Archive

How to Predict the Future

Every sin­gle futur­ist has one of these as the first slide in their deck. It does­n’t real­ly mat­ter what this is. An expo­nen­tial curve, up and to the right. This rep­re­sents all of tech­nol­o­gy. The past thir­ty years of tech­no­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion is described in this. This could be any­thing. This is proces­sor pow­er. This is mem­o­ry per dol­lar. This is Internet pen­e­tra­tion. This is the num­ber of peo­ple play­ing Angry Birds.

What Does the Internet Bring to the Concept of a Country?

You all have, undoubt­ed­ly, friends in New York and San Francisco and Berlin and Tokyo and Australia or what­ev­er, all of whom you have much more in com­mon with than you do with your neigh­bor. You’ve cre­at­ed dias­po­ras of inter­est. The death of dis­tance has cre­at­ed many dif­fer­ent new forms of coun­try. Countries which aren’t based on how far it is from us to those guys over there, but new coun­tries based on what you’re inter­est­ed in.