DISRUPTIVE
AN ENORMOUS SELLING point of cloud software, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and other new technology is that it removes “friction” from business. But as it turns out, much like with sex, the economy isn’t that great if you take away all the friction.
This is why the best news out of our house of horrors presidential campaign might be that both candidates pledged to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure projects. A good way to add friction to our hyper-fast software-driven economy would be to invest in painfully slow, physical, local, wasteful infrastructure, like a nice bridge or sewer. “If some parts of our society are going to speed up,” tech philosopher Stewart Brand wrote in The Clock of the Long Now, “then other parts are going to have to slow way down, just to keep balance.”