AntiAmba

A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, by Deleuze and Guattary was not published this year, hence, it would never appear in any best book of the year list. A challenging read. Therese Krumbholz, the dumb housekeeper of Elias Canetti Nobel prize award wining novel, Auto-da-Fé, needed to read twice or three times the same page of Peter Kien's infinite book collection to understand the meaning of it. In this case you do not need to repeat the reading. Most of times you will understand the reading if you have a life story that reveals your experience across the authors narrative style and how it connects to the concepts they wrote. It is a book that followed my world drifts, my inner reflections. That exposes your ignorance, that lets I see right through you. More than the technical interpretation , makes you ignore listening to the order, exposes how ridiculous you are when you already lost your privacy, how you lost your reasoning, when the state, the machine, contr...

Travelling in economy class in any kind of airline can be a very rewarding experience. The closeness, boundary-less space shared with the passenger siting next to you, can be considered an invasion of your privacy, unless your travelling partner is a woman an she is interested in embracing into journey of exposing the soul to a stranger. Have you imaged what is to be laid back, relaxed, looking to her eyes, like you were with your date in a bed, ready to start sexual intercourse and you listen without paying attention, about her dreams and experiences? And how frustrated it becomes once she does not give you a sign and you can't put the arm rest up and enter into her space? We were 3 at a table. I noticed her feet are beautiful. She scrubs the feet gently under the iron table, as we seat at a restaurant near a swimming pool. - When the divorce was over, I wanted to move out of Berlin, she told. - I was sick of the routine, to go to my fathers a...

I wake up. I look at the window trying to figure it dawn is close or I need to wait. Everything is dark. Again, waiting to feel the pulse of the city. I have nothing to do. It's 04:18 as I glanced to the phone glass. I am defined on not finding a center that is hidden in my mind as I fell multiple exogenous forces around an idea, like radiating circles that expand in my brain with an hidden order. I jump to one place to the other, to one principle to the next one. I cannot find answers to what is right or what is wrong. Sense just moves away and drains my energy. Contrary of complex systems, there is no natural equilibrium. I have been told I put very hard to myself lately.

When you arrive to Cape Town's airport domestic terminal, there are a series of billboards of an investment bank that is promoting safe and responsible asset portfolio management. Most of the pictures are about people coming from different backgrounds and professions, sweating, exhausting and bleeding to achieve some conform or life status. One of the billboards' includes a picture of a young male working alone in an empty office. All the city is sleeping. The  person is there finishing some kind of work on top of a deadline. I worked many times like the man in the picture. A recurring repetitive pattern in the knowledge era we live. Music is that piece of art that I like to hear time and time again, contrary to books or movies, that I shelve, once I read or watch it. I particular enjoy song versions. During the 80's, the music industry created a new revenue source, the 12" extended play mixes. In the beginning, those versions were merely black vinyl fillers, but...

There a moment in time I return to my south hemisphere home base after the annual leave period. The arrival always leaves me the impression that I do not belong here, but I live here. On arrival, I needed to get a name clearance statement from the police for a visa application purposes. In Cape Town downtown, there is a central police station, close to Truth Cafe, an avant-garde place where I spend some during weekends reading the newspapers. Cape Town at the city center is a maze full of high and low buildings. During winter season, it offers an amazing continuum change in light brightness as you walk on the street. Light change becomes bolder close to dusk. When walking around the blocks, some streets can be exposed to sun light, corners stand in the shadow, while others transition from dark to light grey. For the ones that live in downtown, as I lived for two months on my arrival to Mother City, it becomes part of your life, walking around the maze of the light spectrum, when you ...

"Try to love your siblings, your acquaintances actively and tirelessly. As you achieve progress in loving the others, you will convince yourself about God 's existence and the immortality of God's soul. If you self sacrifice to love who surrounds you, you will believe in it without any kind of doubt and no doubt will enter in your soul." Fiódor Dostoievki - The Brothers Karamazov My father died some years ago. I do not remember how many years ago he passed away. I also do not keep in mind what was the exact date when he died. I have a record of his death certificate, but I did not open it or look at it ever since. I just remember he died around August 15th because in Portugal it is celebrated the assumption of Mary. My father did not love me. I was just a biologic product that resulted from sex intercourse with my mother. He never supported me with money - he had the responsibility to pay a pension as a result of the divorce, but he was clever enough...

This entry goes back in time. On June 2014, I was at Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe in London to present my work on the theme of cybernetics, called Viable System Model meets Enterprise Architecture . During the preparation of the presentation, I moved to a co-work location in Leça da Palmeira, Portugal, to isolate my self from bias an influence. During my stay at the co-work lab, which I sat side by side to a digital graphical designer, a kind of digital artist, I talked with one resident about the concepts of cybernetics. During the conversation, I was exposed to the concept of the rhizome, created by two French philosophers, Deleuze and Guattari, designed to bring some random pointers about complexity theory, deeply related with the challenges a cybernetician like to reflect on. The rhizome was brought to life in a book called A Thousand Plateaus, that according to the authors, was written in random mode. Every day, they decide in which part of the book they will w...

Last weekend I embraced an open road journey to the northwest coast of South Africa. I drove to Saldanha Bay at cruise control velocity in a way I could appreciate the landscape, like I was on the passenger seat. Making that kind of ride makes me immerse the days I was reading Jack Kerouac's on the road. I was around 25 when I stumble on that book. I was not mature to understand some of the stories, like changing love partners, having no strings attached relationships, ridding to the road of nowhere in search of void objectives. Some years after, the spirit of book could live in Clint Eastwood's movie a perfect world, and as such, I decided to make my own road movie across the long road that can takes you to Namibia. During the ride and because the road was turning endless, close to shore, which most of the time you could not see where it ended, it came back to me the opening track of David Lynch's disturbing movie, Lost Highway. The movie soundtrack opened with David...

