My apologies for the sad tone of this piece, but a hero has fallen and we need to pay him tribute — and make sure his death is not in vain. Every turning point in the history of civilization has its champions and its opponents. The opponents of the digital age are those who use …
I am one of those people who has a seriously deficient sense of direction. In other words, I feel lost most of the time. It’s been this way since I was very young. My parents would take me camping. As soon as I walked out of eyesight of the tent, I was lost and they …
I’m not a bettin’ man, probably because I’ve lost every time I’ve tried it. Still, I benefit from those who do. We all do. Betting odds give us information about what others believe, same as stock and bonds prices. And this collected knowledge, backed by real property, tells us more about the real world than …
We can learn from Facebook and all other social networks that the Internet has brought us. These are more than websites; they are models of social organization that transcend old forms. Make the rest of life more like a social network and we will begin to see real progress in the course of civilization. Persist in the old model of forced democratic community and we will continue to see decline.
My brother is teaching a semester in London, and he casually video Skyped me last week to show me around his apartment, which is small but charming. I reciprocated by hauling up the cover of the e-book I am reading, and shared my desktop to show a YouTube performance of Renaissance music I thought he …
There is a scene in the Parable of the Talents in which the returned master berates the shabbiest of his three servants. Discovering that he had buried his seed capital in the ground, the master says: “You should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have …
There’s been a long debate over digital technology. Does it help or harm the cause of liberty, individualism and human rights? People who say it has hurt point out that government has been able to use the products of private innovation for its own purposes. The government can watch us as never before. It assembles …
The other day, a local hamburger joint was advertising a 99 cent hamburger, and I took the offer. It was great. I wondered: how can they make money this way? A few days later, my head still swimming with memories of that great experience, I went back. This time, I dug in a bit deeper …
The barely-defeated legislation called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) hit out of the blue and caused a global scramble among the smart set to make sure it was defeated. It was a close call, and the legislation isn’t going away. It will come back and back again, and it will require relentless vigilance to keep …
Let’s say you are a farmer and most of your animals are dead from disease. But there are a handful of chickens still making it, and a couple of cows too. So you decided to kill them too. Now, why would you do that? I want to ask the same question of those who are …