digital rights

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pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

The only detail that betrayed his radical political leanings was the pin fixed on his lapel, the symbol of the Pirate Party, with the threatening black sail shaped into a ‘P’ for Pirates. The Pirate Parties owe their existence to the emergence of new demands: for ‘digital freedoms’ or ‘digital rights’.126 Digital rights have to do with the way information and communication technologies have transformed the relationship of individuals with large-scale organisations, and in particular corporations and the state. They include the following: the right to privacy; the right to freedom of expression online; the right to freely exchange material with other internet users; the right to maintain control over one’s own data; the demand for free access to government information and transparency in public records; the right to a free or inexpensive internet connection and a reform of copyright laws to adapt them to present social conditions.

This is seen in governmental initiatives such as the Digital Bill of Rights proposed in the United Kingdom by Jeremy Corbyn or Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights (Marco Civil da Internet) which propose to update rights and freedoms to the digital condition. It may thus be said that whereas the early defining issue of digital parties – digital rights – has been progressively absorbed by mainstream politics, digital parties, including the Pirate Parties that were most strongly single-issue in their original design, have progressively come to encompass a greater variety of issues, starting from the question of updating democracy to the digital condition. Hacking democracy Although the demand for digital rights is the one that first signalled the rise of digital parties, the demand for a digital democracy updating the spirit of the democratic project to present technological and social conditions should be considered the real ‘wedge issue’ of this new wave of political parties.

The early embodiment of this ideal type is found in a series of self-declared ‘internet parties’ that have claimed the role of champions of the new digital society, vis-à-vis the rusty and collapsing structure of a crisis-stricken neoliberal society and its worn-out politics. The most famous early examples of this trend are undoubtedly the Pirate Parties, a group of parties campaigning for digital rights, that have been particularly successful in Northern European countries. The first Pirate Party was founded in Sweden in 2006 by entrepreneur and former liberal politician Rick Falkvinge. It was created in the wake of the uproar generated by the judicial shutting down of Pirate Bay, a popular file-sharing service which wore with pride the stigma of piracy levelled at anybody downloading movies, books and video games for free, and especially those facilitating the circumvention of copyright laws.


Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

A challenge will be to bring together the special interests of standardization organizations to converge on a “standard of standards.” Solution spotlights Cities Coalition for Digital Rights Cities Coalition for Digital Rights is a joint initiative between New York City, Amsterdam, and Barcelona and more than 20 other cities representing more than 100 million people to protect residents and visitors’ digital rights. This is the first initiative in which cities have come together to protect digital rights on the global level. It is done in cooperation with the United Nations and focuses on privacy and data protection among other things.

Working with devices in the city Managing devices Methods for communicating with devices The challenges of protecting devices Developing device standards:​ An interagency effort Security standards Privacy standards Architecture standards Solution spotlights Cities Coalition for Digital Rights Array of things PlowNYC Exteros Summary Chapter 4:​ Data Source systems Systems of record Sensors Online sources Structure of data Structured data Semi-structured data Unstructured data Data services Object storage Relational databases Document database Key value stores Graph databases Block chain Data access Machine-to-machine Graphical user interface Deployment On premise Cloud Comparison between on premise and cloud Regulatory requirements Health data Criminal justice data Personal data in general Data management Data governance Master data management Data quality Summary Chapter 5:​ Intelligence The history of AI The promise and threat of AI What is Artificial Intelligence really?​

Strogatz, Nature 393, 440–442 1998 https://web.archive.org/web/20140803231327/http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/downloads/pdf/payphone_rfi.pdf (October 2, 2019) the original RFI for what turned out to be LinkNYC from 2012 www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/923-14/de-blasio-administration-winner-competition-replace-payphones-five-borough (October 2, 2019) press release of the winner of the LinkNYC bid www.citylab.com/life/2015/04/de-blasios-vision-for-new-york-broadband-for-all-by-2025/391092/ (October 2, 2019) an article about Mayor of New York Bill De Blasio’s plan for broadband for all in New York by 2025 www1.nyc.gov/site/doitt/agencies/nycwin.page (October 2, 2019) a description of The New York City Wireless Network, known as NYCWiN www.thethingsnetwork.org (October 5, 2019) a project dedicated to building LoRaWAN solutions Chapter 3 https://dyn.com/blog/dyn-analysis-summary-of-friday-october-21-attack/ (October 2, 2019) the official analysis of the Dyn attack on October 21 https://citiesfordigitalrights.org (October 2, 2019) the official site for the Cities for Digital Rights coalition www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases (October 2, 2019) an article about the Strava fitness tracking incident involving a US Army base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet (October 2, 2019) a description from Wikipedia of the Stuxnet worm https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.199.pdf (October 2, 2019) the official FIPS 199 standard for categorization of information and information systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Information_Security_Management_Act_of_2002 (October 2, 2019) a description of the FISMA framework from Wikipedia https://arrayofthings.github.io/ (October 2, 2019) the official site of the Array of Things project http://maps.nyc.gov/snow/# (October 2, 2019) the PlowNYC site where New Yorkers can track the progress of snow plows during wintertime Chapter 4 https://scijinks.gov/air-quality/ www.epa.gov/pm-pollution/particulate-matter-pm-basics (October 2, 2019) definition of what particulate matter is https://brightplanet.com/2013/06/twitter-firehose-vs-twitter-api-whats-the-difference-and-why-should-you-care/ (October 2, 2019) a description of how the Twitter Firehose works www.waze.com/ccp (October 2, 2019) official site of the Twitter Connected Citizens Program The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing , Peter M.


pages: 378 words: 110,408

Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, deliberate practice, digital rights, iterative process, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, sensible shoes

Up to that point he had remembered a nine-digit string correctly only a handful of times, and he had never remembered a ten-digit string correctly, so he had never even had a chance to try strings of eleven digits or longer. But he began that fifth session on a roll. He got the first three tries—five, six, and seven digits—right without a problem, missed the fourth one, then got back on track: six digits, right; seven digits, right; eight digits, right; nine digits, right. Then I read out a ten-digit number—5718866610—and he nailed that one as well. He missed the next string with eleven digits, but after he got another nine digits and another ten digits right, I read him a second eleven-digit string—90756629867—and this time he repeated the whole thing back to me without a hitch. It was two digits more than he had ever gotten right before, and although an additional two digits may not seem particularly impressive, it was actually a major accomplishment because the past several days had established that Steve had a “natural” ceiling—the number of digits he could comfortably hold in his short-term memory—of only eight or nine.

As he increased his memory capacity, I would challenge him with longer and longer strings of digits so that he was always close to his capacity. In particular, by increasing the number of digits each time he got a string right, and decreasing the number when he got it wrong, I kept the number of digits right around what he was capable of doing while always pushing him to remember just one more digit. This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve. The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of “practice” during that time, but he is no better at playing the piano than he was thirty years ago.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

While these words may not have legal, if not performative force, their imaginary force can be powerful. There are many other examples of how subjects make claims such as those who call upon authorities to inscribe digital rights through regulations and legislation and give them legal force. The declaration of the UN World Summit on the Information Society, and the International Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet that followed, are two examples of declarations. They pronounce digital rights claims such as the right to access, liberty, security and freedom of expression, or right to information, freedom from censorship or hate speech to right to privacy and data protection and many more (see Franklin [2013] for a detailed account of these declarations and claims).

It is also conceptually important in light of questions about the making and meaning of digital data for governing, research and other uses. To address these debates and questions we need a political and conceptual understanding of the acting subject and the power relations of which she is a part in the making of data of the city. Thus, rather than investigating digital rights in terms of their substance my focus is on who is the subject of these rights, or more precisely, who are constituting themselves as political subjects of especially data rights. 202 E. Ruppert The consideration of rights is important especially in relation to critiques of data-driven urban governance and what is commonly termed ‘smart cities’.

This follows a conception of the citizen advanced in critical citizenship studies, which positions the citizen beyond its modern configuration as simply a member of the nation-state (Clarke et al. 2014). Instead citizens are understood as subjects who make rights claims by contesting or struggling against existing regimes such that citizenship is a site of contestation rather than made up of bundles of given rights and duties. How then do subjects make digital rights claims and become digital citizens? Words are of course one way that they make claims to rights such as speech, access and privacy. As John Austin famously argued, language is a means of social action: it can be performative such that people do things with words (Austin 1962). However, making claims was not one of the five classes of speech acts (judgments, decisions, commitments, acknowledgements and clarifications) that he identified as having performative force.


pages: 397 words: 102,910

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

By November 2011, SOPA and PIPA had won the support of many groups: the Motion Picture Association of America, the US Chamber of Commerce, several major labor unions, the publisher Reed Elsevier, and many others. No significant public resistance or congressional opposition had emerged. Though certain tech companies, notably Google, had contributed money to anti-SOPA lobbying efforts, they were late to the game; in his book The Fight over Digital Rights, Bill D. Herman noted that, through mid-November 2011, proponents of SOPA and PIPA outspent the bill’s opponents by a six-to-one margin.60 On November 16, 2011, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on SOPA. Six witnesses were called to testify; the first was Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante.

., MIT Report, 68. 57 Brewster Kahle, “Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg Passes,” Brewster Kahle’s Blog, September 7, 2011, http://brewster.kahle.org/2011/09/07/michael-hart-of-project-gutenberg-passes/. 58 Tim Berners-Lee, “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,” Scientific American, December 2010, 80–85. 59 Moon, Ruffini, and Segal, Hacking Politics, 103. 60 Herman, Fight over Digital Rights, 196. 61 “Stop Online Piracy Act, Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 3261,” serial no. 112–154, November 16, 2011, 47. 62 Ibid., 99–100. 63 Ibid., 246. 64 Ibid., 245. 65 “American Censorship Day,” November 17, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20111117023831/http://americancensorship.org/. 66 Ibid., November 18, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20111118014748/http://americancensorship.org/. 67 Moon, Ruffini, and Segal, Hacking Politics, 117. 68 Brewster Kahle, “12 Hours Dark: Internet Archive vs.

