The 007s — Week 15

Assimilating concepts here, a few of the many that intrigued me over the past two weeks. Currently (struggling to) read: Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead

• Blue Ocean Strategy: In their classic book, Blue Ocean Strategy, Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne coined the terms ’red ocean’ and ‘blue ocean’ to describe the market universe. Red Oceans are all the industries in existence today — the known market space. In red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted. Blue Oceans in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today — the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. A blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential to be found in unexplored market space. A blue ocean is vast, deep, and powerful in terms of profitable growth.

• Protopia: Founder of the online magazine Wired, Kevin Kelly — coined the term ‘protopia’. Its defined as a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. “Protopia” is also defined as the opposite of a “Dystopia”. In Dystopia, people are stuck in some kind of recurring pattern of suffering (like George Orwell’s 1984). A Protopian society, then, is one where people are free from such gridlocks and can thus work actively to improve life. It’s a more carefully stated form of a dream of societal transformation: It doesn’t say that “everything will be good for everyone”; it focuses not on the state-of-things-at-a-given-moment, but on the possibility — the shared capacity — to move in mutually desirable directions.

Image Source: Medium

• Anthropocentrism: Anthropocentrism, in its original connotation in environmental ethics, is the belief that value is human-centred and that all other beings are means to human ends. Although in its most relevant philosophical form it is the ethical belief that humans alone possess intrinsic value. From an anthropocentric position, humans possess direct moral standing because they are ends in and of themselves; other things (individual living beings, systems) are means to human ends. In one sense, all ethics are anthropocentric, for arguably humans alone possess the cognitive ability to formulate and recognize moral value.

Image Source: Word Press

• Debt-Trap Diplomacy: Debt-trap diplomacy is a type of diplomacy based on debt carried out in the bilateral relations between countries. It is an international financial relationship where a creditor country or institution extends debt to a borrowing nation partially, or solely, to increase the lender's political leverage. The creditor country is said to extend excessive credit to a debtor country with the intention of extracting economic or political concessions when the debtor country becomes unable to meet its repayment obligations. The conditions of the loans are often not publicized. The borrowed money commonly pays for contractors and materials sourced from the creditor country. The term was coined by Indian academic Brahma Chellaney to describe how the Chinese Government leverages the debt burden of smaller countries for geopolitical ends.

• Internet of Things: The internet of things, or IoT, is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. A ‘thing’ in the internet of things can be a person with a heart monitor implant or an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) address and is able to transfer data over a network. An IoT ecosystem consists of web-enabled smart devices that use embedded systems, such as processors, sensors and communication hardware, to collect, send and act on data they acquire from their environments. The devices do most of the work without human intervention, although people can interact with the devices — for instance, to set them up, give them instructions or access the data.

• Author Surrogate: An author surrogate is a character within fiction that acts as a proxy for the author within a novel, and writers have been known to create surrogates of themselves from as early as David Hume in 1779. It has been used strategically for comedic effects (a bit like Stan Lee’s cameos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) or to make ones work a bit meta by design. Designing characters can be a daunting task at first and — consciously or not — one may draw the foundations of a protagonist (or antagonist) from oneself. Examples using this literary technique: Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird is a surrogate for Harper Lee.

Image Source: Medium

• Gorging Gene Theory: The theory explains that our hunter-gatherer forebears opportunistically bloated themselves on sugars or fats, which is in some way causal to obesity being so prevalent. Although it’s been a long time since humans stalked migrating bison, or dug for edible roots in the woods, their DNA still hasn’t forgotten when food was scarce. During most of human history, food was generally in short supply. Humans did not have the means to preserve or store much of it, so they were always on the move to find our next meal. Imagine the excitement of our “hunter-gatherer” ancestors when presented with a greasy slab of freshly cooked bison meat, or upon discovering a tree full of ripe fruit. Such a bounty of food was rare, and our survival instincts told us to gorge while we could. Over thousands of years, these eating patterns became imprinted in our DNA. These tendencies seem to be contributing to our weight problems today, as food is relatively cheap and abundant in most places.