Gorbachev’s perspective: look for the causes of the present crisis not in Iraq, but in the situation that has developed in the US itself. “There would be no change in politics unless the US starts to contemplate its own model of economical and social development and unless it makes an effort to look at the world with more realism. In other words, what is needed is a profound perestrojka of the US itself.” via XMCA

US Senator Robert Byrd’s important, largely unreported floor speech: “Reckless Administration May Reap Disastrous Consequences“

McKenzie Wark (author of The Hacker Manifesto) has an interesting review of Bruce Sterling’s futuristic essay collection “Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years” out on Nettime. In the review Wark writes: “A key insight [for understanding the future] is to follow the language, not the money. The consensus hallucination of stock valuations, as many learned rather bitterly, only gives you a homogenized average of emergent delusions. Shifts in language, on the other hand, reveal a virtual space, where a heterogeneous cluster of possibilities may fester or grow.”

Lisa Zeidner, the author of Layover looks at William Gibson’s latest novel in today’s NYT Book Review. She writes: “Pattern Recognition is almost nose-thumbingly conventional in design. Despite the requisite tech toys, it’s set squarely in the present. But then the dates of Gibson-action have been creeping steadily backward. Predicting the future, Gibson has always maintained, is mostly a matter of managing not to blink as you witness the present.” Also, check out Gibson’s new blog.

Venture capitalists are hurting and having worked for one, personally I don’t feel particular sympathy toward the industry as long as it disregards the idea of “use value” and continues to operate on pure greed. When I say greediness is bad I don’t mean you should give up your allowance or start acting like David in Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good. What I mean is that a focus purely on the market value (exchange value) of the firm and a disregard for the effects of its products on people’s quality of life is practically and morally unsustainable. Recently some venture capitalists have started to look into debt financing instead of equity financing. Writes Mike on Techdirt: having debt makes you much more focused on succeeding, since you have the pressure to make the interest payments. It really helps to focus and motivate you. For a while now I’d been wondering why companies always look to raise venture capital instead of taking on loans. The obvious answer is that a capital investment doesn’t need to be paid back like a loan. Exchange-value focus seems built into the very structure of equity financing. I wonder if other forms of financing might direct the focus towards a more balanced approach? Here’s a Red Herring article on the VC turn to debt financing.