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Wednesday 21st of January 2026

1%ers The latest real estate trend among internet billionaires and hedge fund tycoons is, apparently, buying bunkers. These individuals, who have made fortunes disrupting the present, predicting the future and then making the future happen, are preparing for the end of civilization. … This new group of tech-savvy survivalists prefers the name “preppers”. It implies something preppier than the redneck gun-nuts in battered pick-ups with whom they might otherwise be confused. Financial Times, April 9, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Books [S]tudies have shown that because memory is spatial, with readers recalling where information is located in a book, we retain less information when reading on-screen. Financial Times, April 13, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
By the numbers The most covetable trend in China is the most basic: education. China last year produced roughly nine times as many graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics as the US. Financial Times, September 19, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Car culture Ordering a car via an app means the profits leave town. Margaret Heffernan, Financial Times, April 17, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
China All the tech competence China has now  is not the product of Chinese tech leadership drawing in Apple. It's the product of Apple going in there and building the tech competence. Kevin O’Marah, a supply chain technology researcher, Financial Times, January 17, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
China A research backwater when its economy took off in the 1980s, China has since spent heavily on r&d to obvious effect. A study published by Elsevier, a scientific publisher, and Nikkei, a news business, in 2019 found that China published more high-impact research papers than America did in 23 out of 30 “hot” research fields. The Economist, January 16, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Cocks of the walk say Technology — nobody knows more about technology than me.  Donald Trump © 2023 Kwiple.com
The Cold War In the Cold War it was relatively easy to say that this fighter jet is a weapon and that that phone is a tool. But when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or  tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off. Today, it’s just a few lines of code that separate autonomous cars from autonomous weapons. Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Apr. 14, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Craft 3D printing has a value but you don’t learn much from just pressing Cmd+P on a keyboard. Jony Ive, Financial Times, May 6, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Duh obvious A new Commerce Department report says self-driving vehicles are likely to have a greater impact on job prospects of people who drive full-time, like bus, taxi and truck drivers, than on people who don't, like real estate brokers and plumbers reported by Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Employment The crucial problem isn't creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable. … So what will the useless class do all day? Yuval Harari, The Guardian, May 8, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Entrepreneurs Between 2012 and 2017 the number of tech start-ups that received initial funding fell 22 per cent. As one investor put it, “90 per cent of the start-ups I see are built for sale, not for scale”. Many of those businesses end up in the tech giants’ waste bin. Susan Holmberg, Financial Times, February 15, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations c The driving force behind the Hamiltonian renewal is the rising importance of the interdependence of corporate success and state power. … This connection operates most strongly at the most advanced levels of tech and production: the information-finance-business-government complex is increasingly necessary to the prosperity and security of the American state and people. …  Washington is going to worry more about whether its leading tech companies are strong enough and well resourced enough to stay ahead of their Chinese rivals than about whether U.S. tech companies are becoming too big. Walter Russell Mead, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Free lunch Technological progress … has provided society with what economists call a “free lunch,” that is, an increase in output that is not commensurate with the increase in effort and cost necessay to bring it about. Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress © 2016 Kwiple.com
Innovation The idea of a single moment of inspiration, of the apple landing on young Isaac Newton's head, stirs the soul, even if it turns out to be apocryphal. In contrast, the idea that innovation occurs in fits and starts, with one person adapting a concept already in use and another figuring out how to make a profit from it, has little appeal. The world likes heroes, even if the worshipful story of one person's heroics is rarely an accurate representation of the complex path of technological advance. Marc Levinson, The Box © 2016 Kwiple.com
Good news But the production of killer zombie mice is not on the agenda. Financial Times, January 13, 2017, in a report about potential uses of technology developed by Yale University researchers to turn on and off the neurons in mice brains that control hunting, subduing and killing prey and inanimate mobile plastic toys © 2017 Kwiple.com
Inequality While there are forces – among them, changes in technoloogy and globalization – that are increasing inequality, the markedly different patterns across countries demonstrate that policies matter. Inequality is a choice. It is not inevitable. Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power and Profits © 2019 Kwiple.com
Knowledge We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster. Carl Sagan © 2016 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say If your boss's name is Al Gorithm, you're fucked © 2016 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Prohibit public spending on colonizing or traveling to Mars by humans © 2017 Kwiple.com
Liars say I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term. Donald Trump © 2022 Kwiple.com
