Mark Fishman

One of the highest-valued private technology companies, grocery delivery service Instacart, announced last month that it has cut its valuation 40%, from $38 billion to $24 billion. To be more specific, the 409A share price (or value of a share of common stock) went down in its most recent third party analysis, such that the company is now valued at... See more

Perhaps a great deal of television is not meant to absorb our attention, at all, but rather to dab away at it, to soak up tiny droplets of our sensory experience while our focus dances across other screens. You might even say that much television is not even made to be watched at all. It is made to flow. The play button is the point.

Someone once asked me recently if I had any advice on how to predict the future when I wrote about social and technological trends. Sure , I said. My advice is that predicting the future is impossible, so the best thing you can do is try to describe the present accurately . Since most people live in the past, hanging onto stale narratives and... See more

Zoom out more, and you’ll see that scarcity is also the story of the U.S. economy. After years of failing to invest in technology at our ports, we have a shipping-delay crisis. After years of a deliberate policy to reduce visa issuance for immigrants, we suddenly can’t find enough workers for our schools, factories, restaurants, or hotels. After... See more

The community-input process is disastrous for two broad reasons. First, community input is not representative of the local population. Second, the perception of who counts as part of an affected local community tends to include everyone who feels the negative costs of development but only a fragment of the beneficiaries.