Tag: In The Zeitgeist

  • Reforming the World Bank

    In this brief published by the Center for Global Development, the authors discuss the calls for setting a reform agenda for the World Bank aimed at “enabling the institution to respond to today’s global development challenges.”

    “The reform agenda is being negotiated by representatives of World Bank shareholders and the institution’s management, which  put forward an evolution roadmap laying out key issues for discussion. Among these issues is whether the World Bank should take on a bigger and stronger role in addressing major global challenges. The United States has been a leading voice in the push for World Bank evolution […]. However, some shareholders have voiced concerns that the evolution agenda could detract from the bank’s core development mission or create financing trade-offs in the absence of significant new resources.”

    Read/download the full document here.

  • The Global History of Sugar

    This book review in the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses Ulbe Bosma’s book The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environmentover 2,000 Years.

    Earlier scholarship had established decades ago that “early modern European aristocrats […] decorated their salons with sugar sculptures” while “millions of enslaved men and women, overwhelmingly of African origin, […] were overworked so mercilessly on Caribbean plantations that they regularly lost fingers, arms, or even their lives when they collapsed on whirring mill machinery or fell asleep atop boiling vats of sugarcane juice.” 

    According to the reviewer, “Bosma breaks some new ground” by adding to previous scholarship: 

    “The World of Sugar brings Asia to the forefront, particularly India, China, and—a little later—the Indonesian island of Java. A sophisticated sugar economy existed in Bengal and North India by the time Marco Polo visited in the 13th century. It employed professional boilers and entrenched systems of monetization and wage labor within the village economy. […] Ming China became a global hub of sugar trade, with cane dominating the landscape, and with new technological innovations—perhaps introduced by Egyptians in the early Islamic era—increasing the efficiency of refining. Elsewhere, Barbarossa, fresh from crusading in the Holy Land in the mid-12th century, brought skilled Syrians to breathe new life into the sugar economy of Sicily.”

    The reviewer shares some interesting tidbits about the global history of sugar from Bosma’s research: 

    “In the late 1600s, sugar confectioneries were introduced into Siam by a Catholic woman of Japanese and Portuguese descent, Marie Guyemar de Pinha (also known as Marie Guimard in French), who married the king’s Greek prime minister. Two centuries later, a sugar planter like Leonard Wray could effortlessly move between the Malay Peninsula, Natal (in today’s South Africa), and the American South, receiving land in Algeria from Napoleon III and conducting sugar experiments under the auspices of the former governor of South Carolina.”

    Since at least the “early 20th century onward,” the problems with the sugar industry have been far from secret:

    “Sugar was only profitable when churned out in mass quantities: consequently, sugar industrialists deliberately overproduced, which artificially drove down prices (and workers’ wages). Governments, meanwhile, helped save corporate sugar from a race to the bottom. They realized that national sugar industries, increasingly financed by Wall Street and the City of London, were “too big to fail” and thus protected them behind stout tariff walls. Today, national governments spend around $50 billion a year to subsidize the global overproduction of a commodity responsible for serious health epidemics.”

    Apparently, “Bosma is hopeful that movements such as conscious capitalism and green capitalism will prod the global sugar industry into reform: he establishes a parallel with the consumer-driven activism of the abolitionist movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.” But the reviewer argues that “[f]or products of mass consumption like sugar, conscious capitalism remains a fringe movement”: “The abolitionist movement, as Bosma notes, was itself undone by consumer demand for cheaper (and thus slave-produced) sugar.”

     As Bosma’s own scholarship shows, “the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 was followed, a bit more than a decade later, by the resumption of British mass imports of slave-grown sugar from areas beyond London’s imperial control” like Brazil and Cuba. Similarly, “Saint-Domingue sugar workers might have cast away their chains during the Haitian Revolution, but French planters simply carried those chains across the Windward Passage to Cuba, where they got to work establishing a new, brutal sugar frontier powered by yet more slaves.” 

    Read the full book review here.

  • Saving the Public Sphere from the Onslaught of Digital Media

    In this piece, Nathan Gardels, the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, discusses what some respected thinkers are saying about how to approach “the infopocalypse,” which Aviv Ovadya of Harvard has described as “a catastrophic failure of the marketplace of ideas with no one believing anything or everyone believing lies.”

