Category: Medium

The True Genius of Tech Leaders

Capital, Not Vision.

A humanoid figure standing to the fore of a TED stage; he wears Steve Jobs’s signature turtleneck and bluejeans, but he is also wearing clown shoes. His head has been replaced by a donkey’s head.
in pastel and lKlearchos Kapoutsis/CC BY 2.0 (modified); Ben Stanfield/CC BY-SA 2.0 (modified)

When it’s railroading time, you get railroads. “Innovation” is the intersection of collage and timing. For hundreds of years, people observed the action of a screw-press and the motion of a twirling maple-key, and invented the helicopter:

A woodcut engraving of a screw-press, a plus sign, an engraving of a spinning maple key, an equals sign, DaVinci’s drawing of a helicopter.

But of course, they didn’t invent the helicopter! No one invented the helicopter, until someone else had invented new lightweight alloys, as well as fossil fuel refining techniques, as well as internal combustion engines:

A woodcut engraving of a screw-press, a plus sign, an engraving of a spinning maple key, a plus sign, a carbon fiber molecule, a plus sign, an oil well, a plus sign, an internal combustion engine, an equals sign, DaVinci’s drawing of a helicopter.

Once all those factors were in place, lots of people independently invented the helicopter. Same goes for TV, radio, and many other inventions. When it’s railroading time, you get railroads. It takes some creativity to invent the railroad, but creativity is an abundant element in the human condition. Creativity doesn’t get you anything until other people have build the substrate for your invention.

What we take for singular vision is best understood as lucky timing. Receiving the patent for the radio doesn’t mean you and you alone could invent the radio — it means you lucked into being alive when all the underlying technologies were in place, and you beat everyone else with the ability to invent radio to the patent office by a minute or two.

The Good Timing Theory of Innovation explains a lot about the successes and failures of the heavily mythologized tech founders and the companies they run. It explains how Google could launch such as fantastic search-engine and then launch a string of failed products, from G+ to Google Video to Stadia. Google’s success stories (its ad-tech stack, its mobile platform, its collaborative office suite, its server-management tech, its video platform…) are all acquisitions.

Besides search, Google’s only had two other in-house successes: they made a great Hotmail clone (Gmail), and they got more than a billion people to use Google Photos (but only by bundling it with Android, a mobile operating system they bought from someone else).

Google didn’t invent its way to glory — it bought its way there.

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Oil is Bankrupt (If We Want It)

Alberta’s Oil Companies Are the Walking Dead.

This figure shows how Alberta’s let-the-future-pay-for-cleanup funding model is playing out. The red curve shows the growth of cleanup liabilities, which accumulate as new wells are drilled and not cleaned up. The blue curve shows the assets that will pay for this cleanup — the industry’s future income (assuming various prices of oil and gas).

Albert’s oil-patch is a zombie, the walking dead. The companies that extract oil there owe more money than they can pay, more than they can borrow, more than they can earn. If they were made to pay their lawful debts, they would all go bankrupt, and, in so doing, would end the extraction of one of the dirtiest, worst sources of oil in the world.

Now, there’s an argument that all the oil companies are busted, Alberta or no. If they were made to pay for the damage they’ve done to our world, the millions their deadly products have killed and the billions they threaten, they would all be cleaned out.

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Doing the Work

How to Write When You Suck

A giant typewriter sculpture at Burning Man, with several people admiring and climbing on it.

I’m out on tour again, my first in-person book tour since 2019. I had four books come out during lockdown and “toured” them over Zoom, which was as good as many talented and dedicated publishing PR people, booksellers, and co-presenters could make it.

Now, after three years, I’m out on tour again. It’s an odd kind of tour, because it’s a different kind of book. Chokepoint Capitalism isn’t a novel from a Big Five publisher, it’s a nonfiction critique of monopolies and cartels. That includes the Big Five, which is why we went with an indie, the storied Beacon Press, praised by the likes of Albert Einstein and Howard Zinn for a publishing program that promotes progressive values.

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Sound Money

The best money is social, not personal.

Several rows of old rulers and yardsticks, distorted as through a lens.

The inflation hawks have a point: inflation is genuinely destabilizing. When working people’s purchasing power declines, they rightly worry that heating their homes, putting food on the table, or commuting to work will cause them to fall into debt, and, eventually, poverty.

But where the inflation hawks go wrong is in blaming “money printing” for inflation. It’s true that when demand exceeds supply, prices go up, but the nutrition, shelter and transport are not luxury goods whose prices are spiking because we gave ordinary people more money than they deserved.

