There’s a joke around “the best minds of my generation were tasked with getting people to click on ads”. At least you can attribute those ads to powering free global communications, information networks, and technical research.

I’d argue that the most creative minds of my generation were told to believe that creating yet another self-satisfying... See more

Finally, the new technologist does not limit themselves to the VC sprint arena of the past two decades. We believe that we will need to run for government offices with a platform around building products that work for constituents. We are comfortable and embrace roles in the public sector, financial industry, cultural industries, and more.

As Governance is downstream of Culture, I think it’s important (and obvious) to recognize the way we talk about politics is in fact a cultural issue. One that has been in semantic slide for quite some time. We not only need to increase the amount of ideas that we have today to fix our culture, but we have to be brave enough to challenge underlying... See more

“The fast shall inherit the earth.” This was previously printed in the Facebook internal book they’d give new employees. Now we can read it as “the fast will catch Elon’s attention, which will influence an army of fans to mimetically adopt the message.” Unfortunately that’s not as catchy.

I wrote recently in a tweet that there’s a rarity from technologist to say whether a thing is good or not. Instead they repeat that it is inevitable, and their actions show that they believe they should financially benefit from and “steer” that inevitability. That is a politically bankrupt position.

Technologist tended to view their world as somewhat insulated, despite having mass impact on culture and society at large. But over the past decade, at minimum, there’s been far more collisions of scenes. Both production oriented and deeply intellectual.

Let’s start with the reality that this idea of satiating the internal of an individual is also deeply embedded in the philosophy of internet technologies. That Ayn Rand was, and maintains to be, a philosophical hero that helped to invent the mythos of the self-made Silicon Valley hero that many founders strive to be.

“The culture” as a phrase, has been unfortunately hijacked by the artistic class to mean the byproducts of their creativity. But this is an incomplete picture of our culture. Culture is the difference between car-centricity and walkable neighborhoods. Culture is the values we place on our food system. Culture is the quality of our public goods and... See more

The second reason I gave extra focus to the left in this essay is because of the relationship with the artistic class, which was the more important group I wanted to focus on. As a New Yorker and creative, I’ve seen how these folks articulate how they judge impact on the world and what it means for their personal production. This has to change.... See more