    The piece argues that “democracy cannot survive this failure of the marketplace of ideas because it disables the formation of any shared ground where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole.”

    The main problem that the piece is trying to highlight is that “the digital media ecosystem disempowers the public sphere.” The author writes:

    “Without institutions and practices that can establish and preserve the credibility of information, there is no solid ground for democratic discourse.”

    His suggestion for creating such institutions and practices:

    “[…] new mediating institutions, such as citizens’ assemblies, that encourage and enable civil discourse and consensus formation at the same virtual scale as social networks, are more necessary than ever because the forces of fragmentation have never been greater. Mending the breach of distrust between the public and institutions of self-government in the digital age can only happen by absorbing the wired activation of civil society into governance through integrating connectivity with common platforms for deliberation.”

    Read the full article here.

  • The Failure of the East India Company's Efforts to Pedestalise Robert Clive

    In this article for Scroll, art historian Jennifer Howes shows “how the East India Company tried to cultivate a strong, positive reputation in London by commissioning artworks” through two portraits of the colonist Robert Clive that the company commissioned, “showing him as a hero.” One of these was a neo-classical statue that depicted Clive “in Roman military costume” and the other was a painting that depicted him as a philanthropist in an effort “to heal his toxifying reputation.” The latter was commissioned after the reputation built by the former had collapsed: 

    “In the late 1760s he returned to Britain, bringing with him a staggering personal fortune that he had amassed in Bengal. Regarded as one of the richest men in Europe, he conspicuously bought properties in England and Wales, and spared no expense on rebuilding and furnishing these new residences. Clive’s spending spree coincided with reports of the Bengal Famine, a catastrophe that killed about 10 million people. The source of Clive’s fortune came under scrutiny and his character was aggressively criticised by the British public.”

    Of the failure of the East India Company’s attempts at spreading propaganda, the author says: “such manoeuvring, particularly in Georgian London’s critical atmosphere, could also backfire.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Degrowth and the UK Economy

    This article in The Conversation discusses the current state of the UK economy and the idea of degrowth that has been gaining traction around the world in the recent past. 

    The author points out that the two main political parties of the UK are presenting economic growth as a solution to the country’s current economic problems based on “conventional economic wisdom that “growth, growth, growth” increases incomes and standards of living, employment and business investment.” But according to the author, “economic growth on its own is not going to solve these multiple and intersecting crises.” 

    The article goes over some of the main ideas behind the degrowth movement, like “abandoning our obsession with growth at all costs” and instead “orienting the economy towards social equality and wellbeing, environmental sustainability and democratic decision making.” 

    The author argues that while “for many people the word smacks of misery and the type of frugality they are trying to escape from during the cost of living crisis,” actually “degrowth, if successfully achieved, would arguably feel better than a recession or a cost-of-living crisis.” 

    Importantly, “degrowth is not the same as negative GDP growth”: 

    “Instead, degrowth envisions a society in which wellbeing does not depend on economic growth and the environmental and social consequences of its pursuit. Degrowth proposes an equitable, voluntary reduction of overconsumption in affluent economies.

    Equally important is to shift the economy away from the ecologically and socially harmful idea that producing more stuff is always good.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Pangenome Project

    As this report in the MIT Technology Review states, “researchers announced yet another version of the human genome map, which combines the DNA of 47 diverse individuals—Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, among other groups—into one giant genetic atlas that they say better captures the surprising genetic diversity of our species.”

    The “pangenome,” as the new map is called, is the latest in a long line of human genome mapping projects. Reportedly, it “has been a decade in the making, and researchers say it will only get bigger, creating an expanding view of the genome as they add DNA from another 300 people from around the globe.” 

    The significance of this project stems from the fact that it provides a more diversified map of the human genome than previous versions: 

    “People’s genomes are largely alike, but it’s the hundreds of thousands of differences, often just single DNA letters, that explain why each of us is unique. The new pangenome, researchers say, should make it possible to observe this diversity in more detail than ever before, highlighting so-called evolutionary hot spots as well as thousands of surprisingly large differences, like deleted, inverted, or duplicated genes, that aren’t observable in conventional studies.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Making the Case for Reforming the IMF

    This article in Phenomenal World, “a publication focused on political economy,” juxtaposes “the rigidity and discipline enforced in IMF loan programs” with the “elasticity in liquidity and legal constraints” and “expedited financing” that is provided to financial institutions in the North Atlantic like Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse at times of crises.

