Right now, the American military can take on and defeat, not just any other military force, but all other military forces combined. We assume this gives us responsibility, that it makes us the world's policeman, that our military is the only guarantee for world peace and stability. Bullshit.
This decade has been marked by a complete lack of real jobs. Real jobs include health benefits. Instead we have had an enormous rise in non-job jobs. Wal-Mart jobs are non-job jobs. Immigrant jobs are non-job jobs. Freelance jobs are non-job jobs. You can’t really live on a non-job job, only survive. This is not […]
Recently I began a game here called The 1966 Game. The idea is that our present political myths, which emerged from the Nixon Era, are in the process of dying out. Thus, the question, who today has the roles played in 1966? We first identified John McCain as akin to Hubert Humphrey, because he is […]
NOTE: This is the lead item from the most recent issue of my free e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.Com. Subscribe here. Glad to have you. Always free. Who wants to revisit electronic commerce? God knows I do. Let’s review our problem set, shall we? There’s no valid business model for Web content. Every bit on a mobile […]
Mallory is a Dursley, a caricature of a Muggle. She accepts the magic of her time as a given, she cares little for the complexity of the real world. She stuffs her face with the products of magic -- computer networks, fast food, miracle drugs, SUVs -- with no thought for her responsibility to maintain that world, or raise children to maintain it.
This is what makes blogging such a threat to all hierarchies. It gives power to those who would otherwise be readily destroyed by the Right Wing Noise Machine and its allies in the Corporate Press. Blogging is the open source ethos applied to journalism. The Wall Street Journal is the proprietary ethos.
It’s the links. Doc Searls sort of hits it on the head. It’s the giving of links that makes blogging so dangerous to journalism. The room with the most exits wins by letting in the most light. I found this to be the case in launching voic.us over the last few months. It’s designed as […]
A floor price. Plenty of energy sources are ready to come onstream right now if the producers could be assured of long-term profits. Tar sands. Coal. Wind. Geothermal. Solar. It’s all there for the taking, but only if the producers can be assured of a market. The problem with oil, as we learned 25 years […]
The more I read about MySpace, its success in getting users, and its problems, the more one word keeps coming to mind. Pointcast. I know you’ve got to be pretty old in Internet years to remember the PointCast fiasco. It was an early "push" system. You would sign up for news stories and get them […]
The real political divide in America is between the ascendent open source view on the one side and the proprietary view on the other. Right now, the proprietary view holds absolute power. This is partly because open source is not organized. In fact, many with an open source view see what they’re doing as merely […]
