Twenty nineteen. The word of the year is “impunity.” Here’s a nice symbol of the moment: the founder of WeWork reportedly wanted to be the world’s first trillionaire, the president of the world and live forever — but all he succeeded in doing was evaporating $40bn of market capitalization on a fa...
2018—just the facts. Internet pioneer John Perry Barlow died—and with him, perhaps some of my internet utopian streak. Stephen Hawking died, leaving warnings about automation and capitalism. “Space Force” is a thing. Corruption and the murder of journalists in broad daylight. Contemporary writers...
Twenty seventeen: Donald’s first year. A year of exhaustion and planetary confusion and excess. Bitcoin briefly topped $20,000. Geopolitics is a reality show and no one knows what’s real anymore. This year we arrived at, and moved well beyond, some of the foreseen conditions of technological and...
Twenty sixteen: the year of Trump; the first swing of a wrecking ball that could demolish the liberal world order. It was also the year we discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting our nearest star. Might not be too early to start saving for the trip. In January, I hosted a meeting on Video & the […
Twenty fifteen: the year of Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan massacre, millions of Syrian refugees and a series of farcical presidential debates that ultimately delivered Donald Trump as the GOP nominee. You get the feeling that the world is headed in the wrong direction and the processes we have a...