Articles
Information Wants to be Free
April 30, 2020
Data is the most consequential commodity in the world. If you have access to it, but don’t need it, it has little value. But if you have no access to it, and desperately need it, it is priceless.
Read articleRead articleSurveillance State / Surveillance Capitalism
April 28, 2020
The authorities can see everything people do, every move they make. This situation is comparable to George Orwell’s 1984 — except this is a more extreme version. The corporations know everything people do, every move they make. This situation is comparable to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — except this is a more extreme version.
Read articleRead articleThe New Face of Surveillance
April 24, 2020
“Big data” is above all the foundational component in a deeply intentional and highly consequential new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. This new form of information capitalism aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control.
Read articleRead articleDark Pools of Money
April 17, 2020
Dark pools of dark money roam the financial ecosystem looking for quick kills. Using sophisticated computer algorithms, traders place thousands of orders per second, only to reverse them a few moments later. Sometimes these...
Read articleRead articleImagine a World
April 9, 2020
I now imagine a world where Ceos and Wall Street voluntarily cut their millions in bonuses and donate it to Public Health Departments and Hospitals. I now imagine a world where Bezos, Zuckerberg, Google, Boeing, Comcast, et.al, and yes, even the Koch brothers, literally throw money into ...
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let the crows come
March 27, 2020
"When I die / Throw my body, / Washed and naked, / Over the fence / And let the crows come."
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Change Must Go Viral
March 20, 2020
"It struck as if from on high, like a bolt of lightning. After striking an insulating material such as lawn or earth or flesh, lightning often leaves behind scorch-marks in branch-like patterns, which trace its path through the stricken material as the latter undergoes electric breakdown. Likewise, as the coronavirus contagion has surged through its human medium, it has left behind a pattern of destruction laying bare the structural failings of the world as we knew it before the shock of the pandemic.
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The Delusion of Economics
March 13, 2020
Human beings are in a state of denial about the calamity of calamities our economy is actively engineering. Unfortunately, we needn’t look far to find one of its major sources, namely, the modern study of economics (in particular, Economics 101). Each year, millions of students have their noses forced into textbooks that investigate or illuminate no causal connection extending from the economy to the ecosphere. (In this formulation, the environment provides fuel for industry, but suffers no return impact from it.) We’ve known for ...
Read articleRead articleSurviving the Plague
March 6, 2020
Ordinary life was suspended during the epidemic. Confraternities, associations that brought laypeople together for charity work and socialising, could no longer hold meetings. Public sermons were forbidden. The city’s schools were closed. Taverns and inns were shut. Gambling dens and barber shops were closed, ball games forbidden.
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Hope in the Time of COVID-19
March 2, 2020
The virus seems well-turned to exploit the specific characteristic of the world we’ve created for ourselves - with our massive population tightly linked by air travel, exotic tourist excursions and just-in-time supply chains, and marked by brutal inequalities in health care and physical well-being.
Read articleRead articleCan we break the spell?
February 25, 2020
At its start, the internet was still relatively scarce, in the sense that we generally wanted more of it everywhere. iPhones were new; we were still excited about carrying portals to that utopia in our pockets and finding new ways to integrate two domains that were previously separate. Ten years ago, I could sit in a bar and wish that it better reflected the future I was experiencing.
Read articleRead articleThe War on Words
February 21, 2020
Brutal days, to be resisted, often demand brutality inkind. In such times, marked as they are by the fear anduncertainty that naturally metastasize out of truth’s debasement, there is but one bold act from which all other acts of dissent may precede. That is to tell — with utter, brutal frankness — the truth.
Read articleRead articleWe know so little
February 17, 2020
Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe. I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it, caught in the shining jaws of a limestone bedding plane first formed on the floor of an ancient sea.
Read articleRead articleThe Meaning of Life
February 13, 2020
There is the dream of an alternate aesthetic, of a world in which aestheticized experience worked only on things that were ordinary, local, small, repetitive, and recalcitrant, on things that really did happen to most of us in the everyday. This would imply a challenge to drama as we know it.
Read articleRead articleHungry Hungry Factory Workers
February 11, 2020
I think of Keith Haring. (And someone named Ariel Allen.) I admire how he committed to every line — it looks like he never thought twice. I wondered what he would draw today, and it inspired me to create this piece.
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