Noumenal, Inc.
Chairman Partner
Folioworks
Epigrams, inc.
CityWare: Information Technology Planning and Urban Planning (Acrobat PDF only), a riff on why planning large-scale enterprise IT is really a 4,000 year-old intellectual discipline.
Visceral Technologies, an argument about the inevitability of the marriage of meat and silicon.
Knowledge Management: An Introduction (Acrobat PDF only), a shortened version of which appeared in Long-Range Planning, Volume 30, Number 3.
Cities of Text: Some Notes On Some Notes on Intranets, Knowledge Management And Urban Planning
Knowledge Centers & Flexibility: How People Think About What They Know (Acrobat PDF only)
The Information Triad: OLTP, DSS and Collaborative Computing (Acrobat PDF only)
The Politics of Data Warehousing
Technology and Policy In Decision Support Systems
The Responsible Preparation of Electronic Literary Texts
Controlling Dissemination Mechanisms: The Unstamped Press and the 'Net and Electronic Media, Dissemination and Suppression, a related talk given at an NYU summer hypertext program (Powerpoint, 65 KB).
Rhetoric, Epistemology and the 'Net: The Ethics Of Web Publishing (a UNESCO document selection) and Wanton Knowledge: The Canon and the 'Net, two avenues into the same argument: the Web is our savior and our nemesis. See also: CAVEAT: A Proposal for a Web-Wide Page Registration and Rating System, which attempts to ameliorate this situation.
Dissemination, Indoctrination, Analytics: The School and the 'Net
The Firm And The Guild: A Perspective On The Future Of Knowledge Work And Information Technology originally submitted to Ethicomp '95
Data Legibility in Decision Support Schema, (Acrobat PDF only), an updated version of the original published version (1994), where star schema first appeared in the popular tech press (originally published in DBMS Magazine)
Two-Tiered Enterprise DSS Architectures, a revised version of my earlier Building the Data Mart, the founding document of data marting, and my most grievous sin (originally published in DBMS Magazine)
Leading Edge Retail (originally published in DBMS Magazine)
Data Warehousing: Oracle 7.1 Investigated (originally published in Oracle Technical Journal)
Retailing and the Infobahn: Predictions and Advisories
Zero Gravity Training, CIO, July 1994
Vladimir Illich Ulyanov (Lenin) in Psychoanalytic History (1989).
Arnold and Tylor: The Codification and Appropriation of Culture. in Culture and Education in Victorian England. ed. Scott and Fletcher. Associated Universities Press, 1990.
Entries on Jerzy Kosinski and Robert Coover in Dictionary of American Literary Characters. ed. Franklin and Hague. Facts on File: 1989.
Entry on George Moore in Dictionary of Literary Biography [Volume 57: Victorian Prose Writers after 1870]. ed. Thesing. Bruccoli-Clark, 1988. Co-authored.
Under the Sign of Use: Humanism and Deconstruction.; delivered at the Critical Theory session of the College English Association National Conference, 1987.
If it is true -- as Tolstoy says it is -- that one can only understand The State after one has been in prison, then it must also be true that one can only understand The Market after one has participated in the spectacle of greed called stock manipulation, and been caught at it.
One hopes Kenneth Lay will acquire the wisdom of Tolstoy, though. Responsibility after all is a uniquely human thing. We cannot ever ask institutions made of paper and sustained through force of law to be responsible for themselves; they cannot be. But the men and women who run those institutions can be responsible, and must be.
Beasley Gervais, from Ethics and Interest (forthcoming)
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
I envy therefore I am. To define oneself by reference to others is to perceive oneself as other. And the other is always object. Thus life is measured in degrees of humiliation. The more you choose your own humiliation, the more you 'live' - the more you live the orderly life of things. Here is the cunning of reification, the means whereby it passes undetected, like arsenic in the jam.
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
Continuing to Live Continuing to live -- that is, repeat A habit formed to get necessaries -- Is nearly always losing, or going without. It varies.
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise -- Ah, if the game were poker, yes, You might discard them, draw a full house! But it's chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist.
And what's the profit? Only that, in time, We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home. But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins, Just what it was, is hardly satisfying, Since it applied only to one man once, And that one dying.
Philip Larkin