Wrecked

I like old rusty vehicles, like this one off the Dollarton. It's an abandoned wreck, but that doesn't mean it never had value. Wrecking things is problematic, especially if it involves vandalism or wanton destruction (rather than effectively targeted destruction such as occurs in house renovations). Wrecking things denotes violence. However, wrecking weak ideas should always be encouraged, particularly if you replace them with more robust ones.

When you find weak ideas, attack them, critique them, squash them. Find the flaws and magnify them so that other people can also see the cracks in their foundations. The authors or speakers of the ideas being demolished, if they are true thinkers who believe in intellectual pursuits, will thank you for it, rather than being defensive, resentful, or insulted. They may try, in turn, to take the wrecking ball to your ideas. This should be welcomed and celebrated, since it's what happens when people are engaged and feisty thinkers! If you aren't willing to risk the vulnerability that inevitably comes with putting your thoughts out there in the world for intense scrutiny, then how will you ever improve and develop your own intellectual prowess?

Vivisystems

In Kevin Kelly's book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, he writes: "The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being. What should we call that common soul between the organic communities we know of as organisms and ecologies, and their manufactured counterparts of robots, corporations, economies, and computer circuits? I call those examples, both made and born, 'vivisystems' for the lifelikeness each kind of system holds" (3).

The made and the born...will we make this distinction in Kelly's version of the future, where the hive mind rules? Kelly's intimate connection with WIRED is significant here. If any publication has tried to define and plot out the economic-technological future, it is this one. Remember --- there is no such thing as the future; we only have the past and the now. The now just keeps extending. We are creating the "future" every minute. Kelly's book is full of fascinating ideas about complexity and the "neo-biological," but it might give you the shivers. The future is never a done deal. Don't give away your stake in it or disempower yourself by assuming you have no say.

I don't really like the term "vivisystem," it reminds me too much of vivisection, which unsettles me.