Pioneering Spirit

You've heard about agile software development, right? The web 2.0 manifesto usurped the upper echelons of high technology and overthrew the waterfall crowned kings of the 1990's internet. I'd like to share an example of what we can call agile infrastructure development. Here I don't mean servers or data warehouses or any backend bits or bytes. I mean moving actual atoms. Specifically essential infrastructure and more specifically a stormwater recharge facility in my hometown, a humble ditch w...

Sir, The hour grows late. The President asserts the right to govern by decree. Worse, the Congress has ceded its constitutional prerogatives, neglecting to protect its power of the purse and even the sanctity of its chambers from executive overreach. Charles I chuckles from the grave. In this dark and doom filled hour, one hope remains: the power of story, aided and abetted by unassailable songs stirring up this country’s frayed and nearly forgotten faith in this experiment in self-governance...

It has been basic United States policy that Government should foster the opening of new frontiers. It opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers. Although these frontiers have more or less disappeared, the frontier of science remains. - Vanevar BushA decade ago, I wrote a long piece looking at the history of information technology innovation and related shifts in government operations. IBM's origins date back to the challenges with a late 19th century census and need for...

Kicking off the New Year, I started reading City of Fortune, a wonderful history of Venice recommended by Venkatesh Rao and part of his 2025 Contraptions book club. It's great history, full of the hubris of a dying empire and the rise of scrappy literal swamp dwellers who forge a trading empire with grit and gumption. The latter of course is the now esteemed City of Venice. The book provides a fascinating history of the political economy and history that led to the rise of a powerful city sta...

With increasingly intense megafires, Michael Wara, a Stanford based fire and climate expert, has presciently called for a new state agency focused on proactive action to mitigate catastrophic fires before they happen since 2020. That's an excellent idea and I'd note we don't need a new competing center complete with competing turf battles and increased coordination headwinds. Nor do we need a specialized hyper-focused plan producing shop that results in reports that sit on shelves. What we do...

I originally published this piece in 2017. I thought I'd share it with my lovely newsletter community. What do autonomous vehicles have to do with California water? More than you might think. Governor Brown recently declared the end of the California drought and has released a new long term framework to make conservation a way of life in California. As we think long term about California’s urban water use, it’s worth noting that autonomous vehicles will have transformative impacts on urban wa...

Sometimes I wonder if I time-traveled back two decades if I could explain how we got to today's world to my high school self or anyone around then. Would anyone believe the US had been at war for twenty years or that a cameo real estate guy from Home Alone became president? In many ways day to day life - the cars, the built environment - hasn't really changed, but so much of the news is psychodrama. Today I generally bet on things getting weirder. What does the future hold? Today while scroll...

It’s a fairly loaded question layered with lots of baggage, both literally with the protocol of bagging up dog defecation and metaphorically with moral sentiments. A few years back, my local hometown weekly newspaper ran a “Spiritually Speaking” piece with a neighbor wondering how in a good community like ours, there could be people who didn’t pick up their dogs poop. It was a revealing wonder, in a way a microcosm of the problem of evil in the human heart. Especially considering the normally...

To Governor Jerry Brown, This is our most desperate hour. I regret that I am unable to present this message in person, but I am writing from the edge of a strange precipice in time. The future of our species is teetering on the brink. We are losing the plot. The American experiment in self-governance needs deep renewal. The threats to the future of the republic have returned. The winds grow hotter, with hurricane force firestorms devastating communities close to my home in Southern California...

"Where is the California alternative to DOGE?" - Bill Maher in conversation with Ezra Klein and Andrew Sullivan. That's an important question. Governor Newsom responded earlier saying effectively that there's already the State Office of Digital Innovation. But here's the former CA state chief data officer saying that the model for the last decade hasn't worked and the gov tech movement needs to step its game up. More deeply, the flames of today’s tribalistic politics are fueled by a deep dist...

"If Truman was the Nuclear President, Kennedy the Space President, and Eisenhower the Interstate President, Obama will be the Cloud President." -VGR Venkatesh Rao wrote a nice little piece in 2008 providing an overview of the presidential technological eras and arguing that Obama would be the first cloud president. The piece aged very well so I thought I'd share some of the key excerpts. “Obama has a few technological levers he can push, as he looks for ways to deal with his big problems: two...

In the wake of the recent devestating wildfires, Governor Newsom has floated the idea of a "Marshall Plan" to build "LA 2.0," to mixed reactions. In the spirit of building the new I thought it timely to reshare this essay that I wrote and published during California's first global climate action summit in 2018. This week California Governor Brown will host the historic global climate action summit with other global luminaries this week in San Francisco. The goal is to show the overwhelming gr...