Part II: From Artisans to Employees This is the second part of an essay for the Equitable Enterprise Initiative at Institute for the Future. Part I is here. For a happy couple of centuries before industrialism and the modern era, the business landscape looked something like Burning Man, the famous…

Part I: A new economic story; a new theory of change — For the past year, I’ve been serving as a senior advisor to the Institute for the Future’s Equitable Enterprise Initiative, along with great new economics thinkers and practitioners from Jerry Davis and Astra Taylor to Jessica Gordon Nembhard and Cory Doctorow. …

Ecstasy Club and the Unfulfillable Promise — I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in my first novel, the 1996 rave sci-fi thriller love story, Ecstasy Club, in hope of developing it for the screen. It has been 25 years since I wrote it, so I feel like I can read and enjoy it as if…

How to transcend both denial and distraction when the world seems to be coming apart — You know that moment when you realize you’re seriously sick, or that your relationship is going to end, or you’ve lost your job, or you realize that you’re about to crash the car? It’s not panic, so much as the queasiness of realization. Like when you see the police lights…

The catastrophes on your TV screen are the result, not the cause — I’ll admit these last few weeks have been particularly destabilizing for a lot of us. If my inbox is any indication, it’s been particularly destabilizing for anyone who believes women should have authority over the bodies, who support the idea that an Environmental Protection Agency should be able to regulate…

If baseball is going to abandon the poor, then I’m going to abandon baseball. — With people dying in Ukraine, the overturning of Roe V Wade, and the diminishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the fate of baseball in America may seem like a trivial concern. But after a hard week of fighting the fight for climate remediation, social justice, and economic equality, I was…

Let’s build an Overground Railroad instead — I overhead a couple of high school students this morning talking about their college options. “I don’t think I’m going to apply to Grinnel, anymore,” one said. “Or Rice,” the other chimed in. “Screw them.” They were looking at the map of US states that are either implementing or likely…

How Speculators Prevent Crypto from Working as a Safe Haven — One of the most common questions I’ve been getting this week is from young investors (they wouldn’t call themselves investors, but they are) wondering why their crypto holdings are going down as fast or faster than the stock market. “But I bought all this Ethereum because I knew the market…

Higher prices are not necessarily a bad thing. — Yes, gas prices are up. I saw a woman fill up her old station wagon with premium the other day, and her pump total went over $90. “Ouch!” I said to her, smiling. “This damn inflation will be the end of us all,” she replied, then added “Let’s go Brandon,”…