Society

An Argument into the Agora

We can laugh at them but we have to take this seriously

New research sheds light on how mediocre employees help would-be authoritarians maintain power.

Why an ephemeral model can't fund relationship-based work

The most important AI story of the year is not happening in Silicon Valley

An Argument into the Agora

One of the many reasons I’m a fan of reading history is its ability to offer frameworks for understanding the present. I recently finished Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History, a…

Capitalism breeds anti-social behavior, and a downturn accelerates it.

An Argument into the Agora

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s

Governance determines the evolution of an innovation, giving society power over a technology’s ultimate form.

If you’ve been following technology news recently, you’ve probably noticed a sudden increase in references to a 19th-century economics theory called the ​Jevons Paradox​, which ... Read more

Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are.

This election should be a slam dunk for Democrats. There are billions of reasons it absolutely is not.

Most of these decisions were not made by people who understood the limits of the technology.

Today Bloomberg.com published my opinion piece in which I analyze the connection between economic inequality and political instability. It starts: Complex human societies, including our own, are fr…

Are our first principles as Americans, as humans, as creatures, sifted and rightly laid down?

I saw someone post on here about why small towns vote red and as someone with family from a VERY small town, like one road small, I’d like to throw my blue hat in this ring. They vote red because...

Robotaxis are the beginning.

A Crisis Dispatch

So why do people keep betting on them?

Residents in Fayetteville, Georgia, noticed low water pressure last year. The utility discovered two unaccounted-for water connections at one of the nation’s largest data center campuses.