Global Culture

Half-drunk with a bottle of Casillero del Diablo, sitting on the floor in the middle of Plaza Mayor, Madrid, having had a great lunch at Museo Del Jamon, and enjoying a spontaneus “Concierto de Aranjuez” interpreted by an anonymous street musician, it felt very close to the most perfect vacation moment I’d ever had. [...]

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Hyper-connected to the rest of the world through an ample offering of long-haul flights, low crime rates, great education and health system, fair balance of sunny and warm days, plenty of ways to stay informed, availability of drinks after hours, good public transit, lots of green areas and a will to keep them green. [...]

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hyper as in linked, and local as in location
In a fascinating dispatch from the future, author Bruce Sterling brings us the ultimate global citizen: Harvey Feldspar, who as a modern Phileas Fogg describes his encounter with world cultures with the only difference that he does it from the year 2017.

If there is a lesson [...]

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I used to live two parallel lives: working as a technologist on a digital agency by day and writing for this blog by night. For more than a year I managed to keep them separate, but blogging was an exercise of introspection and through it I learned of many things that I was [...]

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Let’s start with a powerful assumption: a panel of experts has used the vast resources of the web to determine who is the utmost global citizen. To keep thinks colorful, we shall call him Phileas Fogg. A British citizen with known addresses in London, San Francisco, Manhattan, Dublin, Tokyo & Istanbul; manages [...]

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Although the Face of Tomorrow project seems to have come to a halt after 2004, the idea that cities assimilate their migrants and eventually their inhabitants mix giving place to new generations of cosmopolitan beings with ancestors from all over the globe is still a powerful one.
The large metropolises of the world are magnets for [...]

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Yes, I know it is zeitgeist. But this one deserves the special denomination. Stan Stalnaker and team have just published their 2007 Zeitgeist Ranking, a look at the top cities around the world influencing global culture. While Stan’s ranking is admittedly not scientific, it is a refreshing perspective, possibly a bit on [...]

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