Jamais Cascio's blog

(tap tap... this thing on? There's dust and cobwebs all over the place.)

What happens if global efforts to set and abide by strong carbon emissions cuts fail?

The standard answer to a question like this is that "we all suffer." While that's probably true, it misses the point -- we may all suffer, but we don't all suffer equally. Some nations will be hit harder by storms or droughts than others; some nations will have the resources and technologies to adapt better than others. And therein lies the potential for what may end up as a nasty tool of international competition.

The talk I gave at the New York Future Salon is now available!

Quick question: where does this URL go to?

http://tinyurl.com/ya8p9vg

How about this one?

http://bit.ly/DkXOW

Would you have guessed that the first goes to a Computerworld article about business-appropriate avatars, and the second goes to the previous post on Open the Future?

New Fast Company essay is now up: Head in the Clouds looks at cloud computing in light of Amazon's nuking of purchased Kindle copies of 1984 and Animal Farm.:

Okay, managed to put together a collection of the scenes I'm in from the July 14 "That's Impossible" episode.

The emergence of Twitter as a heroic enabling technology for the pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran this past week has been a thrilling reminder of the power of distributed communication tools. I'm impressed at how useful this simple application has been shown to be, and at the clever hacks the Iran-based commentators have employed to stay online. As so many tech pundits have said, this has been a golden moment for social networking technologies.

And, I have to admit, it's scared the hell out of me.