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Turn On, Tune In, Disrupt Something
February 09, 2017
There’s a direct line to be drawn between the counterfeit “at one with everything” consciousness revelations of the Golden Gate Park Human Be-In and the phony “disruption” revolutions of Palo Alto today. You can “Turn on, Tune in, Drop” without missing this ...

The Attention Deficit
February 03, 2017
Once upon a time a lot of hope was invested in adblockers. Many saw them as a way to halt the blight of online advertising. The thinking was that if everyone got adblockers, it would not only make the ads disappear, but it might make the internet a more enjoyable place, too. We ...

#DeleteUber, Delete Everything
February 01, 2017
Like many billion-dollar startups, Uber is notorious for its self-regard. One nugget buried in this week’s news serves as a reminder: until a few days ago, Uber had no automated system to process users’ requests to delete their accounts. That meant that every time a user ...

Tech Meets Trump
December 16, 2016
It’s clarifying to see the oligarchy assemble itself in the open. President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet selection show has offered a murderer’s row of venal billionaires, spousal abusers, wild-eyed ex-generals, Christian fundamentalists, racists, and the ...

Cars Entering and Leaving Mosul
October 21, 2016
What they don’t tell you about the battle for Mosul is how boring it is, hour by hour, day by day. From my vantage point near the Iraqi village of Bartella, ISIS positions are visible in the smoke-filled distance, across the crinkled flatness of Nineveh; in front of me, gangs ...

Our New War Machines
September 12, 2016
For an institution synonymous with tradition and continuity, the American military is in quite a radical state of flux. In just the six or so years since I left the Army, two major demographic shifts that might superficially appear unrelated (or even contradictory) have taken ...

Elon Musk, Fatalist
August 19, 2016
Odds are that you’ve heard by now that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said something Totally Trippy at Recode’s Code conference earlier this summer. According to the darling of Silicon Valley, “the odds that we’re in base reality is one in ...

Flu in the Face
February 04, 2016
Anyone who spends time in enclosed public spaces is barraged with images from television news, most often broadcast from the default network, CNN. We glimpse these images, with the sound down, for only seconds at a time as they bounce, germ-like, from corner to corner, chasing ...

Thought Leaders as Loss Leaders
December 02, 2015
The breathless, investor-beguiling fable that the next iteration of the Web has to be the smart one has been around long enough now to qualify as a touching millenarian faith, like the quadrennial fiction of a “deep” GOP presidential field, or the diehard belief that the ...

Metrics All the Way Down
July 08, 2015
According to Spotify, the value of one play of a Willie Nelson song in an Ole Miss dorm room at 4 a.m. is around 0.68 cents, but why stop there? When everything is data and data can be called down through the air, “song” and “book” and “movie” ...

The Unbearable Emptiness of Politics as Code
June 30, 2015
Nothing inspires nihilism quite like physical proximity to a U.S. presidential campaign. Having attended my first pseudo-event of the 2016 election cycle in San Francisco, I must now banish the encroaching numbness by speaking its name. Evil, thy name is campaign ...