1. The Collapse of the Left As the world holds...

Populism and Its Hidden Allies

By sebastian olma, February 14, 2017

1. The Collapse of the Left As the world holds its breath in the hope of surviving the first weeks and months of the Trump presidency, it is high time to start a political debate that is on par with the gravity of our current debacle. The American political system has been handed to an [...]

Digital Taylorism: Labour between Passion & Serendipity

By sebastian olma, December 23, 2016

(this is an excerpt from my new book written with the generous support of the INC) Attack of the Big Yawn In his fascinating historical study of the rise of happiness to the highly valued commodity it has become in our time, the British sociologist William Davies offers a brief yet intriguing meditation on the [...]

A fair city: voorbij de heilige drie-eenheid van innovatie

By sebastian olma, April 11, 2016

Een toekomstbeeld: Europe by People Er hangt op het ogenblik in Amsterdam een beetje toekomst in de lucht. Van januari tot juni is onze stad gastheer voor de evenementen rond het Nederlandse voorzitterschap van de EU. Terwijl het Marineterrein, de nieuwste creatieve locatie van Amsterdam, profijt hoopt te trekken van zijn rol als gastheer van [...]

In the Name of Coworking: How Digital Taylorism is Killing Serendipity

By sebastian olma, November 25, 2014

The Travels and Aberrations of Serendipity When I started to think about the book to which this blog serves as a preliminary publishing vehicle and testing ground for ideas, I thought I could use the notion of serendipity as a conceptual counterweight to the vacuous notion of creativity as it is currently used in policy [...]

Never Mind the Sharing Economy: Here’s Platform Capitalism

By sebastian olma, October 16, 2014

A Backlash Against Sharing? Lately, the so-called “sharing economy” has been all over the news. Under flashy headlines such as “Sharing is the New Owning” it is heralded as the solution to the current financial crisis, the path toward a more sustainable economy or even the harbinger of a post-capitalist society. And while the “sharing [...]

Hewison’s “Cultural Capital”

By sebastian olma, October 3, 2014

Where have all the Critics gone? Since their inception in the late 1990s by Tony Blair’s New Labour government, creative industries policies have spread throughout the continent. The creative industries approach is increasingly becoming a mainstream tool for policy makers at all levels, from the funding schemes of the European Union and the various national [...]

Rethinking Social Innovation between Invention and Imitation

By sebastian olma, August 18, 2014

Social Innovation: In Search of a Definition ‘Social innovation’ is a bit of a puzzle. As one of the currently fashionable policy ‘trends’, it emerged out of the conviction that the great challenges our societies are facing today require new methods and strategies. Over the course of the last decade, the field of practices that [...]

Erich Honecker & the Internet of Things. A Comment on Jeremy Rifkin’s “The Zero Marginal Cost Society”

By sebastian olma, July 18, 2014

“The capitalist era is passing… not quickly but inevitably.” Thus reads the opening sentence of Jeremy Rifkin’s new book The Zero Marginal Cost Society. It’s not, indeed, a blockbuster title but that doesn’t mean that this would be one of Rifkin’s minor books. In fact, what the American Business School Academic and head of [...]

Of Thumbs and Heads: A Comment on Michel Serres’ “Petite Poucette”

By sebastian olma, July 12, 2014

Michel Serres’ Petite Poucette, is a strange little book. Written as a “love letter to the networked generation,” it celebrates the digital savviness of his grand children and their peers. Petit Poucette is the fairly tale character known in the English speaking world as little Tom Thumb. The title is thus a pun on the [...]

What Design Can Do – A Report from Weimar

By sebastian olma, July 4, 2014

Last weekend, I went to the Digital Bauhaus Summit in Weimar, organized by Berlin’s Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, a network of writers, designers and consultants who over the years have significantly shaped the discussion on digital culture, creative industries and design in Germany. The purpose of the summit was to explore contemporary theory and practice [...]

A Blog by Sebastian Olma