    The author makes the case that “[s]urveying the contemporary landscape of sovereign debt and IMF lending programs reveals pervasive inequalities in the Bretton Woods system.” Such inequalities disproportionately impact low- and middle-income economies because “if countries fail to meet the structural reforms spelled out in the IMF’s program review, lending can come to a halt.”

    Busting a popular myth, the author writes that “[f]or many developing countries, the problem is not over-indebtedness per se” as “[m]ost governments pay back their external loans, often at the expense of imposing austerity on citizens.” Much like Credit Suisse, “the problem that most sovereigns face today is a liquidity constraint.” 

    Not only do “[p]rohibitively high interest rates make it difficult to access new financing and roll over existing loans” but high interest rates and debt servicing costs have led to central banks in some developing countries “selling part of their dollar stockpiles to buy—and thereby bolster—their own currencies.” Reportedly, the IMF does not seem to approve of this: 

    “Recently, IMF economists have criticized central banks that accumulate hard currency reserves to bypass interest rate hikes. But using foreign exchange reserves to purchase and thereby bolster the value of domestic currencies enables central banks to dampen some of the inflation. Given the inherent asymmetry in the international monetary system, hard currency war chests empower countries lower in the monetary hierarchy to cope with financial shocks.” 

    Between 2013 and now, the IMF’s own assessments have concluded that “IMF-imposed austerity mandates incur more damage to economic growth than previously calculated” and that “on average, fiscal consolidation does not lower debt-to-GDP ratios.” 

    The author makes a detailed argument that unless there are fundamental reforms in existing IMF lending policies and the Bretton Woods institutions are modernised, “the IMF’s future as the preferred lender for countries in crisis” is itself not secure: 

    “Much has changed since the initial drafting of the IMF Articles of Agreement in 1944. The Articles have been amended seven times, most recently in 2010. Shifts in the global financial system justify revisiting the Articles as a living document.”

    Read the full article here.

  • New Study Raises More Doubts About the Theory That Humans Originated in A Single Region of Africa

    As widely reported, including in this article in Nature, “[m]odern people evolved all across Africa, not from a single location, a new study exploring the diversity of human genomes has found.” 

    The study adds to the scepticism about the long-popular “single-origin theory.” Reportedly, what sets this study apart is that it uses more parameters than earlier models to establish the idea of “the weakly structured stem”: 

    “The ancient hominin species, or ‘ancestral stem’, had localized populations which are thought to have interbred with each other over millennia, sharing any genetic differences that they had evolved. They also moved around Africa over time. […] The intertwining of these stems, separated only weakly by their genetic differences, gave rise to a concept of human evolution that the researchers described as a “weakly structured stem” — more like a tangled vine than a ‘tree of life’.”

    Apparently, this study gives a “clearer explanation for the variation seen in humans today” than the explanations previously put forth.

    Read the full Nature report on the study here.

  • Socialist Software Engineers

    This article in The Drift magazine talks about “a non-negligible number of the people who write software for a living” being socialists, though not “as many as the right would have you believe.” 

    Calling it “the engineer’s predicament,” the author talks about such coders developing a desire to “to put their politics into code”: 

    “They want to write software that will facilitate the creation of worker cooperatives, seed the internet with self-governing platforms, and equip movements and municipalities with tools for democratic decision-making and participatory governance.”

    Elaborating on the article’s theme after sharing some facts about the history of “highly skilled workers in capital-intensive industries who had radical politics,” the author concludes: 

    “This is the greatest dilemma faced by socialist software engineers: in working against the grain of their technological heritage, they may also be working to bring about a world in which technology matters less.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Board of Academic Journal Resigns Over Elsevier's "Greed"

    As this report in The Guardian states, “More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier.” 

    “The entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage […] resigned after Elsevier refused to reduce publication charges.” 

