Sorting through notes on blank business cards, getting things back together again

Not sure when/where, but a note from a talk by Karl Shroeder where he said something like: There are no disruptive technologies, only disruptive business plans.

A nonabstract continuation of reality

The cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality.
...
From this point of view, what can make bits have meaning is that their patterns have been hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren't really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a nonabstract continuation of reality.

Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Meanwhile, on the other side of the firewall...

Younger Chinese friends of mine regard the firewall as they would an officious lifeguard at a swimming pool—an occasional, largely irrelevant, intrusion.

To get around it, Tang detours through a proxy server—a digital way station overseas that connects a user with a blocked Web site. He watches television exclusively online, because he doesn’t have a TV in his room. Tang also receives foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad. (According to the Institute of International Education, the number of Chinese students in the United States—some sixty-seven thousand—has grown by nearly two-thirds in the past decade.) He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

“Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

The New Yorker. Angry Youth - The new generation’s neocon nationalists [in China].