The spatial dimension of democracy Since the time of the Greeks, democracy has been understood to have a spatial dimension and so, by extension, an element of scale. Plato measured the polis, the unit of democratic citizenship, at five hundred citizens, an extremely tractable size for a community that seeks to express itself through direct engagement. Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan democracypoliticscommunity
What kind of world it's going to be The wonderful thing about living in a world of our own creation is that we get to choose what kind of world it's going to be—at least in principle. But the promise is meaningful only if a broad enough "we" can be engaged in the process. At present, mechanisms and democratic institutions for making collective decisions about the deployment of technology are hopelessly cumbersome. How can anyone make a sensible choice without being able to weigh one alternative against another? Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape democracypoliticsclimatechoice
In ways you didn't anticipate A Quote by Patrick Hebron www.noemamag.com I always have a hard time wrapping my mind around some of the classic user questions: What is this thing for, is it for novices or professionals, etc? I do my best to avoid these questions, because the best thing you can possibly accomplish as the maker of a tool is to build something that gets used in ways you didn’t anticipate. If you’re building a tool that gets used in exactly the ways that you wrote out on paper, you shot very low. You did something literal and obvious. All sorts of ways to use the machineHacking is the opposite of marketingStretching the productThis tactile form of doodling toolssurpriseux