Facebook, it’s now widely accepted, has been a calamity for the world. The obvious solution, most people would agree, is to get rid of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has a different idea: Get rid of the world. Cyberutopians have been dreaming about replacing the physical world with a virtual one since Zuckerberg was in Oshkosh B’gosh […]
There’s a line of verse I’m always coming back to, and it’s been on my mind more than usual these last few months: The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. It’s the second to last line of one of Robert Frost’s earliest and best poems, a sonnet called “Mowing.” He wrote it just […]
Photographer: “How ’bout we do the shoot in a hot tub?” Larry and Sergey: “Sure!” Never such innocence again. Can billionaires be tragic figures? Lear must have been worth a billion or two, in today’s dollars. And surely the family fortunes of Hamlet and Macbeth crossed the magical ten-figure line. I’d go so far as […]
This review of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism appeared originally in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 1. The Resurrection We sometimes forget that, at the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was in a funk, economic and psychic. The great dot-com bubble of the 1990s had imploded, destroying vast amounts of investment […]
“Ziggy sucked up into his mind.” –David Bowie In his Wall Street Journal column this weekend, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers a fascinating theory as to why we haven’t been able to find signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Maybe, he suggests, intelligent beings are fated to shrink as their intelligence expands. Once […]
I like to know where things stand. I like to know how things are progressing. I signed up for UPS My Choice and FedEx Delivery Manager and USPS Informed Delivery. I know when a package has been shipped to me, where it is at every moment as it hops across the country toward me, the […]
[No. 02 in a Series] “Man Called Aerodynamics,” the opening track of the 1996 Guided By Voices album Under the Bushes, Under the Stars, hits you like an anxiety attack, if an anxiety attack were indistinguishable from bliss. Like “Gold Star for Robot Boy,” the first song on the second side of the band’s 1994 breakthrough Bee Thousand, […]