Whales

We’re teaching our sons about whales.

Their habits and habitats, their evolutionary history, their cultural and economic relevance, the many stories told about them.

An adult male sperm whale has washed up, dead, on a beach on the Norfolk coast, and we’re following the clean-up effort on TV and the radio and the internet. People are worried that the build up of gas inside the decomposing whale carcass may cause it to explode. Onlookers have been moved back to a safe distance.

Our sons are gripped by the unfolding drama. Continue reading “What We’re Teaching Our Sons #603: Whales & #189: Geology” →

The Network is Not the Territory

In business, as in war, the important thing is not how much geography we hold, but the supply lines we control. How we get food, fuel, people, goods from one point to another.

The only map that matters is the one that describes the routes we own. Everything in between – the mountains, the deserts, the forest, the places where people live – is dead space.

From the point of view of the one billion shipping containers circling the globe, the world is both one-dimensional and eternally present. The future is currently stacked eighteen thousand deep on 1,300-foot-long ships, each one designed to cover vast distances as slowly as possible – because with a theoretically endless number of ships at sea, the time it takes any one of them to get from one port to another becomes irrelevant.

Time is cheap.

The thing we’re interested in is cadence. Continue reading “Against The Nostalgia of Objects: Extracts from A Manifesto for The Container Shipping Industry” →