A feature story for this week’s New York Times Magazine is titled The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t. In the article, writer Steven Johnson concludes that neither the economic nor the cultural losses in the creative industries, which were predicted to result from the digital revolution, have come to pass. Just as lesser pundits have previously declared in blogs and industry PR ...
At last count, the EFF has over 40 attorneys on staff* and lord only knows how many communications minions. So, if this organization is going to maintain its loose relationship with reality, they might at least take a meeting and invent some fresh exaggerations. But no. SOPA is just too provocative a buzzword to let go. And as part of ...
“We the consumers are outgunned and outmanned. We don’t have the tools needed to protect ourselves. While you are still better off having a 2013 anti-virus program, it won’t protect you against zero-day malware anymore than the polio vaccine will protect you from Ebola.” That quote is from the introduction of a new report published last week by the Digital ...
In this post from June of 2014, I argued that the Internet is a reason for the average person to care more about copyright, not less. The premise of that piece was that just because it’s a right most people will never need or care to enforce, that’s not a reason to allow—let alone get fooled into evangelizing—a weakening of ...
Google remains the third largest corporate lobbyist in the country, spending a reported $4.62 million in the second quarter in Washington, with Amazon, Facebook, and Apple spending a combined $6.07 million in the same period. Naturally, each company has its own interests—Facebook would like more skilled immigrants in the U.S. and Amazon wants to deliver goods by drone—but all of ...
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin