The Perfect Circle

Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.

Twitter recently announced that it will be able to put a virtual fence around content and ideas that may be deemed unsuitable or offensive to users in a specific country.

Do platforms such as Twitter have a responsibility towards the nature of content? I don’t think so. I think most reasonable people would agree that this is a grand expectation. Moreover, not only are people and ideas self organizing, they are also self regulating.

Twitter is a driver of global conversation and by taking on the responsibility of moderating an overwhelming sea of international complexities, it is confusing it’s role as the messenger.

The sheer scale of this operation will be massive and it will be interesting to see how Twitter manages to walk the line globally.

Bottom line: Virtual fences hurt free speech and global conversation. Localized censorship will present itself as an ongoing headache to Twitter and is largely pointless in an increasingly open, free world.

#LetTheTweetsFlow

People told stories, now we’re living in them.

We can now fly across continents, work better and faster, and have a much better understanding of our place in the universe.

Visionaries - people who are not afraid to redefine reality. They lead, question and drive progress for the rest of us. Sometimes though, this happens at the cost of failure, ridicule or exile; in rare cases even their own sanity and lives.

I’m not going to talk about the importance of trying different or how we should continuously make mistakes and learn from them. And while it is sincere, this is definitely not a sermon on dreaming big and working hard to bring it to life either. All I want to ask is this:

How do you know you’re not flying too close to the Sun?

I am fascinated by circles and make no secret of it. Circles to me represent continuity in nature, our imperfection as a species, Plato’s realm of ideas and the vast infinity of the universe - among many other things!

If this sounds a wee bit intense, allow me to explain why I am obsessed with the shape:  

Firstly, depending on your definition of ‘perfection’, a perfect circle may or may not exist to you. I use the word in its most absolute sense here. 

Essentially, there are two broad ways to think about circles:

• From outside: a circle is a polygon with an infinite number of sides
• From inside: a circle is a set of points which are all equidistant from the centre

A circle can also be thought of as a shape that holds an infinite number of line segments running from the centre to the circumference. Circles in other words, can ‘hold’ infinity. There is a catch to this however, for a circle of any given size - it is possible to conceive a bigger circle. Hence infinity still eludes us. This drove Galileo nuts!

The Law of Imperfection:

It is a physical impossibility to build an absolutely perfect circle. Sure, we can define a perfect circle mathematically as x^2+y^2 = r^2 

However, even if you construct a circle on a microscopic level, if you continue zooming in, the circumference will eventually break down.

So, why does this matter?

A circle is merely a symbol denoting what we understand and agree upon to be true - in other words, we know what a perfect circle would look like…but we’re still not there yet. We are merely an imperfect species bringing our notions and ideas into reality. 

All circles have an error in their radius. 

Perfect circles only exist in the mind.

• Only write enough to make your point.