Kate Chapman, geographer and technologist, joins us to discuss Hugh Howey’s Wool. We discuss failures of governance, the perils of IT supremacy, the difficult ethics of constrained environments, and competitive goating.

Kate shares her background building digital public infrastructure (Common Space, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Open Supply Hub) and currently providing fractional CTO work and AI enablement. We discuss how Wool serves as a cautionary tale about bad governance, the intersection of information control and governance, and what happens when humans can’t push boundaries or explore frontiers.

Show notes:

• Wool by Hugh Howey - Originally published as five novellas, later compiled as the Wool Omnibus
• “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson - Short story about the dangers of blindly following tradition
• How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier - Classic book on cartographic manipulation
• Nonviolent Communication - Framework for conflict resolution
• Terrible, Thanks for Asking (now Thanks for Asking) - Kate’s favorite podcast
• The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office” - Fantastic analysis of how The Office portrays social dynamics
• Slavoj Žižek’s red ink joke:
  • “In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing unavailable is red ink.””