About
I am an independent strategist, inventor, entrepreneur, writer, policy analyst, commentator, and consultant with a particular interest in how technologies shape organizations, markets, politics and cultural identify. My undergraduate education was in philosophy and anthropology (structuralism) and doctorate was in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. My professional experience spans business, government and academia and in recent years has focused on the influence of the “new sciences” - complexity sciences, self-organizing systems, neurosciences and evolutionary anthropology, and in technology, the blending of digital and genetic technologies.
Big Opinion 1: We are on the cusp of attaining a rigorous and scientific understanding of how people think, feel, act, speak, and organize; the social sciences will finally become real sciences. The findings of genomics, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology are being rendered into variety of biological, psychological and social technologies that will soon re-define and reframe what it means to be human.
Big Opinion 2: Technology is not something that we are free to “choose” how we use, but rather something we co-evolve with; our futures are inseparable from the technologies in which they are imbedded. We have truly entered the Epoch of the Anthropocene, that the geologic epoch following the Holocene Epoch that is principally shaped by human conduct. We have become our own gods and there is no going back
Big Opinion 3: Technologies - hardware - software - biological - nano - will become the principle vehicle by which transformational public and corporate policies are framed and introduced.
Basic Science and Technologies: The gap between basic research and commercial product is contracting. The progress of basic research in the new sciences so rapid and its implications so pervasive, that it will bear more immediately and directly on business today. In this regard, the following research areas warrant special consideration:
Social networks: roles, social protocols, dynamic binding, reciprocity, trust, reputation, context, identity, social branding
Self-organizing grammars: new vocabulary formation, verb specification, context marking
Social linguistics: Pidgins, creoles, pragmatics, metaphor, and institutional facts, games
Evolutionary Psychology- Sociology: social exchange algorithms, identity formation
Evolutionary Biology- Genomics: altruistic reciprocity, handicap principle, commitment contracts, evolutionary stable strategies, evolutionary game theory, multi-agents simulations, nurture-nature interaction
Neuo-science: neuro-trasmitters (oxytocin, seratonin); role of social emotions, roles, identity, trust and
social exchange mechanisms and genes
Technologies: A new kind of technology is coming - smaller, faster, sensate, smart and self-organizing, and expendable. It represents a fundamental shift in thinking about how to control complex processes and achieve fitness under diverse conditions;
Motes: “Smart Dust”
Self-organizing sensor and wi-fi networks
Self- Assembly Nano-Tech
Social Software
Genetic algorithms
Self-organizing grammars
Multi-agent simulations
Wi-Fi
Organizational, Market, and Regulatory Designs, Policies and Practices: Science will play a greater role in all aspects of organizational, market and regulatory policies and practices. A confluence of disciplines and technologies will focus on highly distributed, networked organizations and the use of tags and meta-data for creating self-enforcing recommender and referral networks, displacing traditional marketing, branding, and distribution channels. Rigorous conventions will emerge for self-enforcing forms of self-organization, and post-market mechanisms for investment, social branding and resource creation and allocation.
Networked and edge organizations
Trust Mechanisms and metrics
Self-enforcing social contracts
Network leadership roles and metrics
Open production networks
The New Commons
Self-Synchronization
Recent Books by John Henry Clippinger
The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise:
editor; Jossey Bass, 1999
Relevant Recent Articles With David Bollier, The Renaissance of the Commons, (MIT Press)