The House of Harper: A Century of Publishing in Franklin Square. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912. Hatakenaka, Sachi. “Flux and Flexibility: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Evolving University-Industry Relationships in MIT, Cambridge, and Tokyo.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002. Herman, Bill D. The Fight over Digital Rights: The Politics of Copyright and Technology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. New York: Knopf, 1955. Holt, Henry. Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923. Imfeld, Cassandra Jacqueline. “Repeated Resistance to New Technologies: A Case Study of the Recording Industry’s Tactics to Protect Copyrighted Works in Cyberspace between 1993 and 2003.”


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The first principle is that each file, or whatever unit of information the thing is built of, exists only once. Nothing is ever copied. We are utterly familiar with that trio of activations, cut, copy, and paste. The right to copy files on the Internet is held up as a form of free speech in the digital rights community. The Internet has even been described as a giant copying machine.1 But copying on a network is actually rather odd and at the very least an extraneous, retro idea, if you think about it from first principles. After all, in a network, the original is still there. It’s a network! The idea that copying would no longer be needed in a networked world was almost impossible to convey for many years.

If you doubt the importance of that small change, just look at Google’s revenues, which are almost entirely based on putting links immediately in front of people. The real sophistication of Ted’s idea is how it would bring about a balance of rights and responsibility while at the same time reducing friction. That’s a rare, magical combination. Hackles in the digital rights movement are usually raised so high that it’s often hard to see past the fears. There’s an absurd but entrenched fear that any system other than anonymous copying would lead to an end to free speech. These fears only serve to blind. What we are familiar with today is not necessarily the best we can do.

If you are tracked while you walk around town, and that helps a government become aware that pedestrian safety could be improved with better signage, you’d get a micropayment for having contributed valuable data. Commercial rights are better suited for the multitude of quirky little situations that will come up in real life than new kinds of civil rights along the lines of digital privacy. There are always tricky questions about how to interpret a digital right. You probably agree that it’s still okay to be photographed in public, in a pre-network-age sense, but it also might feel creepy to have a multitude of automatically generated photographs collated in a remote server to generate a comprehensive record of everything you do in public. How do you draw the line between these two cases?


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Algorithmic Justice League ajl.org The Algorithmic Justice League is an organization that combines art and research to illuminate the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence. Backyard Basecamp backyardbasecamp.org (Re)connecting Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to land and nature in Baltimore City. Center for Digital Democracy democraticmedia.org CDD works to protect and expand digital rights and data justice through research-led initiatives designed to influence policy makers, corporate leaders, the news media, civil society, and the general public. Center for Humane Technology humanetech.org We reframe the insidious effects of persuasive technology, expose the runaway systems beneath, and deepen the capacity of global decision makers and everyday leaders to take wise action.

Parents Together parentstogether.org Dedicated to organizing and empowering parents. Raffi Foundation for Child Honoring raffifoundation.org Child honoring is a unique social change revolution, one with the child at its heart. It is a positive vision that holds the primacy of early years as key to activating the powerful potential of our species. Ranking Digital Rights rankingdigitalrights.org We evaluate and rank twenty-six of the world’s most powerful digital platforms and telecommunications companies on their disclosed policies and practices affecting users’ rights to freedom of expression and information and privacy. Share Save Spend sharesavespend.org The mission of Share Save Spend is to help individuals and families develop healthy money habits that honor their values and enhance their financial wellbeing.

Ferguson (1882), 158 Pokémon, 30, 84–85, 102–6, 185 branding and, 30 collectibles craze, 30, 84–85, 105–6 theme song chorus (“gotta catch ‘em all”), 30, 85 Pokémon GO, 102–4 Pokémon Oreos, 105–6 Pokémon Sleep, 103–5 Pokémon Smile, 105–6 Political Tribes (Chua), 61–62 pop-up ads (nagware), 46, 186–87, 189 poverty children and, 65 COVID-19 disparities, xv materialistic values and, 97 millennial families and, 121 precautionary principle, 38–39, 209 presidential branding, 67, 69–71 privacy Apple, 68 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), 135, 201–3 data mining, 47–48, 81 Echo Dot Kids Edition, 135–36 edtech and inBloom administrative platform, 233–34 Google tracking and data collection, 4, 177–78, 183 online behavior tracking, 47–49, 137, 177–78, 183 smart devices and surveillance/data collection, 36, 47, 133–36, 177–78 YouTube, 4, 47–48 Prodigy Education, 185–86 Prodigy English, 186 Prodigy (freemium math app), 181, 184–89, 192–94, 232–33 nagware and pressures to upgrade, 181, 186–87, 189 question of effectiveness at teaching math, 186, 187–89, 232 as social network, 189 professional organizations, corporate funding and, 238 progressive education Dewey’s philosophy of, 168–69 and personalized learning, 191–92 Psychological Science in the Public Interest (journal), 194–95 Psychology Today, 191 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 52–53 public education American democratic citizenship, 168–69, 172 Dewey’s philosophy of, 168–69 purpose of, 168–69, 172 See also edtech industry; schools, corporate advertising in public media (commercial-free), 52–53, 216 Publicis Groupe, 117 Punished by Rewards (Kohn), 191 puppet therapy, 3, 27 characters’ behavior as models for children, 20 and parasocial relationships, 143 video chats during COVID-19 pandemic, xiii, 33, 138, 194 push notifications, 46, 200, 204, 220–21 Pussy Cat Dolls, 4 Putnam, Robert, 132 racism, racial biases, and racial stereotypes, xv–xvi, 146–62 Alexa’s search feature, 151 algorithms and, xv, 146–53 children’s stories and racialized dolls and toys, 153–62 and COVID-19 pandemic, xiii–xiv and digital beauty filters, 153 Disney films, 159–60, 161 Google’s search engines, 146–51 name searches and search terms (e.g., “Black girls”), 146–47, 149–51 and postslavery history, 158–59 and social media sites, 151–53 white dolls and, 153–57 Radesky, Jenny, 119, 125 radio advertising (mid-twentieth century), 132 Raffi Foundation for Child Honoring, 258 Ranking Digital Rights, 258 reading books differences between using smartphones and, 126, 127–28, 132–33 e-books and e-readers, 132–33, 134, 221 reading to children, 132–33, 214 Reagan, Ronald, 29, 69, 166 Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Turkle), 133 Reinhard, Keith, 69 religious organizations and spiritual leaders, 71, 238–39 Reset Australia, 75 resistance parenting suggestions, 207–28 age-appropriate and commercial-free apps, 216–17 be wary of convenience, 222–2 family plan/agreement about tech use at home, 222 helping kids resist marketing-induced behaviors and values, 225–27 infants and toddlers, 212–14 middle childhood/elementary grades, 217–19 preschool and kindergarten, 214–17 reading to kids, 214 reducing your own time with tech, 220–21 screen time limits, 43, 53, 209–11, 213, 223 and six principles of child development, 209, 210–11 smartphones, 218, 220–21, 225 social media sites, 219 tech-free, commercial-free family time, 223–24 tech-free solutions to boredom, 224–25 tech-free time outdoors, 224 tech-free zones in the home, 224 things to consider in making decisions for your family about tech and commercial culture, 222–25 toys, 213–14 retail therapy, 90–91 Rethinking Schools, 170 Rewards external (material), 8, 97–102, 104–8, 193, 194 intermittent (persuasive design technique), 46–47, 185 and intrinsic motivation, 8, 97–103, 107–8 Rideout, Vicky, 1 Roblox, 218 Rodgers and Hammerstein, 90 Rogers, Fred, 3, 25 Roof, Dylann, 149 Rowling, J.K., 139n Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, 211 Rubenstein, Rheta, 186 Ryan’s World (Ryan’s ToysReview), 72, 204 Salesforce IoT, 45 same-sex marriage legalization, 230 Sanrio, 28 Scholastic, 170 schools, corporate advertising in, 163–80 Channel One News, 182–86 corporate-sponsored “educational” films (1950s), 182 corporate teaching materials (SEMS), 164–66, 169–80, 199 credit card companies and financial literacy materials, 172–75, 180 Disney, 164–65 fast food industry, 165, 167, 172, 180 financially-strapped schools, 166–67, 300–1n20 fossil fuel industry, 170–72, 179–80 Google’s Be Internet Awesome, 176–79 Impossible Foods, 175–76 instilling brand loyalty, 164, 165, 172, 184 local level efforts to change, 231–34 “partnerships,” 164, 167 science materials that deny climate change, 171–72 and true purpose of public education, 168–69, 172 See also edtech industry Schwartz, Shalom, 96 Scooby-Doo, 67 Scotland, 118 Screen Free Week, 234, 254 screen time, children’s, 39–43, 52–53, 118–19, 209–11, 213 babies’ and toddlers’ interaction with screens, 17–19, 39, 41–43, 213 and children of tech executives, 129, 218 and COVID-19 pandemic, 39–40 and language acquisition, 41–42 online videos, 40 recommendations, 43, 53, 209–11, 213, 215, 223 state bills to limit in early childhood settings, 204–5 touch screens, 40, 215 TV watching, 40, 42, 100 Screen Time Action Network at Fairplay, 234, 253 search engine optimization (SEO) companies, 148 search engines Alexa’s search feature, 151 algorithms and, 146–53 Google Search, 145–51 name searches and search terms, 146–47, 149–51 racial and ethnic biases, 146–53 and SEO companies, 148 Searle, Mike, 61 Sears catalog, 158–59 self-regulation, 21, 42, 193 SEMS (“Sponsored Educational Materials”), 164–66, 169–80, 199 financial literacy materials produced by credit card companies, 172–75, 180 and fossil fuel industry, 170–72, 179–80 Google’s Be Internet Awesome, 176–79 Impossible Foods and climate change education, 175–76 science materials that deny climate change, 171–72 See also schools, corporate advertising in Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention (1848), 230 The Sense of Wonder (Carson), 23 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 91 Sesame Street, 27, 131 Sesame Workshop, 52–53, 131 “7 Rings” (song), 90 sexualized toys, media, and clothing, 4, 26, 59, 85, 156 Share Save Spend, 258 Shell Oil Company, 165, 171, 182 Shenoy, Neal, 136 Shine, Nora, 232–33, 234 Shrek, 67, 142 Silent Spring (Carson), 23 Siri, 134 ŠKODA Auto, 117 slavery, 158–59, 230 sleep, 103–5, 224 digital devices and, 104, 224 Pokémon Sleep app, 103–5 slogans, advertising, xiv smart devices, 36–38, 45, 47, 133–41 Amazon’s Alexa, 133–34, 137–41, 151 Aristotle, 36–38 attachment and, 36–38, 141–43 digital personal assistants, 133–41, 151 and “dumb” watches, 220 Echo Dot Kids Edition, 134–41, 151 Internet of Things (IoT), 45, 47, 133 privacy and data collection, 36, 47, 133–36, 177–78 See also smartphones smartphones, 35, 45, 66, 100, 105, 126–28, 130–33 differences between reading books and using, 126, 127–28, 132–33 effect on conversations between parents and children, 130–31, 132–33 and internet access, 40–41 marketed to children, 130–31 parents’ and caregivers’ overuse of, 41, 125–27, 221 resistance parenting advice, 218, 220–21, 225 Snapchat, 5, 73, 152–53, 202, 204 social change, steps toward systemic, 198–99, 208, 229–40 at the local level, 231–35 Minnesota’s Digital Wellbeing Bill, 236–37 organizations working to change laws and policies, 231, 234–35 organizing screen-free weeks in communities, 234–35 religious organizations and spiritual leaders, 238–39 schools and school districts, 231–34 young people’s advocacy groups, 237–38 social media sites, 5–6, 40, 72–76, 151–53, 219 and adolescents’ mental health, 73–75, 219 algorithms and racial biases, 151–53 brand tribes and marketing, 63–65 girls and, 73–75 influencers, 5, 72, 86–88, 204 intermittent rewards, 46–47 “likes,” 46, 47, 63, 72, 73, 152, 153 resistance parenting recommendations, 219 self-branding, 5, 72, 76, 219 Somerville, Kyle, 158 The Sound of Music (film), 90 South Africa, 117 Spears, Britney, 3 Spiderman, 13, 67, 121 SpongeBob SquarePants, 138, 142 SpongeBob SquarePants Challenge, 139, 140 Sponsored Educational Materials.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Citizens in Iran, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines and many other countries regularly have their internet access surveilled or blocked.43 More recently, this dynamic has spread to liberal democracies. In many cases, their reasoning is understandable. European data protection laws, namely the General Data Protection Regulation – which imposes a strict set of rules on how companies collect and use data – is perhaps the best example: a benign attempt to protect citizens’ digital rights, which nonetheless places hard limits on how easily data can spread across the world. Elsewhere, governments’ actions have a more authoritarian tinge. India’s national e-commerce policy, for example, argues that ‘the data of a country is best thought of as a … national asset, that the government holds in trust’ – a statement that Barlow would likely have been appalled by.

