Dancing amid the spires of a city called New Ataraxia, there is a woman who can cloud men’s minds, leap across buildings as if weightless, unerringly fire twin automatic pistols in the most insane conditions, and disappear in a crowded room. She fights against the political repression of an insane technocratic society, and she comes from a place that no-one in New Ataraxia has ever heard of. And she’s got one hour to save the city from itself

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My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I’m using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat. Say you mention the movie Once: I’ve never seen it, but in 10 seconds I’ll have reviewed a summary of the plot, the actors, and its cultural impact. Machine memory even changes the way I communicate, because I continually stud my IMs with links, essentially impregnating my very words with extra intelligence

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or all Lovelock’s sensitivity to the subtle dynamics and feedback loops in the climate system, he is curiously tone-deaf to the subtle dynamics and feedback loops in the human system. He believes that, despite our iPhones and space shuttles, we are still tribal animals, largely incapable of acting for the greater good or making long-term decisions for our own welfare. “Our moral progress,” says Lovelock, “has not kept up with our technological progress.”

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Simply put, one could create a small magazine about comics and format it for cheap copying in black and white, and free it so anyone could print off copies. And then put it in comics stores. Viral distribution from pixel to print…

What occurred to me after that, that I don’t think anyone picked up, was the broadside format. The single sheet. The broadside has a centuries-long history as a device for disseminating news and ideas. I mean, flyers go up on the web to be printed off, sure. But it’s not quite the same thing. Getting an idea, or a piece of writing, on a single sheet and saying, yes, print this off, copy it and distribute it wherever you like — that’d be interesting. In web terms, the costs are tiny — host the image on a free hosting site if you’re worried about the bandwidth hit. Use Livejournal or Blogger for the whole thing.

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Here’s our checklist of where to spot changes in consumer behaviour, new trendsetting products or just super-smart thinking on where our societies are headed at large. Papers, websites, mags, blogs, books, news, newsletters1 Alerts2 TV, movies, radio Seminars, fairs, trade shows Customers, clients, colleagues, friends, family Eavesdropping, chat rooms, conversations In-house Trend Group Dedicated spotters network Other trend firms, thinkers (philosophers, architects, sociologists, management gurus) Advertising at large Competitors Street life, travel3 Friends, colleagues, family Ready made trend reports Consultants, researchers, experts Universities Shops, museums, hotels, airports Catalogues Trade shows Start ups Customized trend tours4

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The catalyst to this change is eBay and similar sites that are quickly growing into mainstream shopping venues and creating unprecedented levels of liquidity for our everyday goods. This new liquidity is moving our society from an ‘accumulation nation’ of hoarders into one where our possessions can be constantly replaced with newer, better items.

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Which brings us to eBay and the many other auction and classifieds sites now matching supply and demand for used goods. In fact, what started out as a ‘global garage sale’ is now responsible for making used goods a widely accepted alternative to buying new, while it has empowered well-off or just obsessed-with-the new TRANSUMERS to constantly sell products bought for temporary pleasure on to the next person (and then buy something else)

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just a few centuries ago, millions of soldiers, priests, nuns and the like had no children at all while a few men had dozens.

“In fact, in the modern world we are going back to the life of the hunter gatherers – back to the savannah – with central heating rather than sunshine, foraging trips to the supermarket instead of back-breaking labour in the fields and no real fear of starvation or epidemic disease.

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you can learn from the backlash seen from YouTube and Facebook users who felt cheated when the sites built a loyal userbase, got bought out and suddenly the user experience drops in favour of advertising revenue. After all, without a userbase, there would have been no aquisition, and no investment to recoup. So I predict (and hope) that 2008 startups will be wise to this, and keep user loyalty in the long-run by working unobtrusive revenue models into the site from day one.

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