Markets Technology has made markets faster, but arguably not better. It certainly hasn't made them cheaper. As academics such as Thomas Philippon have shown, none of the many technolog- ical “innovations” in the financial markets since 1880 has actually lowered the cost of financial intermediation. Someone is making as much money as ever. Fintech just makes it tougher to see who. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Modernity By himself, the human being, whether worker or manager, is incapable of producing.  Peter Drucker © 2017 Kwiple.com
Resisters People with pitchforks will eventually come after them [tech bros and Silicon Valley honchos]. Even if they are using their smartphone to find out where the protest is. Jeff Hauser, quoted in The Guardian, September 3, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Science In turn, the fragmented design of technology reflects its scientific foundation, for science is divided into disciplines that are largely governed by the notion that complex systems can be understood only if they are first broken into their separate component parts. This reductionist bias has also tended to shield basic science from a concern for real-life problems, such as environmental degradation. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle © 2022 Kwiple.com
Selfie I cannot compete with Facebook, with Twitter, with Instagram and Youtube. I simply can't. And I just can't for a very simple reason: most likely someone with a cellphone will be there, and I won't. Jorge Ramos, self-described “dinosaur” anchor of a regularly-scheduled TV news program © 2016 Kwiple.com
Selfie I'm sticking with my six-year old feeling of delight in things that move by themselves. You don't want to think of an odometer as alive and possessed of a soul, then don't. But Odometer and I have a beautiful relationship, and when she rolls over, I go to pieces. Paul Lockhart, Arithmetic © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Form follows function © 2016 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Our weapons are so smart they only kill the bad guys  © 2016 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say Technology is everybody's friend © 2017 Kwiple.com
Stock markets The performance of the S&P 500 index is now the most concentrated it has been since the 1970s. Seven of the biggest constituents  — Apple, Microsoft, Google owner Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla and Meta — have ripped higher, gaining between 40 per cent and 180 per cent this year. The remaining 493 companies are, in aggregate, flat. Financial Times, June 15, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest My phone needs a human assistant © 2016 Kwiple.com
Surveillance That era [of spying by the Stasi in East Germany] wasn't over at all. Rather, it had escalated to a new level of data volume, speed, efficieny and, most surprising of all, wilful mass compliance. Now I – and everyone with a smartphone – was carrying a digital Stasi in my pocket. Not only was I willingly feeding more personal data than [Erich] Mielke [Stasi commander] could have dreamt of, and to who knows where, I had paid several hundred pounds for the privilege. Adam LeBor, Financial Times, October 8, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Tech bros say Technology makes the past irrelevant --> © 2023 Kwiple.com
Technology Apps are a young person's game © 2016 Kwiple.com
Technology But the third most costly building is almost certainly the giant semiconductor fabrication plant being built by TSMC in Taiwan for about $20bn. When operational next year, the facility will contain clean rooms the size of 22 football pitches in which silicon chips will be manufactured at dimensions that redefine the meaning of wafer-thin. At just 3 nanometres, TSMC's wafers will be as thick as the length your fingernail grows in three seconds. John Thornhill, Financial Times, February 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Technology By 2016, technology no longer made American society look better to the outside world. Instead, technology offered a better look inside American society, and into individual American minds. Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom © 2021 Kwiple.com
Technology … a contrarian indicator of this growing industrialization of the service economy is the rapid and parallel growth of the concierge economy, in which very high- income consumers use their financial muscle to escape reliance on the defective, mass-produced services available to middle- and lower-income consumers. So there are concierge doctors on Park Avenue and mass-production doctors with HMOIs … In the concierge economy, the relationship between technology and work is turned on its head and information systems are used to supplement rather than replace the skills of employees. There are no digital scripts at the Goldman Sachs private bank. Simon Head, Mindless © 2016 Kwiple.com
Technology Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, reckons that an alarmingly different kind of Moore’s Law is at work today: the minimum IQ needed to destroy the world drops by one point every 18 months. John Thornhill, Financial Times, May 13, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Technology In actuality, the most crucial choices about the future of ordinary voters and their children are probably made not by Brussels bureaucrats or Washington lobbyists but by engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists who are hardly aware of the implications of their decisions, and who certainly don't represent anyone. But voters can't see them or address them, so they lash out where they can. Yuval Noah Harari © 2016 Kwiple.com
Technology Information technology is continuing to leap forward; biotechnology is beginning to provide a window into our inner lives – emotions, thoughts, and choices. Together, infotech and biotech will create unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human agency and, possibly, subverting human desires. Under such conditions, liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete. Yuval Harari, The Atlantic, October 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Technology My advice to anyone who wants to preserve a digital work is to print it. Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books, December 21, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Technology Nobody writing a love note with a quill ever said, “Why can't I send a dick pic?” Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, August 9, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Technology Social media’s mutation from Speaker’s Corner to Gin Lane roughly tracks the smartphone’s conquest of BlackBerry. It comes down, I think, to the diffuculty of typing anything of length, and therefore of nuance, on a touch screen. The currency of the internet changed from the paragraph to the sentence, from the blog to the tweet, from the word to the image. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Technology The technical is political. Yochai Benkler and David D. Clark, Dædalus, Winter 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Technology There is no existential comfort to be found in artificial wood, unchanged by time, none of the melancholy that paves our understanding and embrace of time and dying. It's not that it taunts us with comparative immortality. It speaks nothing. Nina MacLaughlin, Hammer Head © 2016 Kwiple.com