Martin Tisné, of the charity and think tank Luminate, calls for three inviolable data rights: that people be secure against unreasonable surveillance; that no one should have their behaviour surreptiously manipulated by using data; and that no one should be unfairly discriminated against on the basis of data.40 How, precisely, to enshrine these rights is up for debate. We could try a digital bill of rights. In the vein of America’s Bill of Rights, or France’s Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a bill of digital rights would legally protect data subjects from the arbitrary will of corporations and governments. But a declaration of rights is a fundamentally reactive mechanism. While it would protect us from overbearing businesses and states, it would do little to entitle us to the true benefits of data. If we’re serious about rewiring the relationship between citizens and the market, we need to share the benefits data can bring more widely.

The world is developing faster than ever, and we need institutions that are sturdy enough to handle constant change. When we talk about new forms of welfare – the Danish ‘flexicurity’ model identified in Chapter 5, for example – we are trying to build systems that don’t collapse under the strain of a rapidly changing labour market. And when we emphasise the need for new digital rights for citizens, we are trying to create a bedrock of basic protections that will remain in place whatever direction the digital platforms develop in. These are only a couple of suggestions. All organisations will need to consider how to develop sturdy systems – designed with resilience in mind rather than with resilience as an afterthought.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

* * * Some tech billionaires, men – and it is men, who have made their fortunes out of the most ubiquitous of AI tools, algorithms – are trying to limit the damage to society they now perceive as a real threat. This isn’t because tech is, in and of itself, a threat – but because of how humans are using the powerful AI tool we have invented. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, has poured tens of millions into Luminate, a London-based organisation operating in 17 countries. Luminate invests in data and digital rights, financial transparency, power-to-the-people initiatives around tech, as well as supporting media that is independent of the fake news and propaganda regularly pumped like sewage through buzzfeeds into your phone. Working with Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz, Luminate wants governments to recognise independent journalism, in whatever medium, as a public good – and therefore deserving of public funds and public protection.

Luminate argues that data isn’t the new oil – an extracted raw material that powers our digital world – data is the new CO2 – a pollutant that affects everyone. We under-estimated the collective harm that data can have on societies. For example, the societal impact and harm caused by the Cambridge Analytica breach goes beyond the sum total of individual privacies breached. Martin Tisné – Managing Director, Data and Digital Rights, Luminate When you consider that 87 million individual privacies were breached in that harvesting scandal – that’s a big statement. But if customised political marketing based on intimate user-profiling can swing elections – as it did for Trump in 2016 – then the whole world is affected. If digital social passports become normal, and if such passports can be used to decide who goes where, who does what, gets what, pays what (China is mooting charging systems that offer discounts to exemplary citizens), then how we live changes collectively, as well as individually – and perhaps it will make us less compassionate too.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The real commercial value, according to Balsillie, is that “‘smart cities’ rely on IP and data to make the vast array of city sensors more functionally valuable, and when under the control of private interests, an enormous new profit pool.”33 In the year since the official announcement, it has become even clearer that Sidewalk Labs wants Toronto’s blessing, but it does not relish the city’s active involvement and oversight in the build-out and management of the smart neighborhood on the waterfront. Meanwhile, the ongoing negotiations between Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto, the development body for the site, have been steeped in secrecy. As Balsillie points out, Waterfront Toronto is an “unelected, publicly funded corporation with no expertise in IP, data or even basic digital rights … in charge of navigating forces of urban privatization, algorithmic control and rule by corporate contract.”34 By the closing days of 2018, the outlook for Sidewalk Labs’ smart city project seemed bleak, at least in its present articulation. The great fanfare that surrounded the initial announcement a year earlier had faded as doubts began to pile up among government officials and the general public.

See People’s Republic of China Cisco Citigroup Claassen, Utz climate change and freshwater and history of the Green New Deal and peer assembly governance and poverty and public health and stranded assets and wealth See also global warming; greenhouse gas emissions climate change policy and leadership climate-neutral 2050 game plan (European Union) Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Paris Agreement on Climate Change 20–20–20 mandate (European Union) Climate Corps climate strike (March 15, 2019) Clinton, Bill coal and carbon capture and storage as centralized source of energy costs of and First Industrial Revolution and Germany and Hauts-de-France (Green New Deal roadmap) and pension capital debate (1946) and railroads and South Korea and stranded assets and US public land Cohn-Bendit, Daniel cold war Commonwealth Edison Communication Internet Condorcet, Nicolas, Marquis de ConocoPhillips Conservation Corps Consoli, Angelo Cook, Tim Copenhagen Climate Summit Council of the European Union German presidency of Slovakian presidency of CPS Energy creative destruction Currie, Helen cyber war and cyber-attacks Daimler Trucks & Buses Data for Progress Davos (World Economic Forum) DC Infrastructure Academy De Blasio, Bill Di Lorenzo, Julie digital natives digital rights DowDuPont Inc. Dubai Economics of Clean Energy Portfolio, The (Rocky Mountain Institute report) Eisenhower, Dwight D. Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) electric vehicles autonomous (self-driving) electric vehicles charging stations for cost tipping point for and declining price of lithium batteries and employment and energy storage and government fuel economy standards and Green New Deal key initiatives investment in and Los Angeles’s Green New Deal and Mobility and Logistics Internet and peak oil consumption projected sales and sustainable community pilot projects tax incentives for electricity sector decoupling from fossil fuel industry and Great Disruption warning signs national smart grid See also coal; fossil fuel industry; natural gas; oil; solar and wind energy Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) EnBW Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) energy service companies (ESCOs) business model and investment in Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure transition main feature of and peer assembly governance and performance contracting top ten ENIAC (first electronic computer) E.ON Eugster, Chris European Commission European Greens European Parliament European People’s Party–European Democrats (EPP–ED) European Union and building retrofits Central Bank climate-neutral 2050 game plan Committee of the Regions Energy Performance of Buildings Directive A Green New Deal (declaration) A Green New Deal for Europe (European Greens report) Green New Deal Group Green New Deal origins taxation in Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure in and Toward a Transatlantic Green New Deal (German Green Party manifesto) 20–20–20 mandate European United Left–Nordic Green Left (GUE–NGL) Exelon Utilities Facebook Farmers Insurance Group Federal Housing Administration (FHA) feed-in tariffs Fields, Mark financial sector Bank of America Bank of England and stranded assets See also investment; pension funds Financial Stability Board (FSB) First Industrial Revolution and building sector definition of and family and kinship and fossil fuels ideological consciousness of infrastructure of and Morrill Land-Grant Acts (1862) and railroads and wealth First Nations 5G broadband Internet Fleissig, Will Ford, Gerald Ford, Henry Ford Motor Company Ford Smart Mobility River Rouge plant (Detroit) and union membership Fortune 500 companies fossil fuel industry collapse of decoupling of building sector from decoupling of electricity sector from decoupling of ICT and telecommunications sector from decoupling of transportation sector from infrastructure post-tax subsidies for See also coal; natural gas; oil; stranded assets Franklin, Benjamin French Revolution Friedman, Milton fuel-cell vehicles.


pages: 87 words: 25,823

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

In its most basic and limited form, cyberlibertarianism is sometimes summarized as the principle that “governments should not regulate the internet” (Malcolm 2013). This belief was articulated with particular force in the 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” written by the libertarian activist, Grateful Dead lyricist, and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder (EFF is a leading “digital rights” and technology industry advocacy organization) John Perry Barlow, which declared that “governments of the industrial world” are “not welcome” in and “have no sovereignty” over the digital realm. In practice, opposition to “government regulation of the internet” is best understood as a core (and in important ways vague) tenet, around which circulate greater and greater claims for the “freedom” created by digital technology.


pages: 347 words: 91,318

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

Antioco had cut a $50 million deal in 2000 with network provider Enron Broadband Services (EBS), a subsidiary of the Houston energy conglomerate Enron, to deliver Blockbuster movies into consumers’ homes via a new type of high-speed data lines called DSL, or digital subscriber lines. The twenty-year exclusive video-on-demand (VOD) deal was supposed to commence by year’s end with a selection of five hundred movie titles to which Blockbuster had obtained digital rights. The high-speed data was to be carried to televisions and PCs over DSLs that Enron could access as a result of its relationships with Verizon Wireless, Qwest Communications International, Covad Communications, TELUS, and ReFLEX. Movies would be priced the same as on cable VOD services. But less than a year later—after completing a three-month trial—the companies broke off the joint venture, with EBS complaining about the quality and selection of the movies and saying it wanted to pursue its own offering.

