Steve Job's Ghost, Zuckerberg, Neuralink and crypto surge, Covid lockdown, deep-fake faces, Drones above public places. K-Pop demons, TikTok wars, Propaganda shilling app stores, Psychic spies, silver screens, Scroll till you forget your dreams. -- Ecclesiates' Cover Band playing "We Didn't Start the Fire" What on earth is going on? Authoritarianism has arrived in America. Yet again! Techies talk about summoning demons and starting a singularity, opening a stargate to a new digital god. Like ...

Steve Job's Ghost, Zuckerberg, Neuralink and crypto surge, Covid lockdown, deep-fake faces, Drones above public places. K-Pop demons, TikTok wars, Propaganda shilling app stores, Psychic spies, silver screens, Scroll till you forget your dreams. -- Ecclesiates' Cover Band playing "We Didn't Start the Fire" What on earth is going on? Authoritarianism has arrived in America. Yet again! Techies talk about summoning demons and starting a singularity, opening a stargate to a new digital god. Like ...

Earlier today, I enjoyed taking a Willy Wonka esque tour of a climate tech R&D lab pioneering low cost means of synthesizing methane from the air. More than just the name of a company and a super intriguing tech tree, terraforming offers a different framing for climate action. California will have a governor's race next year and it should be noted the world is losing "world war zero" right now. We need bold fresh pioneering ideas! The terraforming of Earth is already happening. Not by astrona...

Earlier today, I enjoyed taking a Willy Wonka esque tour of a climate tech R&D lab pioneering low cost means of synthesizing methane from the air. More than just the name of a company and a super intriguing tech tree, terraforming offers a different framing for climate action. California will have a governor's race next year and it should be noted the world is losing "world war zero" right now. We need bold fresh pioneering ideas! The terraforming of Earth is already happening. Not by astrona...

What makes a stay memorable? It is not only the walls that shelter you, nor the scenery that unfolds outside the window. It is the encounter with the host, the recognition that hospitality is not a transaction but a ritual exchange. The old word refugio carries this spirit. In the Alps and Pyrenees, the refugios are huts where strangers share bread, warmth, and stories before setting off again into the storm. To the hiker, refugios make the impossible possible. They let you move lightly, carr...

What makes a stay memorable? It is not only the walls that shelter you, nor the scenery that unfolds outside the window. It is the encounter with the host, the recognition that hospitality is not a transaction but a ritual exchange. The old word refugio carries this spirit. In the Alps and Pyrenees, the refugios are huts where strangers share bread, warmth, and stories before setting off again into the storm. To the hiker, refugios make the impossible possible. They let you move lightly, carr...

Last week I learned about an alien life form. Cyclothones float in the mid to deep waters of the ocean. These fragile small fish make up 100 billion to 1 trillion kg by biomass, approximately 10-100x the mass of all mammals, and play a critical role in the vertical transfer of nutrients in the ocean, making a home 200-1000 meters deep where the light of our modest star struggles and then finally fails to penetrate. Cyclothones have tiny bristle-like teeth that they use to strain plankton, som...

Last week I learned about an alien life form. Cyclothones float in the mid to deep waters of the ocean. These fragile small fish make up 100 billion to 1 trillion kg by biomass, approximately 10-100x the mass of all mammals, and play a critical role in the vertical transfer of nutrients in the ocean, making a home 200-1000 meters deep where the light of our modest star struggles and then finally fails to penetrate. Cyclothones have tiny bristle-like teeth that they use to strain plankton, som...

Earlier this week a gov tech colleague in Colorado shared a sharp provocation: “government is software" That metaphor of government-as-software is certainly punchy. And it packs a kernel of truth. After all, the very word “computer” comes from banks of clerks doing calculations, and many of our bureaucracies are still evolutions of those clerical functions. Benefits programs today run on code, and in that sense the program is the software. But the metaphor is also misleading. Government inves...

Earlier this week a gov tech colleague in Colorado shared a sharp provocation: “government is software" That metaphor of government-as-software is certainly punchy. And it packs a kernel of truth. After all, the very word “computer” comes from banks of clerks doing calculations, and many of our bureaucracies are still evolutions of those clerical functions. Benefits programs today run on code, and in that sense the program is the software. But the metaphor is also misleading. Government inves...

In the tech world right now, the hottest idea in education is AI tutoring. Personalized, mastery-based, infinitely patient digital guides — the dream is that every student could have the kind of one-on-one tutor once reserved for royalty. It’s a compelling vision, and experiments like Alpha School show the kernel of truth: students really do learn more when they progress at their own pace, with tailored support. But here’s the trap: if we treat AI tutoring as the end point of education’s evol...

In the tech world right now, the hottest idea in education is AI tutoring. Personalized, mastery-based, infinitely patient digital guides — the dream is that every student could have the kind of one-on-one tutor once reserved for royalty. It’s a compelling vision, and experiments like Alpha School show the kernel of truth: students really do learn more when they progress at their own pace, with tailored support. But here’s the trap: if we treat AI tutoring as the end point of education’s evol...