Two weeks ago, I bought a novel, called What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell. The book describes a love-hate relationship between two man, an expatriate professor, living in Sofia, Bulgaria and a male prostitute called Mikto, that becomes, during some periods of time the sex the prostitute provides at a price. I've never had the opportunity to read books about gay relationships - despite I watched before movies and TV series - and this was, a novelty life experience. When I started to read the book, I thought it was about the exposure of what a gay relationship is all about, when it turned to be a reveling re-visitation of what how we construct additions with other people that since the very beginning we fell it is not going to work and we continue to insist on it, for a multitude of reasons that can include the sense of set us free, confronting our own beliefs and conscience or completeness of something we never achieved or wanted to be (the self we imagine in or deep thinking...

I am going home. My itinerary dictated I spend 11 laying over Zurich with the company of the readers guide of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Both philosophers introduced the term rhizome, "any rhizomatic element has the potential to connect to other element [...] the challenge for the rhizome is to find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce". Out of the airport, I had 11 hours to explore Zurich. I took the wrong train, the supervisor told me. I need to get off the train, pay an extra ticket and go back to Zurich central station. The supervisor also advised, I stamped the ticket on the opposite side and that was considered illegal. I told him I was a foreigner, I've never been in Zurich and I just want to move on. He ignored my reasoning and asked to leave the train. He also told, looking to an app in the smartphone I had 17 precise minutes to catch the next train. For someone that's been in ...

On my way to the airport headed to Kasptad, ZA. "[... that loneliness can derive from the conviction that there is no person or group to which on belongs. This not belonging can be seen to have a much deeper meaning. However much integration proceeds, it cannot do away with the feeling that certain components of the self are not available because they are split off and cannot be regained. Some of these split-off parts [...] are projected into other people, contributing to the feeling that one is not full possession of one's self, that one does not fully belong to oneself or, therefore, to anybody else. The lost parts too, are felt to be lonely." Melanie Klein - On the sense of Loneliness - Paper, 1963 Nigerian society is shaped by an immense gap in inequality that defines who you are and the position you hold based on the quantity and quality of your assets. Women still largely depend on the income that the husband can bring to the household. Hence, for the wife...

Don't Follow Friday  Source: Based on Seth Godin

Foto: Cidade do Porto, 15 de Setembro 2012, manifestação anti-governamental  Porto a melhor cidade do País Circa 1980 - "Ó mãe,  o banco paga em juros 33%!. Ó meu filho isso não é nada" 1985 - Em Trás-os-montes era normalmente possível ouvir a RDP 1. Apenas. 1994 - Assisto ao encerramento de empresas têxteis, que não conseguiram adaptar-se às alterações da abertura do mercado europeu. 2000 - "Ó Eng.! Não quer meter o carro e a mobília no crédito à habitação? " 2012 - (numa clínica privada) "Pedimos desculpa, mas não aceitamos o protocolo com a ADSE - diz a funcionaria". "Não aceitam? Mas eu não vou pagar a totalidade do exame! Então quem tem Medis, tem desconto e quem tem ADSE não pode auferir desse benefício? ". 2012 - Entro numa infraestrutura inaugurada pelo ministro Mira Amaral (dos governos de Cavaco Silva) onde as escadas não têm uso e vemos a nossa cara na pedra. Vou resumir ao estilo de SMS (sinal dos tempos) o percurso ...

Just came from an extraordinary journey at the Italian Venture Forum (it's my 5th this year). I did not won or get an award, but I would like like to share some thoughts:   In one year or two, maximum, your idea must be in the market up an running. The exit strategy must be a merger or a sell out. Stock market is crazy. Don't go for a IPO because no one trust in you anymore (maybe in the next 10 years). Improve visibility. Don't use a business plan. Business plan are old stuff and are never updated. Use a good power point presentation. A team that is not complete or lacks important business functions it will be difficult to go anywhere. Venture Capitalists (VC) give a lot of importance to this item. Never give up. It can take more than one year to get fund raising. Sometimes you are trying to get money from VC that do not invest in your industry sector or the stage you are (seed, early stage, go to the market, etc). Restart only if repeatedly you hear your business i...

Despite the fact I share some of  Steve Jobs's management philosophy: look to the details; make something wonderful; offer a product the customer is willing for but I never asked for it; it never took me to buy a single product from Apple. This does not mean Apple products are bad, but the ideas underneath the product concept were far beyond our imagination and must be respected and remembered.

Minister Philipp Roesler told on press conference this week EU should put in place new instruments to assure troubled countries to comply with financial EU requirements. One of them is a stability council. A EU body with the aim to help troubled countries comply with EU common policies . During it's mandate, countries loose sovereignty and it should handed over to this council. The other one is countries stress tests. If a country fail to pass the tests there should be consequences. It's curious no one asked this men to resign. Is this the beginning of the fourth Reich?

No seguimento dos graves tumultos em Inglaterra da semana passada, não cheguei a ouvir uma única palavra  da Rainha. Para que serve afinal a monarquia?

 Does the next Portuguese government will meet the conditions it signed with the troika? Groucho Marx: Now pay particular attention to this first clause, because it's most important. There's the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part. How do you like that, that's pretty neat eh? Chico Marx: No, that's no good. Groucho Marx: What's the matter with it? Chico Marx: I don't know, let's hear it again. Groucho Marx: So the party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part. Chico Marx: Well it sounds a little better this time. Groucho Marx: Well, it grows on you. Would you like to hear it once more? Chico Marx: Just the first part. Groucho Marx: What do you mean, the party of the first part? Chico Marx: No, the first part of the party, of the first part. Groucho Marx: All right. It says the first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this ...