    Reportedly, “[a]cademics around the world have applauded what many hope is the start of a rebellion against the huge profit margins in academic publishing.” One resignee is reported to have “urged fellow scientists to turn their backs on the Elsevier journal and submit papers to a nonprofit open-access journal which the team is setting up instead.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Quantum Effects Demonstrated at Macroscopic Scale

    As this report states, physicists have been able to bring “the bizarre behavior of the quantum world to larger scales than ever before.” Various publications are calling it the world’s heaviest or largest Schrödinger’s cat. 

    The experiment can be summarised as: 

    “The trick, performed by vibrating 100 million billion atoms inside a sand-grain-sized sapphire crystal, created the world’s heaviest quantum superposition as the crystal simultaneously oscillated in two different directions.”

    This is important because: 

    “As most quantum effects typically decohere and disappear at macroscopic scales, Schrödinger’s analogy was meant to demonstrate the fundamental differences between our world and the world of the very small. Yet no hard limit exists between the two realms, enabling physicists to begin cajoling complex, near-macroscopic-scale objects into showing freaky quantum behavior.” 

    Of course, this could have far-reaching consequences for quantum technologies like quantum computing. 

    Read the full report here.

  • Bernie Sanders Calls for A Reduced Workweek

    In this piece for Leftist magazine Jacobin, philosophy professor and author, Ben Burgis argues in support of Bernie Sanders renewing “his long-standing call to reduce the workweek to thirty-two hours.” 

    Burgess discusses state-level efforts in California and the federal attempt in Congress to make this reduced workweek a reality. “Right now, these efforts face an uphill battle to say the least.”

    Burgis writes: 

    “There was a 299 percent increase in labor productivity from 1950 to 2020. As Senator Sanders rightly suggests, the benefits of that increase largely went to the top of society. It certainly didn’t automatically generate a shorter workweek.”

    and

    “Technology and productivity have advanced to an astonishing degree since President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. But the limitation on how many hours workers can be made to spend on the job if they want to be able to make a living has stayed in place.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Potential of CRISPR-edited Fats to Treat Cancer

    Various publications have covered a study where researchers converted white fat into brown fat using CRISPR and used it to surround tumours, starving them of essential nutrients. 

    As this report on the popular science website LiveScience summarises: 

    “Fat sucked out of the body and tweaked with the gene-editing tool CRISPR could be used to treat cancer, a study of mice and transplanted human tissues hints. 

    However, it remains to be seen whether the experimental therapy would be safe and effective in people.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Data Security Concerns Over the Use of Generative AI Tools

    A study by an Israeli firm Team8 got widely picked up by media outlets because of the concerns it raises about corporate secrets and customer information. 

    As one report says: 

    “The report said that companies using such tools may leave them susceptible to data leaks and laws. The chatbots can be used by hackers to access sensitive information. Team8’s study said that chatbot queries are not being fed into the large language models to train AI since the models in their current form can’t update themselves in real-time. This, however, may not be true for the future versions of such models, it added.”

    Bloomberg News covered the study first and is said to have received it “prior to its release.” As the Bloomberg report says: 

    Major technology companies including Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. are racing to add generative AI capabilities to improve chatbots and search engines, training their models on data scraped from the Internet to give users a one-stop-shop to their queries. If these tools are fed confidential or private data, it will be very difficult to erase the information, the report said. 

    Read the complete Bloomberg report on the Team8 study here.

  • Flood Mitigation in New Zealand

    This report in Stuff, a news portal in New Zealand, covers local environmentalist Tom Kay’s presentation to government officials “about the importance of rethinking natural disaster mitigation” in light of “a series of devastating floods” over the past five years.

    It raises concerns about “the country’s preoccupation with draining” wetlands having a direct correlation to increased flooding as wetlands “act as buffer zones, or sponges.” 

    Straightening rivers and lining them with stopbanks are said to have “proven disastrous for wildlife and humans alike” as river straightening has destroyed “natural habitats for many fish species” and stopbanks “ultimately elevate water levels above the floodplain.”

    Deforestation, which causes “more water to flow off hillsides,” combined with all the above factors, “has created the perfect storm” resulting in more frequent and more devastating floods, the report argues.

    Read the full article here.

  • PBS and NPR Stop Using Twitter

    As widely reported, PBS and NPR have stopped using Twitter. 

