infrastructure as culture

Changing a culture is a major undertaking, and a data culture is no exception. But thinking of these issues as cultural in the first place can help to open the imagination

A big part of the reason America can’t build like we used to is that we’re victims to the tyranny of the minority. A small group of people with strong opinions, and a lot of free time, can block things that are supported by the majority of the population. The people who are willing to show up to community meetings have an outsized say in what gets

We could bemoan the fact that things have come to this, or we could steal the tricks and channel all of that weird energy into something productive, something that makes peoples’ everyday lives better.

Neoliberals’ political analysis was even worse than their economics, with perhaps even graver consequences. Friedman and his acolytes failed to understand an essential feature of freedom: that there are two kinds, positive and negative; freedom to do and freedom from harm. “Free markets” alone fail to provide economic stability or security against

It’s also something that I encourage people to investigate with their own practices. There’s so much that you can do beyond just making your thing. You can also work on the whole system of getting that thing and others like it out into the world. There’s a lot of room for expansion and creativity there. I think the coolest projects look at the

There is so much energy on the internet directed at so much dumb shit; I promise you, if we tap into even a moderate amount of that, we’ll get the eyeballs.

ohn Podesta, a senior advisor to the Biden White House on clean energy, put it bluntly: “We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America.”

Let’s go over the top, embrace the reality of modernity, and do something useful with it.