The Golden Age of Bullshit isn’t over, but there are reasons to be cheerful
We might be living through The Golden Age of Bullshit, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be positive, argues Al Crawford.
In 1649, King Charles the First was executed for being a bit of a dick. Lopping off his bonce was a big call. Back then, England was even more invested in crown-wearing castle owners than it is today.
No wonder contemporary commentators referred to it as a ‘world turn’d upside down.’ This wasn’t just unfamiliar territory. This was the end of the established order.
There was an explosion of radical thinking – from the excellently named Levellers, Diggers, Shakers and Ranters – on how things should play out.
“We’re not laying pipe, here” declares Dead Poets Society’s John Keating as he inspires his students to wage war on analysing poetry. Much like need to resist beliefs that brands can be understood by quant alone. Thanks Al, marvellous stuff.
Bravo!!! Wonderful read.
“the digital supply chain is more Augean stable than transparent marketplace” – Crawford gold!
Love the way you write Al… Some cracking lines in there and as usual, you make a heap of sense.
Like it Al.
Big data has to be the largest cesspit of non-accountable wastage.
I’d much rather have a smaller, robust, representative data set than an almighty data dump of a vector of the real world that you sticky-tape to another data dump, then hope for a correlation to appear and then assume causality because the data was tortured into revealing a correlation, meaningful or not.