Consumers’ reactions to the infringement lawsuits and subsequent ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent ripples of fear through Hollywood. The lawsuits had prompted tens of millions of angry consumers to flock to video-sharing sites to exchange pirated files in protest. It was the first open public rebellion against companies that would try to manage digital rights tightly. The studios realized that high-speed Internet connections and consumers’ demands to use digital content where and when they wanted would lead to a spike in movie piracy unless a legal alternative emerged, so they got serious about finding that alternative. The first stab was a download venture sponsored by every major studio, except for Disney, called MovieFly, which faced significant technological obstacles—the least of which was the forty minutes it took to download a movie.


pages: 334 words: 102,899

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph

Airbnb, Apollo 13, crowdsourcing, digital rights, high net worth, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, Mason jar, pets.com, recommendation engine, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, Travis Kalanick

A few things were clear: The first was that the studios and networks were terrified of being “Napster-ed.” They’d watched the music industry fall victim to widespread piracy and cratered sales, so they weren’t very keen to give up digital rights. No matter how many assurances I gave them, they didn’t trust the digital future. The way they saw it, once TV shows and movies were digitized, they’d lose all control of their product—along with any ability to make money off it. The second was that hardware and software companies were going full speed ahead, digital rights be damned. Apple, Microsoft, and pretty much every other major computer company were working overtime to take advantage of the jumps in bandwidth speed, and were designing products that could conceivably deliver very large files—movie-sized files—directly into viewers’ homes.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

Megan Bourdon and Qayyah Moynihan, “One of the Largest Cities in France Is Using Drones to Enforce the Country’s Lockdown After the Mayor Worried Residents Weren’t Taking Containment Measures Seriously,” Business Insider, March 20, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-drones-france-covid-19-epidemic-pandemic-outbreak-virus-containment-2020-3; Helene Fouquet and Gaspard Sebag, “French Covid-19 Drones Grounded After Privacy Complaint,” Bloomberg, May 18, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/paris-police-drones-banned-from-spying-on-virus-violators.   23.  “COVID-19: The Surveillance Pandemic,” International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, accessed November 24, 2020, https://www.icnl.org/post/analysis/covid-19-the-surveillance-pandemic.   24.  Samuel Woodhams, “COVID-19 Digital Rights Tracker,” last modified March 25, 2021, https://www.top10vpn.com/research/investigations/covid-19-digital-rights-tracker/.   25.  Adrian Shahbaz and Allie Funk, Freedom on the Net 2020: The Pandemic’s Digital Shadow (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2020), 15, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2020–10/10122020_FOTN2020_Complete_Report_FINAL.pdf.   26.  

Patrick Howell O’Neill, “India Is Forcing People to Use Its Covid App, Unlike Any Other Democracy,” MIT Technology Review, May 7, 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/07/1001360/india-aarogya-setu-covid-app-mandatory/; Arshad Zargar, “Privacy, Security Concerns as India Forces Virus-Tracing App on Millions,” CBS News, May 27, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-india-contact-tracing-app-privacy-data-security-concerns-aarogya-setu-forced-on-millions/; Woodhams, “COVID-19 Digital Rights Tracker”; Anuradha Nagaraj, “‘Black Holes’: India’s Coronavirus Apps Raise Privacy Fears,” Reuters, August 26, 2020, https://in.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-tech-feature-idUSKBN25M1KE.   29.  Shahbaz and Funk, Freedom on the Net 2020, 18.   30.  “Mobile Location Data and Covid-19: Q&A,” Human Rights Watch, May 13, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/13/mobile-location-data-and-covid-19-qa; Shahbaz and Funk, Freedom on the Net 2020, 14.   31.  


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

You might begin to realize that if Facebook’s much-criticized privacy settings are overly complicated, they were designed that way—and that they could just as easily have been designed a different way, less favorable to advertisers and more favorable to users. Or you’d realize that black-box electronic voting machines are inherently untrustworthy, or how digital-rights copyright protection on e-books devalues the book by transforming it from a piece of personal property to a revokable license. Much as learning law gives students tools to think about justice, learning programming gives them tools to think critically about digital life. As Rushkoff puts it, “You gain access to the control panel of civilization. . . .

(It’s had concrete, positive effects: When Yahoo! later rolled out services in Vietnam, it assessed the country’s rights record and opted to locate its servers in Singapore, where they’d be out of reach of the dissent-crushing Vietnamese government.) The challenge, then, is to get people to care about their digital rights enough for governments, and companies, to respond to them. Here, too, there are glimmers of hope, in the way that citizens in Europe and the United States, aided by high-tech firms, have successfully fought ham-fisted legislation designed to let copyright holders knock Web sites and users they don’t like offline.


pages: 381 words: 112,674

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

But is it going to happen from a company that way overramps expenses? Has to get restarted? And you’re going to go through a lot of capital. It’s going to be slow. I think it’s going to be slow no matter what.” Dunlevie still liked the category, however. Artuframe’s missteps were merely operational, easily correctable. “They do have the digital rights to this massive number of impressions. And they have a framing factory, that if anybody cares about framing, these guys are the only guys that have that, too.” The company had twenty-eight thousand prints in its online catalog and were adding new images at the rate of five thousand each week.

Has he put his ass on the line to make this thing happen? Has he recruited a lot of people and got ’em all fired up about doing it? Is he thinking about the business clearly from a strategic perspective? Yeah.” “I don’t know enough about the business,” Harvey said, appearing to soften a bit. “I mean, I didn’t know they had these digital rights.” But when Kagle pressed him for what he’d do in Kagle’s position, Harvey lowered his voice and said, “I’d walk away.” Kagle turned to Rachleff. “I’d pull it and try to find a soft landing or help him with other financing, and feel shitty all the way. I had one of these situations once, where I didn’t pull it, and I should have.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

For example, personal data may be lawfully collected on the basis of consent or to perform a service, but also for other reasons including “where it is necessary to protect an interest which is essential for the life of the data subject or another individual” and for tasks carried out in the public interest. This creates the ability for the government to collect and gain access to personal data, but only when necessary. More important, EU residents are entitled to a new set of digital rights. Companies must inform users that their data are being collected, the purposes for which the data are being collected, and the entities the data will be shared with. Users have a right to obtain a copy of their data, to correct their data, to erase their data, and to remove their data from one company and give it to another.

Though each country will make its own choices, we can’t lose sight of the importance of forging common rules for the digital realm. Otherwise, we could end up in a situation in which China’s preference for state control will displace our long-standing commitment to an open internet, robust competition, and set of meaningful protections for digital rights. One common assumption about technology and geopolitics is that the world stage is a contest among China’s digital authoritarianism, America’s digital innovation, and Europe’s focus on regulation. This dynamic is what drives many tech leaders to warn about the “Chinese alternative” if regulation were to stifle innovation.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Bad Memories’, Prospect, August 1997, http://perma.cc/R89M-ZCST 96. Feinberg 1990, 255 97. in Europe, European Digital Rights acts as an umbrella organisation for more than 30 privacy and civil rights organisations; see https://edri.org/about/. Similar organisations in Asia, Africa and the Americas include the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org), Hiperderecho (www.hiperderecho.org) and Derechos Digitales (https://www.derechosdigitales.org). The African Declaration on Internet Rights (http://africaninternetrights.org) and RightsCon Manila (https://www.rightscon.org) bring together digital rights organisations from various parts of Africa and Asia 98. this is the so-called ‘Lebach judgement’ of 5 June 1973, http://perma.cc/2NHX-JBG6 99.

As a consequence, her “friends” and associates snub her; she is asked to resign her post as church leader; gossipmongers prattle ceaselessly about her; and obscene inscriptions appear on her property and in her mail.96 Such things could happen even before Facebook. Many admirable organisations now exist to defend our ‘digital rights’, but it is the circumstances that have changed, not the underlying rights. Those rights are not digital but human.97 Similarly, most jurisdictions recognise a right for people not to be obliged forevermore to declare their previous convictions. At its most trivial, this is the speeding points disappearing from your driving licence after some years have elapsed.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

After six months stringing together odd jobs from Craigslist, he got hired fulltime at Radical Designs, a worker-owned cooperative in Oakland that builds websites for social justice organizations. Roughly two years after that, Micah landed his dream job: doing web development for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy group. Micah’s infatuation with EFF had begun long before he landed in California. It dated to at least 2006, when an AT&T communications technician named Mark Klein brought proof to EFF that his employer was helping federal agents monitor Americans’ private conversations. EFF took up the whistleblower’s cause, suing the NSA.


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

It’s not a coincidence that Ver and Saverin are big names in the tech sector, an industry that is increasingly set on turning all commerce into a convenient, personalized service and “disrupting” traditional enterprise to be faster, cheaper, easier. Given these priorities, why wouldn’t citizenship come next? Ver’s cultural milieu of “solutionists” has emerged among today’s most vocal and powerful proponents of a border-free world of global citizens. John Perry Barlow, a founder of the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, warned governments of the world of their looming irrelevance in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which was published online in 1996. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” Barlow typed from a computer in Davos, Switzerland.


pages: 212 words: 49,544

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

It is also a resource for in-depth information on government transparency projects (see its “Third Party Websites That Transform Government Data” wiki page for more information: OpenCongress.org/ wiki/Third_Party_Websites_That_Transform_Government_Data). –– The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org). Founded in 1990, EFF is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States. Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, it is the leading organization defending individual civil liberties online. –– Public.Resource.org. A non-profit organization dedicated to publishing and sharing public domain materials in the United States whose motto is “Making Government Information More Accessible.” –– Civic Commons (CivicCommons.org).


