Just last week I wrote about how I’ve decided to turn off the Wrestlemania passing for national news and focus on my local reality. I was hoping that helping neighbors, engaging in mutual aid, and working on local issues might just engender a kind of solidarity. And if we all…
I tried to warn us about what was coming: the collective psychopathology of a society so addicted to its narratives that we would rather the whole thing just end than continue on in its unresolved way.
When I wrote Present Shock, I was chiefly concerned with the way digital technology…
I have let myself get too worked up for too long about the culture wars on Twitter and its extensions on cable TV. They are not based in reality, but rhetoric. So this year, I’m ignoring them.
I think we can trace today’s ideological Wrestlemania in part to Donald Trump’s…
I was at a convenience store the other night, and watched some kids come in who had just escaped from a party they didn’t really like. As soon as they were inside, though, they pulled out their phones and started watching social media reports from the kids who had stayed.
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My accountant Sheldon Gordon died Monday night. It might not be the kind of news one would normally think about for too long, much less write about. Your accountant dies, you find another one. It’s just business. Right?
Not really.
See, Shelly cared about me and my family in a…
As we all predicted back in the 1990s, the net has spawned new opportunities for independent creators and consumers of all sorts. Blogs, YouTube, print-on-demand, 3D printing, Etsy, eBay, 99designs, Upwork, SoundCloud, Substack, and many many other platforms give creators the ability to make things and sell (or at least…
What if the Internet were still being designed? What if we knew everything we now know about surveillance capitalism and social media addiction and Instagram depression and fake news, and had the chance for a big do-over?
Well, we do. No matter how seemingly entrenched the monopolies of Facebook and…
This week, while I was watching the U.S. House committee debate contempt charges against former Trump aide Steve Bannon, a surprising email popped into my inbox: an invitation to appear as a guest on Bannon’s podcast The War Room: Pandemic, to talk about transhumanism. …
Why sci-fi shows should start naming spaceships after social justice heroes.
It’s cool that William Shatner, now 90, got to go to space for real. But as James T. Kirk crossed over from Star Trek’s fictional U.S.S. Starship Enterprise to Jeff Bezos’s real-world Blue Origin, I couldn’t help but wonder…
As I watched Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s Senate testimony today, I found myself oddly encouraged by the proceedings.
No, it doesn’t make me happy to hear how the people running Facebook have consciously chosen profit over the health and welfare of their users. If Mark Zuckerberg could have somehow been…
