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Scope

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[Image source: extract from IUBMB-Sigma-Nicholson Metabolic Pathways Chart]

That’s what the financial system is like to me, for us. If you’re close enough to money to really feel the effects of the way the credit system is changing, if you’re close enough to make out how it’s affecting human lives, you can’t see the edges. It’s beyond your scale. But if you’re at the level of macroeconomics, to see the whole way across it, you miss what’s actually going on, at a human level. The scale difference is just too huge.

I want a Here & There map for the financial system.

In a society changing so far beyond human comprehension, but with such human effects, at such complexity and scale, with the environment, and with banking, and with the social effects of all kinds, we need macroscopes to see where we are.

And I think those of us in this room, people who are native to the Web, there are people here who are great at really personal understandings of the huge amounts of inhuman data the Web provides, and so creating macroscopes is something we can offer culture.

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June 25, 2009

Scope opened reboot11 in Copenhagen (themed 'action'), June 2009, by introducing Thackara's concept of the macroscope, asking how society should spend 100 million hours, and inspiring participation.

There is a video available.
Read from the beginning.