A 9/11 Accounting
So come on Ron, Come on Ron Let me hear you tell em, tell em how I Tell em how I, Tell em how I feel I was high up in the Sierras at some friends’ place on 9/11/01. I had an internet connection, no TV. I woke
MS-Stink Never Ends
Microsoft executives "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to
When the Whip Comes Down
The money system today is not quite the money system of a century, fifty, or even twenty years ago. Fundamentally, we still have a bank-debt money system. Money is lent, debt is created. The banks can then account this debt as new money and lend it again and again
Corporate Power
A headline’s been making the rounds the last couple days, “US corporate profits surge to record as worker payouts wilt.” Not that it's news, certainly not in the last fifty years. Really, you could go back to the beginning, the British East India Company, and depending on
Data Centers & Politics of Technology
This is well worth watching. Yasha had this guy on back in the beginning of the year – Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. This is a good talk about the growing politics of technology. Merchant does a good job explaining
Compute, Money, & Energy Blasphemies
"Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology." – Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, 1973 I’ve been slowly working two longer pieces on energy and money, looking at both in regards to information. However, my screen keeps incessantly being filled with
This and That
Everybody's desperate trying to make ends meet Work all day still can't pay the price of gasoline and heat Alas, their lives are incomplete Don't it make you want to rock and roll all night long Mohammed's Radio It’s hard to
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Populists, Technology, & Organization
“The underlying social reality is one not generally kept firmly in mind as an operative dynamic of modern society – namely, mass democratic movements are overarchingly difficult for human beings to generate. ...coordinated insurgent actions by hundreds of thousands or millions of people represent a political, an organizational, and above all,
Science Fiction as Idiocy
I’ve always been a science fiction fan. Though not reading many books, I watched plenty of movies. 70 years ago, Hannah Arendt noted the then still new genre had not been taken seriously enough in regards to revealing mass aspirations. Last year, I realized popular science fiction is increasingly
No yen for Yen?
Where are you going, my beautiful friend? Is this the road that we take 'til the end? And if we break down are we left behind? Is this the highway of all mankind? Get up and clean your teeth and have a shave It's 1 am let&
State of Play: Electoral Politics in the USA
For two reasons I write little about electoral politics in America. First, without a massive rethinking about all sorts of things, it’s no solution for much of anything. Secondly, I’m not paid to write about it. If you’re not making a lot of money in this election