties are qui­etly embrac­ing oli­garchic social strat­i­fi­ca­tion and use polit­i­cal or insti­tu­tional power to “lock in” the com­par­a­tive advan­tages they cur­rently enjoy by craft­ing dou­ble stan­dards through opaque, unac­count­able author­i­ties issu­ing com­plex and con­tra­dic­tory reg­u­la­tions, spe­cial exemp­tions and insu­lat­ing ( iso­lat­ing) them­selves socially and phys­i­cally from the rest of soci­ety. It’s a careerism on steroids rem­i­ni­scient of the cor­rupt nomen­klatura of the late Soviet period.”

“Florida assured Tessa that Detroit’s plight “is not some­thing I’m par­tic­u­larly happy about.” He told her his wife is from Detroit. And then he told her that his friends who live in Detroit are mak­ing it as “free­lancers” who “com­mute on an irreg­u­lar basis” to work on projects some­where else. He had recently given a speech to Detroit air­port offi­cials, who told him that the air­port would remain viable. “That air­port pro­vides con­nec­tive fiber,” he told her. “Find­ing local employ­ment is going to be a lot harder. So you either have to say, can I com­mute to work, by plane per­haps, or do I have to look for a place that has a bet­ter set of oppor­tu­ni­ties for me?”

There was no way to know if the answer was sat­is­fac­tory: Tessa from Detroit was off the air.”