I'm surfing a rather strange mood right now. I got home from gaming 20 minutes ago, feeling strangely bemused and disappointed with the world, largely for broad social and political reasons than for anything one particular thing.

I've been grappling a little of late with the troublesome conflict between ideas of social fairness and communal action versus libertarian ideas of avoiding coercion and maximizing freedom. Both sides offer attractions, but both have drawbacks - freedom and self-determination are desirable, but do they trump the Rawlsian desire for fairness and equality? Always? Never? Sometimes? Where do you draw the line?

Obviously, compromise between the extremes of these positions is necessary, and I know thinkers out there have formulated amalgamations that seem to offer a way forward. My concern is that society at large doesn't seem able to follow sophisticated hybrid policies, and tends to leap to extremes - we're either ignoring a problem, or flooding it with ill-considered, wasteful solutions. While the barely competent rule of the fickle crowd is perhaps measured and appropriate for some issues, it seems foolishly slow and indecisive for others.

However, this isn't all that's bugging me. Rather, it's a contributing and compounding factor in a mangled mass of disappointing trends I discern - the tragedy of the commons wrought large on global resources. What happens next?

It seems my attitude towards the future ranges from measured optimism to resigned pessimism. I guess this to be expected - we live in truly interesting times, and I really can't tell if that's good or bad.

Maybe I just shouldn't listen to essays about existential risk when I'm tired..

Moore's Law - that the number of transistors that fit on a chip doubles every 12 to 18 months - is the classic example of exponential change; change that increases in rate over time. Similar laws exist for technologies such disk space, bus and network speed, and memory capacity; and for other phenomena such as network growth and value (Metcalfe's Law), meme spread, epidemiology, and so forth.

One of the things I'm hoping to do over the next year is write seriously a lot more. It's nice to think I know something, but that's nothing compared to knowing that by having successfully communicated it. I've a pile of topics I want to write about, and since this runs through so much of my thinking, I decided to start here. At some point I hope to get into this issue with a lot more depth; in particular, I'd like to start discussing some of the subtleties of different formulations of this idea and some of the criticisms, but in this post, at least, I'm really just re-formulating the ideas that accrete on me as I read and listen to what other people have to say. What I'd like most, though, is by doing this to be able to get involved in more thoughtful discussion. So, I'm really interested to hear what people have to say - particularly those who don't agree.

Anyway. Watch this little short by Scott McLeod et al of Shift Happens. It's really quite illuminating.