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Karimkhany was concerned, but then an article appeared on Wired.com placing Swartz in Berlin. Without telling anyone, Swartz had gone to the Chaos Communication Congress, a popular hacker convention. “It kind of tweaked our noses,” Karimkhany said. As a former journalist, he suspects he would have approved Swartz’s trip, if only to bring in an interesting perspective on digital rights. But Swartz hadn’t asked. It looked like a giant fuck-you. When Swartz eventually returned, Karimkhany, a diplomat of a manager and an easy talker, sat down with him. He asked Swartz how the company could make his transition easier. Did he need more days away from the office? Did he want to work remotely?

At this time, Reddit was a list of links to elsewhere and didn’t host images itself, aside from tiny thumbnail images. They hustled to take down the thumbnails. The letter of the law made its enforcement difficult—specifically due to what it failed to address. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which had been signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1998, was straightforward about the digital rights of images taken by an individual: You owned your own photos. So takedown requests for Jennifer Lawrence’s selfies were honored, at least in theory. But what about the photos stolen from her phone clearly photographed by another individual? As Wong put it later, “Someone can take any terrible picture of you and you don’t have any rights.”


pages: 394 words: 110,352

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), collaborative editing, crowdsourcing, Debian, DevOps, digital divide, digital rights, do what you love, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, Guido van Rossum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, openstreetmap, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, software as a service, Stephen Fry, telemarketer, the long tail, union organizing, VA Linux, web application

Who Is This Book For? This book was written to be open and applicable to a wide range of communities. While O’Reilly is traditionally a computer book publisher, The Art of Community is not specifically focused on computing communities, and the vast majority of its content is useful for political groups, digital rights, knitting, and beyond. Within this wide range of possible communities, this book will be useful for a range of readers: Professional community managers If you work in the area of community management professionally Volunteers and community leaders If you want to build a strong and vibrant community for your volunteer project Commercial organizations If you want to work with, interact with, or build a community around your product or service Open source developers If you want to build a successful project, manage contributors, and build buzz Marketeers If you want to learn about viral marketing and building a following around a product or service Activists If you want to get people excited about your cause Every chapter in this book is applicable to each of these roles.

What intrigued me when I first walked into Neil’s living room was the concept of a collaboration-driven ethos, although at the time I had no idea what those words meant. What that experience taught, and what that evening inspired in me, was an excitement about what is possible when you get a group of people together who share a common ethos and a commitment to furthering it. In my world, that ethos has thus far been Free Culture, Free Software, digital rights, and breaking down the digital divide, but it can be as critical as creating world peace or as fanciful as sharing photos of kittens playing guitars on the Internet. The importance of community is not in the crusade, but in how you unify people to march forward together, side by side. At its heart, The Art of Community is a distilled set of approaches and thoughts about how to build community.

Many podcasts include interviews, reviews, features, debates, and other content. They vary hugely in both audio and content quality, and some podcasts have netted thousands of listeners. As I mentioned earlier in this book, I cofounded a podcast with some friends called LugRadio. The show was very specifically focused on open source and digital rights. It took a lighthearted and irreverent approach to the content, and we deliberately focused on making the content social, fun, and amusing. Each show presented a range of topics for discussion, and each of us would weigh in and share our thoughts, often resulting in raucous debate and discussion.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

He was a feverishly dedicated soldier in the open-source/code/Web movement, contributing to the creation of the Creative Commons licensing. (As a countermeasure to copyright, Creative Commons is a license structure designed for creators of content to freely share their material, allowing others to legally build on the work.) Later, Swartz was a general in the fight against Internet censorship, founding Demand Progress, a digital rights group that played a key role in defeating the Stop Online Piracy Act, a measure that sought to control which websites people could visit, proposed by Congress in 2012. His activism was fueled by the belief that all information necessary to make the world a better place should be free. In 2008 he penned the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, in which he clearly stated his beliefs: We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

This is because, however rigorously you might have managed to anonymize a data set, there is always the possibility that at some point in the future, it can be compared to some other data set that is released (or leaked) in a way that re-identifies it. In personal correspondence with us, Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and digital rights campaigner, explained how this could work: Imagine that the NHS releases prescription data with prescribing doctor, time and place—but not patient names. Then imagine that Uber or Transport for London has a leak that releases a large set of journeys. By correlating those journeys with prescriptions, you can probably re-identify a large number of people in the “anonymized” NHS data … The databases held by the likes of Amazon hold the seeds of personal destruction for millions of people—everything from buttplugs to fungal remedies to books about socialism or atheism to trusses.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Just a few wayward seconds—like Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” playing in the background of a video shot in a crowded bar—was enough to nuke a whole clip. In 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain complained that his political ads were being automatically removed because they contained brief clips from broadcast news. Digital rights activists gleefully reminded McCain that he’d voted the DMCA into law a decade earlier. Happily, a small reprieve from copyright laws would arrive later that year, following an epic legal battle between the artist formerly known as Prince and a 13-month-old baby. The baby had been marked as a “copyright violator” after his mother uploaded a video of him pushing a toy stroller and laughing as Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” played for precisely twenty seconds in the background.

Delaney, “YouTube to Test Software to Ease Licensing Fights,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2007, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118161295626932114. 226 John McCain complained: Sarah Lai Stirland, “YouTube to McCain: You Made Your DMCA Bed, Lie in It,” Wired, October 15, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/10/youtube-to-mcca/. 226 Digital rights activists: Ibid. 226 pushing a toy stroller: “‘Let’s Go Crazy’ #1,” YouTube video, 0:29, uploaded by Stephanie Lenz, February 7, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KfJHFWlhQ. 226 plead “fair use”: “Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.,” Harvard Law Review 129, no. 2289 (June 2016), https://harvardlawreview.org/2016/06/lenz-v-universal-music-corp/. 227 PhotoDNA: “New Technology Fights Child Porn by Tracking Its ‘PhotoDNA,’” Microsoft, December 15, 2009, https://news.microsoft.com/2009/12/15/new-technology-fights-child-porn-by-tracking-its-photodna/#sm.0001mpmupctevct7pjn11vtwrw6xj. 227 more than a million instances: Tracy Ith, “Microsoft’s PhotoDNA: Protecting Children and Businesses in the Cloud,” Microsoft, July 15, 2015, https://news.microsoft.com/features/microsofts-photodna-protecting-children-and-businesses-in-the-cloud/. 227 half of all American teenagers: Amanda Lenhart et al., “Social Media and Young Adults,” Pew Research Center, February 3, 2010, http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/02/03/social-media-and-young-adults/. 227 16-year-old Josh Evans: Lauren Collins, “Friend Game,” The New Yorker, January 21, 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/01/21/friend-game. 227 “meet a great girl”: Ibid. 227 “an online Frankenstein’s monster”: Ibid. 227 joined the Drew family: Ibid. 228 “You’re a shitty person”: Ibid. 228 convicted, but then acquitted: Kim Zetter, “Judge Acquits Lori Drew in Cyberbullying Case, Overrules Jury,” Wired, July 2, 2009, https://www.wired.com/2009/07/drew-court/. 228 Myspace was technically: “Woman Indicted in Cyber-Bully Suicide,” CBS News, May 15, 2008, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/woman-indicted-in-cyber-bully-suicide/. 229 “will not censor”: Sarah Jeong, “The History of Twitter’s Rules,” Motherboard (blog), Vice, January 14, 2016, motherboard.vice.com/read/the-history-of-twitters-rules. 229 “the free speech wing”: Josh Halliday, “Twitter’s Tony Wang: We Are the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party,” The Guardian, March 22, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech. 229 “honeypot for assholes”: Charlie Warzel, “‘A Honeypot for Assholes’: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure to Stop Harassment,” BuzzFeed, August 11, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/a-honeypot-for-assholes-inside-twitters-10-year-failure-to-s?


pages: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

But the money quote was in his press release: Law enforcement should have the power to stop the proliferation of guns with a simple Google search. And I had hoped we might be able to run out the clock on them. Cory Doctorow, the Canadian-British sci-fi author, journalist, and blogger, issued a response to this move. His species of response was, like those of the bloggers with a similar digital rights position, certainly sound enough: the politicians couldn’t really get their hands on 3D printers. It was right to assure people. But I thought the straight, pragmatic response missed the philosophical beauty of the scenario. Laws like the Undetectable Firearms Act and the proposed anti–printed gun bills to come were announced more as theater than anything else.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

Founded in 2015, it’s already live in Germany, Switzerland, Japan, and Canada, and hosts more than eight thousand sporting events a year for $20 a month, significantly less than the standard cable packages. “We’ve always had one eye on direct to consumer subscription play,” CEO James Rushton told Sportsmail. Much like Crunchyroll, DAZN is navigating the complexity of digital rights to bring compelling content to all sorts of new overseas markets. Lots of Canadians love the NFL. Lots of Japanese people love the NBA. Lots of Germans love English soccer (or football—forgive me, people of Britain). DAZN caters to those underserved markets. It helps that it’s well funded—it recently bought domestic rights to Japan’s top soccer league for close to $2 billion, and in Germany it won English and Champions League soccer rights away from some big cable companies.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

But if the work that volunteers were given didn’t advance the campaign’s field strategy—with specific goals and targets for having conversations with voters in key states—we’d successfully organize a lot of people but we wouldn’t be doing anything at scale to help Bernie win. It must have gone okay. Ten days later I was in Washington, DC, where I was attending a legal meeting for digital rights groups who were intervening on behalf of the FCC to defend net neutrality rules from a court challenge launched by big telecom. That’s when I got the call from Phil. I was on board what was then called the digital organizing team and incredibly grateful that Phil had given me the opportunity.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

To sell these tools to other foreign groups, cryptographic controls require sellers to obtain a license from Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which often grants them for four years or more, and asks only that sellers report biannual sales in return. Pen-testers, exploit brokers, and spyware makers argue encryption controls are adequate; digital rights activists call that ludicrous. Once it became clear the U.S. would not adopt Europe’s stricter rules, several spyware sellers and zero-day brokers moved from Europe to the United States and set up shop near their best customers around the Beltway. Between 2013 and 2016, the number of companies selling surveillance technology inside the United States doubled in size.

