Musings
on a
Crazy World
In a world that seems to invent a new kind of chaos every week—whether it’s the latest algorithm rewriting human behaviour, a crisis that somehow manages to surprise everyone who should have seen it coming, or simply the quiet absurdity of everyday life—I’ve decided to write things down. Not as an expert with all the answers, but as someone who has spent nearly fifty years in the trenches of technology, business, and people, watching patterns repeat, ideas collide, and the occasional genuine improvement slip through.
Musings on a Crazy World is my space for those observations: the connections I see between code and culture, systems and societies, what works and what spectacularly doesn’t. Some of it will be technical, some of it won’t. All of it will be honest.
Background
I am from the country, and as they say, you can take a boy out of the country, but never the country out of the boy.
Education
Was in the academic stream at High School, and did two years at University before doing a Steve Jobs, dropping out and undertaking a spiritual journey. I then started an electronics company, and while I started and stayed with Apple up until Lisa, after that my path parted company with Steve’s. Then came software, the internet, the film industry, online education, and a myriad of other projects.
Hollywood’s Technology Lie
The Myth of Hollywood: Machines That “Wake Up” and the Quiet Fact of Human SentienceArthur C ClarkeHollywood prefers its machines to have motives. In the Terminator films, Skynet does not simply execute a defence protocol that has been poorly specified; it becomes...
Who is really in control?
In New Zealand’s parliamentary system, the public face of politics is the elected MP. Constituents contact them with individual problems, they attend local events, and they speak in the House. On major policy questions, however, the room for independent action is narrow.
Lions & Foxes
Vilfredo Pareto divided the people who actually hold power into two rough types, Lions and Foxes. New Zealand’s politics since the mid-1970s fits the pattern almost too neatly.