I think the interesting and most difficult challenge for Mrs. Clinton if she becomes President is how to bring America together.
The great danger and fear that I have is that in the last fifty to seventy years, power has increasingly concentrated not only in the federal government but in the presidency.
One thing I can say is that I don’t think we know very much about Donald Trump, which is one of the things that’s scary about him but also one of the things that’s exciting about him.
In an environment where everybody can pick up everybody’s tools, we’re all weirdly empowered now. And I mean kind of weird in an almost fey sense like, our powers are weird, they make us weird, and they make our our conflicts weird. It’s again that idea that our tools are interacting with our human flaws in really really interesting ways.
One of the primary questions, or problems as I see it, is this “illusion” that sameness will bring safety. People start to thinking that if we are surrounded by similar people, like-minded people, if we have communities based on sameness, that will bring us safety. That’s an illusion. That’s not the case at all.
When I look at the signs today, I see a very strong trend back to what I call tribalism, back to nation-states, nationalism, religiosity, all those divisive forces that many intellectuals in the 1940s, ’50s, thought were going to disappear gradually. That did not happen.
Hannah Arendt loved it when unexpected things happened in politics. She thinks and thought that spontaneity, newness… She used the word “natality,” which is often misused and abused in her work by others, but it means birth, birthliness. And she thought that what made human beings different from other animals is not that we were rational, but that we could start things new.
Can we have agreements or the mechanisms for enforcing agreements between governments without having to appeal to the ambiguity of international law?
To understand human nature, I focus on human language and what it can reveal about how we think. Unlike other animals, humans can communicate an infinite number of thoughts through language. And one reason that language is powerful is because we can use each of our words flexibly, with several different meanings.
The United States plants more than 170 million acres of corn and soybeans a year, more than any country in the world. And the primary mechanism in the US that we use to subsidize agriculture is actually called the Federal Crop Insurance Program. So, the crop insurance program in the US is also the largest such program globally, with over $100 billion in liabilities annually. So it’s a very big program.
Online harassment is a huge problem today. Pew and Data & Society have done reports that show that 40 to 50% of people online experience online harassment. That's a huge number of people. Read more →
I ran into Vint Cerf, who didn't know me of course, but I knew him. So I boldly introduced myself, and Vint said, "Hey, you wanna come to dinner?" And I said, "Well yes, please." So he shoved me into a cab… Read more →
A lot of the science fiction I love the most is not about these big questions. You read a book like The Diamond Age and the most interesting thing in The Diamond Age is the mediatronic chopsticks, the small detail that Stephenson says okay, well if you have nanotechnology, people are going to use this technology in the most pedestrian, kind of ordinary ways. Read more →
Encryption is a key piece of a robust enterprise approach to cybersecurity. It keeps down the number of data breaches as the scale and the size of data breaches continues only to grow. It also is the first line of defense that users have against people accessing their data on an individual level. Read more →
Bringing a kind of fabulation or fabulatory practice to design, I want us to try to understand design a bit differently, as a kind of multi-bounded process that starts as very small gestures and begins with doing the impossible. Read more →