In the months after I published everything I knew about NSO—including the few details I had been able to gather about the company’s contracts in Mexico—my phone started buzzing with calls from an array of improbable targets: Mexican nutritionists, antiobesity activists, health policymakers, even Mexican government employees—all of whom reported receiving a series of strange, increasingly menacing text messages with links they feared might be NSO’s spyware. I convened with Mexican digital rights activists and Citizen Lab, which examined the messages and confirmed that each was an attempt to install Pegasus spyware. Other than being from Mexico, I struggled to make sense of what the callers had in common. Eventually, after some digging, I came to this: each had been a vocal proponent of Mexico’s soda tax, the first national soda tax of its kind.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

As a result, New Jersey alleged, some fourteen thousand subscribers unknowingly had their computers hijacked and turned into virtual slaves mining bitcoin. (The E-sports case was eventually settled, though the owner has admitted to participating in the scheme.) In January 2014 the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, took on Rubin’s case. On one hand, Tidbit indeed consisted of software that could in theory be used to mine bitcoins. On the other hand, as Rubin was quick to point out, users would have to opt in to such a program. More to the point, the Tidbit code had never been functional.


pages: 230 words: 76,655

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

* * * Make Sure Your List is Bigger Than Theirs Let’s say you are negotiating a book advance. They offer a $10,000 advance and they can’t budge higher. That’s fine. Now make your list of other things: how much social media marketing will they do? What bookstores will they get you into? Who has control over book design? What percentage of foreign rights, of digital rights, can you get? Do royalties go up after a certain number of copies are sold? Will they pay for better book placement in key stores? Will they hire a publicist? And so on. Make a list before every negotiation. Make the list as long as possible. If your list is bigger than theirs (size matters), then you can give up “the nickels for the dimes.”


pages: 260 words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Scratch those nine, leaving eighty-one. The grand total is 100 + 90 + 81 = 271. ? A book has N pages, numbered the usual way, from 1 to N. The total number of digits in the page numbers is 1,095. How many pages does the book have? Every page number has a digit in the units column. With N pages, that’s N digits right there. All but the first 9 pages have a digit in the tens column. That’s N − 9 more digits. All but the first 99 pages have a digit in the hundreds column (accounting for N − 99 more digits). I could go on, but not many books have more than 999 pages. A book with 1,095 digits in its page numbers won’t, anyway.


pages: 237 words: 74,109

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

It was perhaps a symptom of my myopia, my sense of security, that I was not thinking about data collection as one of the moral quandaries of our time. For all the industry’s talk about scale, and changing the world, I was not thinking about the broader implications. I was hardly thinking about the world at all. * * * I went to the symphony with my friend Parker, a digital-rights activist I knew from New York. Parker worked for a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties—privacy, free expression, fair use—that had been founded in the nineties by utopian technologists with a cyberlibertarian bent. It was, in a sense, the ecosystem’s anchor to history. The office was cluttered with dusty servers and outdated computers running creaky open-source software.


pages: 371 words: 78,103

Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers by Michael Schrenk

Amazon Web Services, corporate governance, digital rights, fault tolerance, Firefox, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, new economy, pre–internet, SpamAssassin, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, web application

Talk to a qualified attorney before you need one. If Internet law is appealing to you or if you are interested in protecting your online rights, you should consider joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). This group of lawyers, coders, and other volunteers is dedicated to protecting digital rights. You can find more information about the organization at its website, http://www.eff.org. Appendix A. PHP/CURL REFERENCE This appendix highlights the options and features of PHP/CURL that will be of greatest interest to webbot developers. In addition to the features described here, you should know that PHP/CURL is an extremely powerful interface with a dizzying array of options.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Freada left in 1987 and created a consultancy offering training on workplace bias. But the progressive culture they set in motion continued. After Lotus, Mitch went back to bouncing around. He developed a program called Agenda, which Lotus distributed. He moved to San Francisco and co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization that defends civil liberties, sort of a version of the ACLU for cyberspace. Mitch began investing in start-ups and had a sharp eye for picking winners. He put seed money into Dropcam, which was acquired by Google, and Twilio, which went public and now has a market value of nearly $4 billion.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Though Lotus made its first program for Apple computers, it scored a runaway hit with Lotus 1-2-3, the first electronic spreadsheet with graphics. The app worked with early versions of Microsoft operating systems running on IBM personal computers, and it gave many people the first compelling reason to buy a PC. It also earned Kapor enough money to fully fund the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group that had saved Phrack’s editor from jail. A few miles away, people who tended to dwell further right on the ideological spectrum were tinkering more quietly. Founded in 1948 by two MIT professors and a former student, BBN Technologies specialized in acoustical engineering before taking on more Pentagon contracts and moving into networking.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

As Ansip ruefully noted, perhaps borrowing from the experience of his country under Soviet occupation, “fake news is bad, but the Ministry of Truth is even worse.”33 As the Economist drily reminds us, “it’s no longer 2005”—and in a world in which violent fanatics of every stripe are actively recruiting on the internet, “legislators must strike a balance between security and liberty.”34 Measures sterner than self-regulation are certainly needed. “Facebook will be driven to remove content only if it could hurt its profit margin,” notes one digital rights activist in Brussels.35 And this is supported by a May 2017 Guardian report that quotes an internal Facebook document saying that moderators should block or hide Holocaust-denial material only if “we face the risk of getting blocked in a country” or face “a legal risk.”36 The Guardian found that Facebook actually hides or removes Holocaust-denial material only in the four countries where it fears it could be sued for the publication of this content: France, Germany, Israel, and Austria.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

The middle-class and even wealthy community that Whole Earth cultivated had already shunned the poor and people of color, and they were primed to buy into the right-wing ideologies of the 1980s and beyond. John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1990—a non-profit that took a libertarian approach to digital rights—believed that government had no authority over what happened on the internet. In 1996, he released an influential essay from Davos, Switzerland, called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” in which he positioned governments as the enemy of the public, and especially of the communities and marketplaces being established on the internet, even though the government had funded the creation of the very network that make those interactions possible.


pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

In 2001, Napster had already disrupted the music business, and there was no safe, easy, legitimate way to buy music online. While Apple’s Steve Jobs set out to recruit music companies and artists to offer their songs for sale on iTunes, Sony announced it would go forward with a proprietary format called Pressplay. Apple announced a rival technology called FairPlay. Both Pressplay and FairPlay protected the digital rights of any song bought online. But there was a critical difference. Sony’s Pressplay would only play authorized, protected files, but Apple’s FairPlay would protect files bought in their store, and also play any file in a user’s existing library. This made Apple’s platform more valuable, because users did not have to start from scratch to build a music library.


pages: 313 words: 95,077

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

Second, he recognized that treating the internet as some sort of separate space—cyberspace, as it was often called—was part of the problem. That word, coined by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, refers to a kind of alternate reality mediated by the world’s communications networks. The cyberspace of Neuromancer is a visual representation of all the world’s data; John Perry Barlow, a digital rights activist, later used the word to refer to the social spaces of the internet. Whether visual or social, though, the basic sense of cyberspace was that it was a world separate and apart from the real world. The predicted end point of this process was a progressive disassociation of social life from real space, leading to the death of cities as the population spread out to more bucolic spots.


pages: 374 words: 94,508

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

However, some unique concepts and focus areas from these disciplines CDOs might consider incorporating into their overall information management approach include:13 Specifications concerning the capture or entry and validation of content, Storing content in an optimal format/structure, Content classification, Content findability, searchability, and discovery, Digital rights and digital signatures, Content as a service, Content versioning and derivatives, and Collaboration among users in terms of: 1) document workflows and 2) joint content creation and editing. Very few CDOs also oversee content management, but in the realm of overall enterprise information management, it makes sense that they should.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Often, it isn’t a sudden and violent coup that kills democracy, but the slow and steady erosion of rights and freedoms that opens the door to autocracy by habituating the public to their loss. Such a loss is what Tope Ogundipe resisted in her work with Paradigm, a pan-African organization at the forefront of digital rights. Her mission, as the chief operations officer, was protecting Nigerians’ freedom online. Safeguarding these rights requires constant vigilance which, she explained to us, is what taught her the importance of civic engagement.71 WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR HOLDING THE POWERFUL ACCOUNTABLE In December 2015, Nigerian senator Bala Ibn Na’Allah introduced a new law to limit freedom of expression online.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Before embarking publicly on the massive scanning of library collections without permission, Google launched what it called its “partner program.” Inspired by Amazon’s success in book sales online, beginning in early 2003 Google began negotiating with commercial and academic publishers to secure digital rights for what was initially called Google Print. The terms of access to the millions of book-page images Google collected depended on the particular wishes of the publishers. Some titles offered nearly full-text access. Others offered only excerpts. In general, users could view only a few pages of a book at a time, and they could not copy, print, or download the images.


pages: 411 words: 95,852

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

In Britain, where the web was expanding rapidly, it was noted that the dire warnings of social catastrophe were matched by cyber-evangelists proclaiming the reverse. ‘The most transforming technological event since the capture of fire’ was how John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and digital rights activist, described the development of the Internet. The writer Howard Rheingold, one of the first to log on to an online community in San Francisco in the mid-1980s, claimed to have been ‘participating in the self-design of a new kind of culture’. In his book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Rheingold wrote of how he had plugged his computer into his telephone and made contact with the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a very early email network.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

http://www.outlookindia.com/news/article/bangalore-south-chosen-forvvpat-system-for-ls-polls/835552 20. 2 March 2009. ‘The new voting machine: Totalizer’. Indian Express. http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/the-new-voting-machine-totalizer/429666/ 11 March 2009. ‘No E-Voting In Germany’. European Digital Rights. http://history.edri.org/edri-gram/number7.5/no-evoting-germany 21. Kumar, Vikram. 13 August 2013. ‘Delhi hit by massive poll scam: Election commission unearths 13 lakh bogus voters and over 80,000 valid voter cards for dead people’. Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2392340/Delhi-hit-massive-poll-scam-Election-commission-unearths-13-lakh-bogus-voters-80-000-valid-voter-cards-dead-people.html 22.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