When the hurricane force firestorm came down Eaton Canyon in January, they did not discriminate between chaparral, oak, or stucco. In a single night the canyon reminded us of how ephemeral our cities really are, and of our fragility. It is easy for many to fall back into the familiar grooves of blame: arsonists, utilities, politicians, regulators, neighbors. But step back, and you glimpse something deeper. We are not simply contending with fire. We are living through the long transition from ...

When the hurricane force firestorm came down Eaton Canyon in January, they did not discriminate between chaparral, oak, or stucco. In a single night the canyon reminded us of how ephemeral our cities really are, and of our fragility. It is easy for many to fall back into the familiar grooves of blame: arsonists, utilities, politicians, regulators, neighbors. But step back, and you glimpse something deeper. We are not simply contending with fire. We are living through the long transition from ...

The pothole isn’t the problem. The process is. That’s the first thing I learned as an Argonaut—one of a new fellowship embedded inside city government to make the invisible visible: how things actually get done. Not what’s written in the manual or the PDF, but what happens between departments, at the counter, in the inbox. What really delays the repair, stalls the permit, or tangles the procurement. Our program is called ARGO—Applied Research in Government Operations. We’re a cross-cutting ci...

The pothole isn’t the problem. The process is. That’s the first thing I learned as an Argonaut—one of a new fellowship embedded inside city government to make the invisible visible: how things actually get done. Not what’s written in the manual or the PDF, but what happens between departments, at the counter, in the inbox. What really delays the repair, stalls the permit, or tangles the procurement. Our program is called ARGO—Applied Research in Government Operations. We’re a cross-cutting ci...

In civic tech, we’ve gotten pretty good at saying how not to do things. Don’t build from the top down. Don’t ignore the user. Don’t digitize dysfunction. Important lessons, to be sure. But slogans like “build with, not for” are not blueprints. And while we’ve produced a forest of “open data playbooks,” they’re often too broad, too conceptual—or simply too disconnected from the messiness of real institutions and everyday implementation. What gives me hope, and what I believe defines the next w...

In civic tech, we’ve gotten pretty good at saying how not to do things. Don’t build from the top down. Don’t ignore the user. Don’t digitize dysfunction. Important lessons, to be sure. But slogans like “build with, not for” are not blueprints. And while we’ve produced a forest of “open data playbooks,” they’re often too broad, too conceptual—or simply too disconnected from the messiness of real institutions and everyday implementation. What gives me hope, and what I believe defines the next w...

During the long stillness of the pandemic I went deep into the oral epics. I read the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid and then their modern refactorings in Circe and Lavinia. What struck me was how each of these works began as a living river of words, carried on the tongues of countless tellers before they were ever written down. They were never fixed but always reshaped. This play between repetition and transformation is what gave them power. An epic is not a stone monument. It is a curren...

During the long stillness of the pandemic I went deep into the oral epics. I read the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid and then their modern refactorings in Circe and Lavinia. What struck me was how each of these works began as a living river of words, carried on the tongues of countless tellers before they were ever written down. They were never fixed but always reshaped. This play between repetition and transformation is what gave them power. An epic is not a stone monument. It is a curren...

All that is solid melts into air... ...and the clouds sublimate into stone.Jason journeyed down into town once again. This time he had to hurry. He felt mildly miffed at that. His boss just had to wait until the last minute to get in the proposal. They missed the 1 PM mail cutoff for another round of fairly pointless formatting tweaks. Then 2 PM had come and gone. Now he was racing down to the unthinking depths as fast as a data monkey could sky summersault through the slow zone. Over the las...

All that is solid melts into air... ...and the clouds sublimate into stone.Jason journeyed down into town once again. This time he had to hurry. He felt mildly miffed at that. His boss just had to wait until the last minute to get in the proposal. They missed the 1 PM mail cutoff for another round of fairly pointless formatting tweaks. Then 2 PM had come and gone. Now he was racing down to the unthinking depths as fast as a data monkey could sky summersault through the slow zone. Over the las...

In the late 1960s Stewart Brand campaigned to have NASA release a photograph of the whole earth seen from space. He believed that a single image of the planet entire would shift human perspective. When the Apollo 17 crew finally captured the Blue Marble, that vision crystallized. It was not just a photograph. It was a consciousness-expanding tool. The Whole Earth Catalog grew from that impulse, offering tools and ideas to ordinary people who wanted to shape their own lives and communities. Th...

In the late 1960s Stewart Brand campaigned to have NASA release a photograph of the whole earth seen from space. He believed that a single image of the planet entire would shift human perspective. When the Apollo 17 crew finally captured the Blue Marble, that vision crystallized. It was not just a photograph. It was a consciousness-expanding tool. The Whole Earth Catalog grew from that impulse, offering tools and ideas to ordinary people who wanted to shape their own lives and communities. Th...