Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Peter Merholz’s rant is bold, uncomfortable and dogmatic, as all rants should be. I’d like to make a more reasoned case for the offense.

I’m worried about persuasion design. Although it’s a powerful and topical approach, I also believe it has the potential to severely damage our industry.

From mySociety: “Ministers are about to conceal MPs’ expenses, even though the public has just paid £1m to get them all ready for publication, and even though the tax man expects citizens to do what MPs don’t have to.” My letter to my MP on the topic: Dear David Lepper, I write to you today [...]

Our tiny brains are reaching social saturation point. Any heavy email receiver, Twitter user or RSS subscriber will tell you that there comes a point whereby the flow of inbound information is more than we can handle. The result is a flood which can often only be stemmed by giving up and hitting that reset [...]

Until recently, I equated politics with duty: something that I must participate in, but that was never elevated above a choice between deeply unsatisfactory options. I find most politics ideologically empty, and it is almost a truism to say that we know very little about how President Obama will govern. However, I do believe that [...]