To narrow the disconnect between the money earned for live events and that earned from recorded music, record companies will have to change their business model, which typically prohibits the resale of live recordings. Alternatively, artists could become more independent of their labels. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke advises young musicians, “First and foremost, you don’t sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights….If you’re an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment. Then again, I don’t see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway.” Most music superstars still sign on with one of the three major record companies (Universal, Warner, or Sony) or one of the large indie labels.


pages: 353 words: 110,919

The Road to Character by David Brooks

Cass Sunstein, coherent worldview, David Brooks, desegregation, digital rights, Donald Trump, follow your passion, George Santayana, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, New Journalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, you are the product

Talese, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. RANDOM HOUSE, AN IMPRINT AND DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC AND CURTIS BROWN LTD.: “Leap Before You Look” from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, copyright © 1945 and copyright renewed 1973 by W. H. Auden. Print rights throughout the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and digital rights throughout out the world administered by Curtis Brown Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC and Curtis Brown Ltd. All rights reserved. RANDOM HOUSE, AN IMPRINT AND DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC: Excerpt from Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith, copyright © 2012 by Jean Edward Smith.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

Tessler—“who called Michael every day and said, ‘I’m calling you because I don’t want you to think no one calls you.’ Michael didn’t want to go back to law. He just didn’t know what he wanted to do.” Another close friend, prominent attorney Howard Weitzman, who is known in Los Angeles as an attorney for Hollywood celebrities, had participated in the launch of a software digital rights business, Massive Media, and in late 1999 Kassan was recruited. Kassan was enthused about the media and marketing business and intrigued because he saw Massive Media as a vehicle to broaden his expertise. “It gave me exposure to what was happening in the digital sphere,” Kassan says. His task, Weitzman says, was to boost sales and help shape business strategy.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Companies should be prepared to make themselves open to algorithmic audits, as suggested by mathematician and Big Tech critic Cathy O’Neil, in case of complaints or concerns about algorithmic bias that could allow for discrimination in the workplace, healthcare, education, and so on.7 Individuals should also have their digital rights legalized. Former Wired editor John Battelle has proposed a digital bill of rights that would assign possession of data to its true owner, which is, of course, the user and generator of that data, not the company that made off with it. He believes this notion should be so central that it should be enshrined as an amendment to the Constitution.


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

A British couple in their thirties—David (a poet and practitioner of the Israeli martial art Krav Maga) and Hannah, who described themselves as ‘voluntaryists’—wanted see if Liberland was really viable. (Voluntaryism sounds kinder than anarcho-capitalism, but it’s essentially the same thing.) Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Pirate Party movement, and a well-known digital-rights activist, had flown in from his native Sweden. There were also a handful of local Croats, people who think Liberland could help the struggling region. One person, however, was notably absent. ‘Our president is in exile!’ announced Damir Katusic as this rabble of freedom-lovers assembled in the main hall.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Sharp, ‘Summary report of the ITU-T World Conference on International Telecommunications’, Internet Protocol Journal 16, no. 1 (2013), https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/press/internet-protocol-journal/back-issues/table-contents-59/161-wcit.html; K. Salaets, ‘A blow to internet freedom’, Information Technology Industry Council, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20170805165237/https://www.itic.org/news-events/techwonk-blog/a-blow-to-internet-freedom 14G. Guillemin, ‘WCIT: what happened and what it means for the internet’, European Digital Rights, 2012, https://edri.org/edrigramnumber10-24wcit-what-happend/ 15D. Shambaugh, China Goes Global: the partial power, New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 137. 16Human Rights Watch, The Costs of International Advocacy: China’s interference in United Nations human rights mechanisms, Washington DC: Human Rights Watch, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/09/05/costs-international-advocacy/chinas-interference-united-nations-human-rights 17‘W3C invites Chinese web developers, industry, academia to assume greater role in global web innovation’, W3C, 20 January 2013, https://www.w3.org/2013/01/china-host.html.en 18Internet Society, ‘Successful IETF meeting reflects growing contribution of Chinese engineering’, Internet Society Newsletter 9, no. 11 (2010), https://web.archive.org/web/20120924171300/http://www.internetsociety.org/articles/successful-ietf-meeting-reflects-growing-contribution-chinese-engineering 19‘ICANN Engagement Center to open in Beijing’, ICANN, 8 April 2013, https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/press-materials/release-08apr13-en.pdf 20‘ICANN hires domain name policy expert to head engagement in China’, ICANN, 30 March 2017, https://www.icann.org/resources/press-material/release-2017-03-30-en 21J.


pages: 426 words: 117,775

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

On the one hand, parenting organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics match the view of the parents and teachers quoted here in their focus on protecting children from what is considered harmful media content, however that is culturally defined.23 Methods for implementing this protection are sometimes individual but often include government regulation or technical solutions such as content filtering. On the other hand, Papert and OLPC’s view matches the stance often taken in the US technology industry and championed by the digital-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation that any attempt at censorship—even of content that is widely considered reprehensible or on behalf of audiences that are widely considered vulnerable—is technically bound to fail due to the abundance of technological workarounds (as the failures of Paraguay Educa’s filters show) and legally could lead to a slippery slope that begets more censorship.24 Some who hold this latter view advocate for self-regulation, as Papert did in the interview above.


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

It also controlled a large amount of sports rights and had exclusive distribution deals with HBO in the UK and Germany. The architects of the British company’s Now TV streaming service—widely seen as the best in class of the European field—would apply their skills across the pond. One reason Comcast was not yet pushing to demolish its existing model is that it controlled TV and digital rights to large-scale events like the Olympic Games. Traditional gauges of Olympics viewing show their numbers are slipping, but social media has helped them continue to be one of the last global watercooler properties in media. NBCUniversal has held exclusive U.S. broadcast rights since 1988, shelling out more than $12 billion since 2011 to lock them up through 2032.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

The social and legal systems that have dealt so effectively with human rule breakers will fail in unexpected ways in the face of thinking machines. A machine that thinks won’t always think in the ways we want it to. And we’re not ready for the ramifications of that. ELECTRIC BRAINS REBECCA MACKINNON Director, Ranking Digital Rights Project, New America Foundation; cofounder, Global Voices; author, Consent of the Networked The Chinese word for computer translates literally as “electric brain.” How do electric brains “think” today? As individual machines, still primitively by human standards. Powerfully enough in the collective.


pages: 440 words: 128,813

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg

carbon footprint, citizen journalism, classic study, deindustrialization, digital rights, fixed income, gentrification, ghettoisation, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, loose coupling, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, postindustrial economy, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, urban renewal, War on Poverty

During Sandy, emergency workers in New York and New Jersey were unable to communicate with colleagues who came from other states, because there’s no nationwide network for first responders, and those from outside the region depended on cellular networks that were down. “Good public policies could potentially make these new networks much more resilient,” Harold Feld, the senior vice-president of the digital-rights advocacy group Public Knowledge, says. The networks he envisages are flexible and have redundancies: “They can back each other up.” Smart phones give the networks additional capacities for emergency communications, such as reverse-911 messaging that can be sent from government agencies to all customers in zip codes where dangerous weather is approaching, with geographically specific instructions on whether to evacuate or how to stay safe.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The ones that do are often obliged under contract not to reveal what their share is.158 That is an ingenious way for the platform to cripple any opportunity for them to unite to organize for better terms.159 Even some progressive voices trivialize the value of ordinary Internet users’ work and play. When one gadfly called Google out as a parasite extracting value created by others, law professor and digital rights activist Lawrence Lessig answered: “In the same sense you could say that all of the value in the Mona Lisa comes from the paint, that Leonardo da Vinci was just a ‘parasite’ upon the hard work of the paint makers. That statement is true in the sense that but for the paint, there would be no Mona Lisa.


pages: 457 words: 126,996

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

Although a single-purpose device is useful for people who do not want to deal with configuring or managing a more general computer, many technologists see this confinement as an arbitrary abridgment of their fundamental right to use their property as they choose. They also see jailbreaking as an appealing challenge, as if the company created a special puzzle for them to solve. George “geohot” Hotz first earned the accolades of hackers and some digital rights advocates in 2007 after being the first hacker, at the age of seventeen, to carrier unlock the iPhone. Then in late 2009, he put PlayStation 3 (PS3), the popular game console made by Sony, on his technical agenda. Hotz and an anonymous team called “fail0verflow” (unassociated with Anonymous) managed to break the lock in just five weeks.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

It is well-documented, for example, that in titling programs, male members of the household often receive title when land relations are formalized at the expense of females; and collective use rights are regularly sidelined in favor of individualized property rights, which give the select few the opportunity to monetize the assets in question for personal gain.28 There is no reason to believe that the digitization of claims will be any different—and these digital rights will now be eternalized in immutable code. It should be clear by now that the digital space is not flat. For every new digital platform that is created, access and control rights over a “defined space” need to be allocated. The challenges that the digital coders face are therefore no different from those that societies governed by the legal code have been wrestling with for centuries.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

If it is true—as the Internet Archive, a competitive book digitizer, claims—that the settlement grants Google immunity from copyright infringement, will the courts permit this? What of so-called orphaned books, those whose copyright owners can’t be identified—does Google, as it claims, get to own the digital rights? Will there be any regulation of the prices Google may charge libraries and colleges for access to digitized books? What will be the outcome of new lawsuits challenging this and other aspects of the settlement? And what impact would the publishing accord have on the Viacom lawsuit and Google’s dealings with other media companies seeking compensation for their content?


pages: 567 words: 122,311

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

We talked with Carlos Pacheco, Digital Director at Just For Laughs, about his job monetizing Gags TV, the show’s YouTube channel. The Decline of Existing Channels “Until recently, the Gags TV series was primarily funded (and profitable) in the old-fashioned TV way,” Carlos explains. “With every new season, the TV and digital rights would be sold to local and international TV networks, which has kept the series going since its start 12 years ago.” But recently, producers saw a decline in licensing prices—basically, TV networks were no longer willing to pay the prices they had in the past. The show has had a YouTube channel since 2007, but it didn’t have much content and wasn’t being regularly maintained.


pages: 437 words: 132,041

Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital rights, Edward Thorp, family office, forensic accounting, game design, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, Myron Scholes, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, random walk, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, SETI@home, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, two and twenty