    According to the National Public Radio or NPR website: “NPR is an independent, nonprofit media organization that was founded on a mission to create a more informed public.”

    According to the Public Broadcasting Service or PBS website: “PBS is a membership organization that, in partnership with its member stations, serves the American public with programming and services of the highest quality, using media to educate, inspire, entertain and express a diversity of perspectives.”

    To access multi-media content put out by NPR, visit their website here. To take a look at PBS programming, visit their website here or their Youtube channel here.

  • The Urgent Need to Significantly Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions

    In this article for Nature, climate scientist David Ho re-iterates his long-standing argument that while there is no denying “the need to develop CDR (carbon dioxide removal) methods over the longer term”, urgently cutting down emissions is important because currently available CDR methods will not remove enough carbon dioxide to be able to compensate for the levels of emissions. 

    Ho argues: “We must stop talking about deploying CDR as a solution today, when emissions remain high — as if it somehow replaces radical, immediate emission cuts.” 

    This is necessary because: 

    “Developing methods to verify that CDR works is a major challenge. It will be many years before we have the science to tell us which methods work and whether they harm or benefit the environment.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Windowless Housing

    In this post on his Substack, The Column, Adam H. Johnson discusses the problems with real estate developers building windowless housing under the guise of solving the homelessness crisis. Johnson points out that over the last few years “calls for gutting regulations” in construction have become “not only mainstream, they’re elite conventional wisdom in Democratic-aligned media circles.”

    Importantly, this is not something new. “Real estate interests have said regulations stand in the wage of housing supply, and kept rents artificially high, since the dawn of government regulation.”

    One such regulation that seems to have become a target is the requirement for windows in bedrooms. Windowless abodes are passed off as necessary to solve the housing shortage. As Johnson writes:

    “Like much of the housing discourse, one is baffled by how quickly the discussion goes from the perfectly sensible—albeit generic—axiom of “we need more housing” to the idea that maintaining standards for windows in bedrooms is a pro-homelessness policy.

    The whole thing feels like a hostage situation, and in many ways it is. Taken to its logical end point, this reasoning means any housing standard that is a notch above homelessness would therefore be acceptable so long as it drove down development cost for real estate interests.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Crises in Higher Education?

    In the post-pandemic world, more and more voices from academia are trying to articulate the problems with the current state of the university system.

    In remarks made at the 2023 meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, Erin Bartram talks of the “intentional systemic understaffing” that plagues universities exploiting the labour of adjunct professors due to a shortage of tenured positions. She makes the case that the AHA has not done enough to tackle the problem, which she believes is larger than tenured professors’ lack of solidarity with their adjunct colleagues:

    “And it’s deeply connected to the broader problems facing history as a field of study in K-16 education—the perpetual concern over what majors get jobs, of course, but also the concerted political attacks on the field and its practitioners, most of whom teach without whatever protections academic freedom theoretically provides. And it’s about teaching, which is what every normal person in the world thinks is our main job, and which the field as a whole does not prioritize, train for, reward, or even really understand.”

    Marymount University had recently created a furore when its Board of Trustees unanimously passed a plan “that will eliminate nine majors, most of which are in the humanities field.”

    Lakshmi Subramanian wrote this disconcerting piece about her experience as a member of “a selection committee for recruiting an assistant professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.” She describes the whole process as “farcical.”

    The UK government has announced that “[g]raduates from the top 50 non-UK universities can apply to come to the UK through a new visa scheme.” But measures like this do not address the problem of providing employment opportunities for all degree holders.

  • A Non-Dualistic Understanding of the Mind

    In this essay, James Barnes, a practising relational psychotherapist, outlines how relational psychotherapy provides a different model of understanding and healing mental distress than the more prevalent models of understanding and ‘treating’ the brain.

    Dualism has long impacted our understanding of the human mind:

    “When the new scientific discipline of psychology separated off from philosophy in the mid- to late 19th century, it adopted an essentially naturalised version of Descartes’s dualism, which persists to the present day, certainly in mainstream psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy. Instead of seeing mind as a separate substance, this neo-Cartesian perspective assumes that the mind is somehow identifiable with the brain, brain states and brain functioning. Much like Descartes, however, it maintains the very same vision of ‘mind’ as an experientially private interior, categorically cut off from the world and others outside.