Technology To err is maybe to be human but to really foul things up you only need a phone. John Boyne, on his website for his novel, The Echo Chamber  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Technology To put the matter bluntly, if we had the polarized politics of today  but the information technology of the 1950s, we almost certainly would not have seen the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol. Millions of Republican voters would  probably not have believed the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and demanded from state legislatures new restrictive voting rules and fake election “audits” to counter phantom voter fraud. Richard Hasen, New York Times, March 7, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Technology We understand the threat to democracy posed by platform technology. But less has been said about the dangers posed to our financial system as “likes” become “buys”. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Technology Whatever the technlogical advances of modern society —and they're nearly miraculous— the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit. Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging © 2016 Kwiple.com
Technology When we don't quite know what we are doing (even if we are doing it well), can we write a program that does it for us? Joel Mokyr, November 20, 2015, four months before AlphaGo, a program from Google DeepMind, won 4 out of 5 games playing against one the world's top three players of Go, a board game with simpler rules than chess but many more squares and possible moves, making winning much more dependent on recognizing inexplicable spatial patterns © 2016 Kwiple.com
Technology When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. Paul Virilio © 2021 Kwiple.com
Trust The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool.  Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend. Thomas Friedman, New York Times, April 14, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Trust What America essentially told … rising Chinese high-tech firms, was this: “When Chinese companies were just selling us shallow goods [single-use products like “shoes, socks, shirts and solar panels”], we didn’t care if your political system was authoritarian, libertarian or vegetarian; we were just buying your shallow goods. But when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’— goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots  and urban infrastructure — we don't have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”  Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Apr. 14, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Trust Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s  evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips. Thomas Friedman, New York Times, April 14, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
War Once soldiers derived their moral authority from their courage; but if they are not now putting themselves in harm's way on our behalf, will that affect their standing among civilians? Will they find themselves increasingly sidelined as leaner states outsource vital tasks to private security firms? Or will the consequence be, as has happened to some extent already in the US, that society itself is remilitarised through the reemployment in domestic policing of veterans and the surplus equipment they carried? Martin Mazower © 2017 Kwiple.com
Warfare The improvised explosive device (IED) is the ultimate counter technology. Alex Roland, War and Technology  © 2024 Kwiple.com
Warfare [T]he technologies of warfare are more effective than ever before, but there is less warfare in the world, based on casualties as a percentage of population, than ever before. Where this will lead is impossible to predict. Alex Roland, War and Technology  © 2024 Kwiple.com
Warfare Technology and warfare are essentially material. They are communal processes for manipulating the physical world to serve human purposes. Technology seeks to bend the material world in pursuit of human goals.  Warfare sseks to bend human behavior by  the threat or applicaiton of physical force. The two phenomena share a physical and material affinity. Alex Roland, War and Technology  © 2024 Kwiple.com
Warfare  Technology can make war more efficient. But if both sides have the technology, even a highly efficient war is likely to involve enormous costs in blood, metal and treasure. Armies without size and depth to absorb losses and  remain viable on the battlefield may find that no amount of digital wizardry or tactical nous can save them. The Economist, July 8-14, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Warfare  Ukraine serves as a rejoinder to the idea that technology always trumps mass, that quality can replace quantity. General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British army, put it acerbically last year:  “You can't cyber your way across a river.” The Economist, July 8-14, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality With black individuals deeply underrepresented in Silicon Valley and largely absent at the highest levels of major corporations, little of the wealth created in the stock market or the technology boom has gone to black families. Today, typical black households have just one-tenth the wealth of typical white households, according to Federal Reserve data. New York Times, June 6, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
 
World War II But if you had the bombsight, you could drop your bomb from way up high — outside the range of antiaircraft guns. We can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet. … High altitude. Daylight. Precision bombing. That was what the Bomber Mafia cooked up in its hideaway in central Alabama.  Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia  © 2021 Kwiple.com