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Parenting and Phones, an Empowering Approach

Wisdom from “Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing)” by Emily Weinstein and Carrie James

DImage; Jiyoung kim/CC BY-SA 4.0 (modified); Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

I am the father of a 14 year old, and it is wild. We have our good days and our bad ones, and the lockdown was hard for all of us, but I learn new stuff from my kid every single day.

I’ve been writing about the intersection of parenting and my kid’s digital life since she was two years old, and from the start, I’ve been clear on one thing: it’s impossible to completely control how my kid uses digital tech, and so the best I can hope for is to teach her to be as safe as possible, and to cultivate a trusting relationship with her so that when (not if) she gets in over her head, she’ll come to me so I can help her figure it out.

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Car Wars

The Real Trolley Problem

A Times Square traffic jam; all the cars’ windscreens have been filled with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The background has been filled with a Matrix “code-waterfall” effect.
joiseyshowaa/CC BY-SA 2.0 (modified); Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

Author’s Note: This short story was originally commissioned by Deakin College as part of an AI ethics course; they have since take it down. This is its new home. For a nonfiction analysis of the problems set forth herein, see my Guardian column on the subject. Here’s an audio edition.

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What is Chokepoint Capitalism?

Why copyright alone can’t unrig creative labor markets.

A middle school doorway. Three cigarette-smoking hoodlums block it from a small schoolboy, seen from behind, carrying a backpack.
Buffalo Police Department/Public Domain (modified); Erik B. Anderson/CC BY-SA 4.0 (modified)

Chokepoint Capitalism is my next book, co-written with the brilliant copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin. It’s a book about how the markets for creative labor were rigged, and how artists, fans, tinkerers, regulators and lawmakers can unrig them.

That second part is key: this isn’t just a book complaining about how tough things are for artists — it’s a book about how we can make things better.

There’s an obvious reason that our book’s focus on shovel-ready projects to put more money in artists’ pockets is important: you’d have to be a monster to prefer a world that underpays the writers, musicians, actors, and film and TV creators whose work heartens and delights you.

The cover for the Beacon Press edition of Chokepoint Capitalism.

But there’s another reason that this focus on fixing creative labor markets is so important: because copyright, the primary tool we’ve given creators to give them power over their labor, has actually made things worse.
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Takes One To Know One

Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense

A finger pointing at the reader.

I first learned about Dr. Thomas Radecki in the mid-1980s, when my grandmother became concerned that my Dungeons and Dragons hobby was going to unmoor me from reality and send me spiraling into delusion and misery, ending in murder.

Radecki was the psychiatrist who testified that the teenager Darren Molitor had murdered another teenager, Mary C. Towey, because he had been driven mad by D&D. Though the court rejected his testimony, Radecki built a career on his willingness to give expert testimony to the effect that young people were being driven to ghastly crimes by D&D.

I forgot about Radecki for decades, and then, last week, I learned that he had lost his medical license following revelations that he had enticed his patients — young people seeking treatment for addiction — into trading drugs for sex. He impregnated one of them. He is now serving an 11–22 year prison sentence.

Radecki attained fame by falsely accusing others of victimizing vulnerable young people for profit. He went on to victimize vulnerable young people for profit.

Takes one to know one.

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Como Is Infosec

Content moderation is a security problem.

Cryteria, CC BY 3.0 (modified)/Crosa, CC BY 2.0 (modified)

in·fo·sec (/ˈinfōˌsek/): information security

co·mo (/koh-moh/): content moderation

Content moderation is really, really hard.

Content moderators:

  • seek to set conversational norms, steering transgressors toward resources that help them better understand the local conversational rules;
  • respond to complaints from users about uncivil, illegal, deceptive or threatening posts;
  • flag or delete material that crosses some boundary (for example, deleting posts that dox other users, or flagging posts with content warning for adult material or other topics);
  • elevate or feature material that is exemplary of community values;
  • adjudicate disputes about impersonation, harassment and other misconduct.

This is by no means a complete list!

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Divination

How the Tim Powers method for secret histories keeps my creative juices flowing.

Lake Mead is the massive reservoir that was created when the Hoover Dam stopped up the Colorado river, creating a reliable supply of water for Las Vegas casinos .

It’s drying up.

As the western superdrought starves the region of water, Lake Mead’s water level is falling to historically low levels, exposing the various things that people had consigned to its (seemingly) eternal depths.

Things like corpses.

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