    For Descartes and for modern neo-Cartesian models alike, our experience of the world and others occurs ‘on the inside’ – in our individual minds or brains. For modern psychology, this meant that mental life could be studied and measured in isolation, lending itself to empirical and quantitative science.”

    On the other hand, “Instead of locating the problem ‘in’ the person, relational therapists see distress as arising in the relationship between the individual and the rest of the world.”

    Barnes goes on to compare the differences between the two approaches in light of his own lived experience.

    An important caveat:

    “To be clear, this isn’t to say that internal processes – biological or otherwise – are not involved; of course they are. It is only to say that, in the relational-intersubjective model, the interpersonal, social level is foundational, and this often, we might say, transcends and includes these processes.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Preventing Harm Caused by Machine-learning

    “As a leading researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence, Timnit Gebru has long believed that machine-learning algorithms could one day power much of our lives,” writes Emily Bobrow in this profile for the The Wall Street Journal.

    “Because machine-learning systems adopt patterns of language and images scraped from the internet, they are often riddled with the internet’s all-too-human flaws” and Gebru is well-known for her work in trying to change that. As Bobrow points out:

    “For years, Dr. Gebru earned notoriety as an in-house AI skeptic at big tech companies. In 2018, while she was working at Microsoft, she co-authored a study that found that commercial facial-analysis programs were far more accurate in identifying the gender of white men than Black women, which the researchers warned could lead to damaging cases of false identification. Later, while working at Google, called on companies to be more transparent about the errors baked into their AI models.”

    Gebru “hopes for laws that push tech companies to prove their products are safe, just as they do for car manufacturers and drug companies.”

    At Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a non-profit she launched in 2021, “Dr. Gebru is working to call attention to some of the hidden costs of AI, from the computational power it requires to the low wages paid to laborers who filter training data.”

    Read the full article here.

  • The Problem with Effective Altruism

    This video essay/tutorial by Youtuber and artist Abigail Thorn for her channel PhilosophyTube is a good introduction to effective altruism and the main problems with it.

    Watch the complete video here.

  • OpenAI's Plans for AGI

    OpenAI has made unprecedented waves in the field of AI with ChatGPT. As a key player in the field, this mission statement of sorts about their plans regarding AGI, attributed to their CEO Sam Altman, makes for necessary reading for people with an eye on AI, if not for every literate citizen of the world.

    Read about OpenAI’s plans regarding AGI here.

  • The Obsolescence Problem

    Planned obsolescence had almost started sounding like a conspiracy theory – a catch-all term for the nefarious schemes of the big bad industrialists out there, used by exasperated consumers when a product unexpectedly stopped being of use.

    But it may not all be in our head, as a piece by Izzie Ramirez for Vox suggests. Ramirez writes: “people are conditioned to buy the new thing and to keep replacing it. Companies, in turn, amp up production accordingly. It’s less so that objects are intended to break — functional planned obsolescence, if you will — but rather that consumer mindsets are oriented around finding the better object. But “better” doesn’t always mean long-lasting when companies are incentivized to produce faster and faster and faster.” 

    Further complicating the problem: 

    “Social media helps accelerate the trend cycle even further. Consumers are buying five times more clothing than they did back in the 1980s. In order to produce goods that fast, both the quality of the item and the quality of life for workers have to take a hit. This is happening alongside a decrease of prices for the consumer (not rooted in reality!) to encourage more trend-oriented shopping and haul buying.” 

    While Ramirez brings up a lot of issues related to the problem (such as companies like Apple opposing the right to repair), the her argument seems to be focussed on design thinking in contemporary culture:

    “Design has shifted more toward manufacturability and appearance than functionality, when it should be a balance of all three. Arguably, it’s nearly impossible for corporations to avoid participating in the trend cycle as long as consumers have an appetite for more — whether it’s a predilection for cooler clothing or whatever new incremental yet buzzy technology just came out. At the same time, the blame does not lie on consumers’ shoulders; corporations are responsible for creating and stoking the “new and more is better” culture we have today.”

    Read the full article here.