Archive: Year: 2021

Don’t read on if you haven’t seen it and plan to, because spoilers.Meryl Streep in her role as President of the United States in Don’t Look UpThe just-released film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two well-meaning astronomers who discover a “planet-killing” comet headed straight for earth, and Meryl Streep as a Trump-like President who glibly tries to ignore the problem, is currently the most popular movie on Netflix. For good reason, because it’s a rollicking fun satire of American politics, media, tech and celebrity culture.The screenplay, which was cowritten by filmmaker Adam McKay and progressive muckraker David Sirota, suggests that Americans are so polarized by raw partisanship and dumbed down by clickbait and morning TV pablum that they...

Continuing my conversation with Mark Pesce, who argues for a ‘metaverse of the real’.Photo by Margot RICHARD on UnsplashWhat follows is the second half of a recent conversation I had with futurist Mark Pesce on the danger and the potential of the metaverse. Mark’s book Augmented Reality came out a year ago, and he’s been closely following developments in the virtual reality field as well. Part one of our conversation was titled, “Will the Metaverse Be an ‘Omnidirectional Panopticon?” and ended with Mark suggesting that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg were trying to monopolize the future.Q: So, given everything you’ve said, the question remains, can we head off the dystopia, the enhanced surveillance that the metaverse seems to portend, with the tools that...

A conversation with Mark Pesce about the future of virtual realityScreengrab from Mark Zuckerberg’s demo of Meta’s metaverseRecently, I had the chance to catch up with my friend Mark Pesce, a futurist and writer living in Australia. Mark co-invented VRML (virtual reality markup language) back in 1994 and he’s been involved in every wave of tech innovation (and hype) ever since. We’ve been friends for years, started in 2008, when he gave a talk at Personal Democracy Forum on “hyperpolitics,” presciently warning the audience that as the Internet gave everyone a voice, it would not lead to more democracy but something more like a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” At the time, just about everyone in the tech and politics...

The social media giant’s first attempt at global branding unwittingly revealed its own hubris.The opening image of Facebook’s first adIn the annals of big corporate marketing, there may be nothing like it. The ad starts with a red chair suspended in the air in a dark forest. Then images float by of an old Black man sitting a bus stop, a young Latino man reading a book on his porch rocking chair, and two young Black kids spinning one another on an old office chair in the middle of a residential street. While we see more images of a group of dancers on chairs, a smiling old Asian man resting on a bench, a girl putting her rag doll on a chair,...

Newly revealed PowerPoint suggests Trump’s chief of staff was making the case that China rigged the election for BidenFrom the “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” deckThe most hair-raising revelation in the 36-slide PowerPoint deck that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows refers to in an email he has shared with the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection, titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN,” is not its assertion that vote counting was halted election night, while President Trump appeared to be winning in many states, so that fake votes could be “injected” into the tallies. Nor is it the deck’s libelous claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the maker of many of...

Minority rule is the opposite of democracy, but let’s not talk about how America is failing to be a democracy.Joe and Jill Biden voting in the 2016 general electionIt’s weird that the Biden Administration is holding a virtual “Democracy Summit” this Wednesday and Thursday, with the leaders of about 100 countries expected to attend. For if democracy means majority rule, then the United States isn’t much of a democracy.The U.S. Senate is split 50–50, but the fifty Democratic senators represent 184.5 million people while the fifty Republican senators represent just 143 million. Wyoming has just 583,000 residents but it gets two senators, just like California, which has almost 40 million residents. So each Wyoming resident is 67 times as powerful as...

Democrats have to channel public anger at a worthy target: Republican antivaxxersVice President Kamala Harris getting her second vaccine shotHaving spent four years under a president who dominated the media on a daily basis, it’s understandable that many of us are relieved that those days have ended. Donald Trump didn’t “drain the swamp,” he swamped it. Every day he could, he captured attention with wild statements and off-the-wall tweets. While he often generated outrage, quite a bit of it earned by his racist and ethically-challenged behavior, he also overwhelmed public attention, short-circuiting our ability to convert momentary anger to lasting accountability.While it’s liberating to no longer have the Narcissist-in-Chief commandeering our attention, the Biden Administration has over-corrected. This isn’t just a...

It’s that time of year…Unsubscribe, disconnect, and give your time instead.Tomorrow is #GivingTuesday, an annual event focused on galvanizing generosity for others that was born nine years ago as a digital response to the hyper-commercialism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Since its founding, #GivingTuesday has become a global movement (supported by its own nonprofit hub). In the United States, it has generated a big spike in donations to groups and causes at this time of year, which is already when most nonprofits and charities raise most of their funds. Last year, nearly $2.5 billion was donated on #GivingTuesday.You already know this, unless you live under a rock, because just about every nonprofit organization and charity in existence has flooded your inbox...

The solution is called fusion voting and it’s as old as the republic.Abraham Lincoln, highlighted in red, at the dedication of the Gettysburg Soldiers’ National Cemetery, November 19, 1863Want to avoid a civil war in America? It’s time to remove one of the artificial constraints that keep us locked in the two-party system and make room for Americans who value the rule of law and compromise over the partisan goals of each major party to have a meaningful voice in the electoral process.Right now, it looks like American politics is heading towards catastrophe. One major party, the Republicans, has been taken over by anti-democratic forces committed to the false belief that the election of 2020 was stolen from President Trump. They...

“What you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa and who’s at your front door” — it’s all accessible.Amazon isn’t just listening to you; it’s letting others spy on you too.Next to the U.S. military, the most trusted institution in America is Amazon. According to a Harvard/Harris Poll done in June 2021, 71% of the public has a favorable or very favorable view of the giant company, ahead of the police, the Centers for Disease Control, the FBI and the Supreme Court. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, given how focused Amazon is on being “the world’s most customer-centric company.”Well, maybe it’s time we thought again about how much to trust it....