This happened because computers are working at different speeds on different sections of the number line at the same time, so it is possible that primes in higher sections will be discovered before primes in lower ones. GIMPS’s message of mass voluntary cooperation for scientific advancement has made it an icon of the liberal web. Woltman has unintentionally turned the search for primes into a quasi-political pursuit. As a mark of the symbolic importance of the project, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights campaign group, has since 1999 offered money for each prime whose digits reach the next order of magnitude. The 45th Mersenne prime was the first to hit ten million digits and the prize money won was $100,000. The EFF is offering $150,000 for the first prime with 100 million digits, and $250,000 for the first prime with a billion digits.


pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Congress—both of the major parties—by lobbyists and campaign contributions. Any notion of public benefit was very nearly steamrolled by a rushed push to vote on the bill with minimal expert or public input. PPF’s mission is to increase civic engagement over the Web, so we believe in strong net freedom and digital rights. Since Nov. 26, 2011—American Censorship Day, protesting the bills—pages with SOPA info on OC received over seven hundred thousand views and PIPA over two hundred fifty thousand—totaling over a million pageviews combined. Since its introduction in October 2011, SOPA info has received over eight hundred fifty thousand pageviews; PIPA info, since May 2011, approx. three hundred fifty thousand pageviews; totaling 1.2 million pageviews on OpenCongress.


pages: 525 words: 149,886

Higher-Order Perl: A Guide to Program Transformation by Mark Jason Dominus

always be closing, Defenestration of Prague, digital rights, Donald Knuth, functional programming, higher-order functions, Isaac Newton, Larry Wall, P = NP, Paul Graham, Perl 6, slashdot, SpamAssassin

Otherwise, change the current number to 0 and continue. If you fall off the left end, then the sequence was the last one. This algorithm should sound familiar, because you learned it a long time ago. It’s exactly the same as the algorithm you use to count: 210397 210398 210399 210400 210401 ...... To increment a numeral, scan the digits right to left. If you find a digit that you can legally increment (that is, a digit that is less than 9) then increment it, and stop; you are finished. Otherwise, change the digit to 0 and continue leftwards. If you fall off the left end, it’s because every digit was 9, so that was the last number. (You can now extend the number by inferring and incrementing an unwritten 0 just past the left end.)


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

And she was more than willing to pay the price, quite literally—her home was swamped with miscellaneous merchandise that more often than not carried no practical use whatsoever, but Aiko didn’t mind. Since that day she first heard his music, she’d spent countless hours digging through online archives devoted to her musical savior. Hiroshi had authorized the digital rights to all of his songs, videos, photos, and other ephemera to a tech company called Viberz many years ago. Viberz digitized and indexed all official Hiroshi-related materials, making them available for licensing to other entertainment projects. As a result of her zeal, Viberz had chosen Aiko as one of the beta users of its mysterious new project, “historiz.”


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

In keeping with the soft technological determinism of Google founder Eric Schmidt and his ideas director Jared Cohen (a political scientist), many observers are sure that “the new digital age” is “reshaping the future of people, nations and business.”1 Integral to this idea of a digital world is the notion of smart cities, which are presumed to have the potential to give new meaning to the idea of digital rights and to promote intercity cooperation. Do they? Let me pose the question this way: Can the ubiquitous technology that everywhere promises digital Nirvana actually further the goal of global networking and the governance of mayors? Or is it burdened by too many of the weaknesses that have stymied technocrats, too many of the failed promises that have repeatedly disappointed the techno-zealots yearning for transfiguration by engineering?


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

John Locke argued that this relationship is unfair and unbalanced, and that governments derive their authority from the “consent of the governed.” This notion fueled the English, French, and American revolutions, and led to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the US Bill of Rights. In her book Consent of the Networked, journalist and digital rights advocate Rebecca MacKinnon makes this point: “No company will ever be perfect—just as no sovereign will ever be perfect no matter how well intentioned and virtuous a king, queen, or benevolent dictator might be. But that is the point: right now our social contract with the digital sovereigns is at a primitive, Hobbesian, royalist level.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

After decades of successfully preventing any of its facilities from organizing in the US, Amazon now saw surging interest in the prospect among its employees. Multiple facilities, from Chicago to Southern California to Alabama, had experimented with organizing efforts. In 2019, Amazon workers, immigrant groups, and digital rights organizations formed the Athena Coalition to push back on the e-commerce powerhouse. Talk of unions was rippling across the country—so much so that Amazon felt compelled to launch internal programs to surveil closed employee Facebook groups and private email listservs. It wasn’t just a lack of Covid safety, or even worker safety, per se.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Doing so makes it vastly more difficult for somebody to intercept and read your e-mail in transit; otherwise, any message you send is as if it were written on a postcard freely accessible to anybody who sees the traffic as it flows around the Internet, such as the local Starbucks Wi-Fi connection you use. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights and privacy advocacy group, has also launched a program known as HTTPS Everywhere to promote the use of encryption in all our Internet browser traffic. In short, it’s high time to encrypt the Internet to help protect the privacy and security of our digital communications and computer data. Though modern computer operating systems, including those from both Microsoft and Apple, come with free hard disk encryption tools built in, they are not turned on by default, and only a small minority of companies and a tiny percentage of consumers encrypt the data on their laptops or desktops.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Pompeo, Secretary of State, “Welcoming the United Kingdom Decision to Prohibit Huawei from 5G Networks,” news release, July 14, 2020, https://www.state.gov/welcoming-the-united-kingdom-decision-to-prohibit-huawei-from-5g-networks (page discontinued). 108China has held training sessions and seminars: Shahbaz, Freedom on the Net 2018. 108two-week “Seminar on Cyberspace Management”: Andrew Chatzky and James McBride, “China’s Massive Belt and Road Initiative,” Council on Foreign Relations, updated January 28, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative. 109“socialist journalism with Chinese characteristics”: Shahbaz, Freedom on the Net 2018. 109Chinese media conferences: Shahbaz, Freedom on the Net 2018. 109how to “guide public opinion”: He Huifeng, “In a Remote Corner of China, Beijing Is Trying to Export Its Model by Training Foreign Officials the Chinese Way,” South China Morning Post, July 14, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2155203/remote-corner-china-beijing-trying-export-its-model-training. 109restrictive media and cybersecurity laws: Shahbaz, Freedom on the Net 2018. 109officials attended Chinese seminars: David Gilbert, “Zimbabwe Is Trying to Build a China Style Surveillance State,” Vice, December 1, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59n753/zimbabwe-is-trying-to-build-a-china-style-surveillance-state. 109sweeping cybersecurity law: Gilbert, “Zimbabwe Is Trying to Build a China Style Surveillance State”; Tawanda Karombo, “Zimbabwe Is Clamping Down on Social Media Use with a Cyber Crime Bill Set to Become Law,” Quartz Africa, October 9, 2019, https://qz.com/africa/1724542/zimbabwe-bill-clamps-down-on-social-media-porn-with-china-tech/; “Zimbabwe’s Cybersecurity and Data Protection Bill Entrenches Surveillance,” Africa Freedom of Expression Exchange, May 19, 2020, https://www.africafex.org/digital-rights/cybersecurity-and-data-protection-bill-entrenches-surveillance. 109proliferation of Chinese-style state surveillance: Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Dealing with Demand for China’s Global Surveillance Exports (Brookings Institution, April 2020), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/FP_20200428_china_surveillance_greitens_v3.pdf. 109view China’s model of digital authoritarianism favorably: Jessica Chen Weiss, “Understanding and Rolling Back Digital Authoritarianism,” War on the Rocks, February 17, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/02/understanding-and-rolling-back-digital-authoritarianism/. 109Carnegie’s AI Global Surveillance Index: Feldstein, “The Global Expansion of AI Surveillance,” 10. 109London: Paul Bischoff, “Surveillance Camera Statistics: Which Cities Have the Most CCTV Cameras?”


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Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Spirit animal: Black bear * * * Alexis Ohanian Alexis Ohanian (TW/IG: @alexisohanian, alexisohanian.com) is perhaps best known for being a co-founder of Reddit and Hipmunk. He was in the very first class of Y Combinator, arguably the world’s most selective startup “accelerator,” where he is now a partner. He is an investor or advisor in more than 100 startups, an activist for digital rights (e.g., SOPA/PIPA), and the best-selling author of Without Their Permission. “You Are a Rounding Error” “[I had] an executive at Yahoo! who brought me and Steve in [for a potential acquisition discussion]—this was early in Reddit—and told us we were a rounding error because our traffic was so small. . . .


Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

Contributor Bio Ricardo Amaro is currently performing senior site reliability engineering functions in Acquia, one of the largest companies in the world of Free Software with around 20,000 servers in production. Ricardo is president of ADP — Associação Drupal Portugal and had his first contact with open technologies and especially Linux in the ’90s. Ricardo started applying Agile techniques and encouraging the DevOps culture very early. He is also a passionate advocate of free software, digital rights, and is a frequent speaker at IT events. 1 Ben Treynor Sloss, Google Engineering. 2 Russell, S. J. and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence — A Modern Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2003, Chapter 2. 3 Definition proposed by Tom Mitchell in 1998, Machine Learning Research. 4 DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence company founded in September 2010.


pages: 706 words: 237,378

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn

airport security, Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, Columbine, digital rights, epigenetics, fear of failure, Higgs boson, impulse control, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, medical residency, mirror neurons, New Journalism, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, traumatic brain injury, Whole Earth Catalog, Yogi Berra

Reprinted by permission Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpts from “Burnt Norton” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and copyright renewed © 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Rights outside of the United States and digital rights are controlled by Faber and Faber Limited. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Faber and Faber Limited. eISBN: 978-0-345-53972-4 www.bantamdell.com Cover design: Beverly Leung v3.1 This book describes the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

How should we react?” There were certainly those. We turned our site black a couple of times—the background black and the text in white—in protest. I forget what the proposed legislation was. Livingston: Was new legislation a big concern? Brady: Absolutely. Just a few things here and there—copyrights, digital rights written in a slightly different way—and we could have a different Internet. Tim Brady 137 Livingston: Do you remember any other interesting new turning points? Brady: I remember one day when Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, got shot. It was the first time that we put new news on the front page.