Future
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The Long View
This blog has been looking like my personal obituary section, and I suppose it is. While I promise to change that, for this post I’ll stick with the theme, and surface some correspondence with an old friend who recommended that I read The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom. In the correspondence… Continue reading
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Unstill life
Her name is Mary Johnson. Born in 1917, the year the U.S. entered WWI, two years before women in the same country got the right to vote, she died in 1944, not long before the end of WWII. She was buried, unembalmed, in the cemetery of a Chicago church that was later abandoned. Her grave… Continue reading
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When Clouds Crash
Rackspace is in a crater right now, on fire. So are many of its customers. I’m one of them. What happened, Rackspace says, was “the result of a ransomware incident.” Damaged, lost or destroyed is its Hosted Exchange business. On that cloud platform, companies and individuals around the world run their email and much else. It’s quite… Continue reading
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The eventual normal
One year ago exactly (at this minute), my wife and I were somewhere over Nebraska, headed from Newark to Santa Barbara by way of Denver, on the last flight we’ve ever taken. Prior to that we had put about four million miles on United alone, flying almost constantly somewhere, mostly on business. The map above… Continue reading
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Toward new kinds of leverage
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” Archimedes is said to have said. For almost all of the last four years, Donald Trump was one hell of an Archimedes. With the U.S. presidency as his lever and Twitter as his fulcrum, the… Continue reading
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To hurt or help?
The choice above is one I pose at the end of a 20-minute audioblog I recorded for today, here it is in .mp4: And, if that fails, here it is in .mp3: The graphic represents the metaphor I use to frame that choice. Continue reading
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The Future of Now
There is latency to everything. Pain, for example. Nerve impulses from pain sensors travel at about two feet per second. That’s why we wait for the pain when we stub a toe. The crack of a bat on a playing field takes half a second before we hear it in the watching crowd. The sunlight we… Continue reading
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The Web and the New Reality
I posted this essay in my own pre-blog, Reality 2.0, on December 1, 1995. I think maybe now, in this long moment after we’ve hit a pause button on our future, we can start working on making good the unfulfilled promises that first gleamed in our future a quarter century ago. Contents Reality 2.0 Polyopoly… Continue reading
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Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible
This is the Ostrom Memorial Lecture I gave on 9 October of last year for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Here is the video. (The intro starts at 8 minutes in, and my part starts just after 11 minutes in.) I usually speak off the cuff, but this time I wrote it out, originally… Continue reading
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Google enters its chrysalis
In The Adpocalypse: What it Means, Vlogbrother Hank Green issues a humorous lament on the impending demise of online advertising. Please devote the next 3:54 of your life to watching that video, so you catch all his points and I don’t need to repeat them here. Got them? Good. All of Hank’s points are well-argued and make complete sense. They… Continue reading
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The Internet deserves its proper noun
The NYTimes says the Mandarins of language are demoting the Internet to a common noun. It is to be just “internet” from now on. Reasons: Thomas Kent, The A.P.’s standards editor, said the change mirrored the way the word was used in dictionaries, newspapers, tech publications and everyday life. In our view, it’s become wholly generic, like ‘electricity… Continue reading
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Dear Adobe, Please buy Flickr
Flickr is far from perfect, but it is also by far the best online service for serious photographers. At a time when the center of photographic gravity is drifting form arts & archives to selfies & social, Flickr remains both retro and contemporary in the best possible ways: a museum-grade treasure it would hurt terribly… Continue reading
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The slow sidelining of over-the-air radio
I’ve always loved AM radio. But it’s not a requited love. AM radios these days are harder to get, and tend to suck. The band is thick with electronic noise from things that compute (a sum of devices that rounds to everything). AM stations are falling like old trees all over the band, and all… Continue reading
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Content as Icebergs
(Cross posted from this at Facebook) In Snow on the Water I wrote about the ‘low threshold of death” for what media folks call “content” — which always seemed to me like another word for packing material. But its common parlance now. For example, a couple days ago I heard a guy on WEEI, my… Continue reading
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The Giant Zero
Many years ago, Craig Burton shared the best metaphor for the Internet that I have ever heard, or seen in my head. He called it hollow sphere: a giant three-dimensional zero. He called it that because a sphere’s geometry best illustrates a system in which every end, regardless of its physical location, is functionally zero… Continue reading
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We can all make TV. Now what?
Look where Meerkat and Periscope point. I mean, historically. They vector toward a future where anybody anywhere can send live video out to the glowing rectangles of the world. If you’ve looked at the output of either, several things become clear about their inevitable evolutionary path: Mobile phone/data systems will get their gears stripped, in both… Continue reading
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The most important event, ever
IIW XX, the 20th Internet Identity Workshop, comes at a critical inflection point in the history of VRM: Vendor Relationship Management, the only business movement working toward giving you both independence from the silos and walled gardens of the world; and better means for engaging with every business in the world — your way, rather… Continue reading
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We’re all going to need clothes
In the physical world we know what privacy is and how it works. We know because we have worked out privacy technologies and norms over thousands of years. Without them we wouldn’t have civilization. Doors and windows are privacy technologies. So are clothes. So are manners respecting the intentions behind our own and others’ use of those things. Those manners… Continue reading