at the intersection of technology, business, and society
Our economic system is founded on the concept of ownership. Buying stuff, selling it, that’s the baseline model. Most importantly, how much or how little you posses is key to your social status. So ownership is a central aspect of our society, and it’s woven deeply into our daily lives. But that doesn’t mean it is immutable, that it could escape change.
Looking for weak signals that might foreshadow major changes, a broad diversity of recent developments comes to the surface. These include the rise of cities as actors in global governance, the demise of the labour contract as the mainstay of wealth distribution, the dominance of data-driven platforms across many industries, and the re-localisation of manufacturing and energy supply. That begs the all-important question: Is there a way to integrate all these ideas and observations? To come up with a reasonably coherent image of the trajectory we are on?
Innovation has become a major buzzword of our time, often with almost mystical properties ascribed. This essay is my attempt to demystify that buzz – in 500 words.
Becoming more energy and raw material efficient is the only way to manage increasing demand within limited resources. That’s no surprise. Challenges arise not only from the physical limitation of resources, but also from our inefficient and wasteful use. That is particularly relevant for manufacturing, as we largely depend upon non-renewable sources of raw material. […]
The Industrial Revolution essentially was an energy revolution: we learned to harness energy way beyond the natural sources we had used thus far. Instead of relying on renewables such as muscle (ox, horse, and man), wood, water, or wind, we increasingly utilised fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas to power the dizzying progress we have […]
