Every digital tech revolution over the last forty years has promised decentralization but each one only seems to have recentralized power. So will the AI revolution be different? Can AI be the tipping point for fundamentally decentralizing the architecture of our 21st century politics, culture and business? That Was The…
How to beat Trump? In his new book, Turf War (https://www.archwaypublishing.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/847566-turf-war) , the architect Steven Robinson shows us how it can be done. In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building his self-styled “masterpiece,” a half-mile of gargantuan buildings…
Former New York Times reporter John Markoff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Markoff) has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the…
Few Americans have been as consistently critical of Donald Trump’s morality than the New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wehner) . How to prevent the worst happening (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/conservative-argument-against-trump/680438/) , Wehner thus wrote, in his final Atlantic column before the election. So now that the worst has actually happened,…
It’s hard to know if F.H. Buckley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.H._Buckley) is keen on Donald Trump. On the one hand, Buckley and his wife wrote a number of speeches for Trump in his 2016 campaign; on the other, Buckley publicly wrote Donald Trump off in 2022, arguing (https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-beat-trump-embrace-trumpism-american-dream-public-corruption-swamp-nationalism-safety-net-patriotism-11668428085) in the Wall Street Journal…
So how can The Dude and The Boss save America? According to the cultural critic, David Masciotra (https://davidmasciotra.com/) , Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, represent the antithesis of Donald Trumps’s illiberal authoritarianism. Masciotra’s thesis of Lebowski (https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/11/11/how-francis-fukuyama-and-the-big-lebowski-explain-trumps-victory/) and Springsteen (https://unherd.com/2024/10/bruce-springsteen-is-the-last-american-liberal/) as twin paragons of American liberalism…
So was November 5 a moral catastrophe signaling the death knell of American liberalism or just another election in the turbulent history of American democracy. According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch (https://www.jonathanrauch.com/) , the Trump-Harris election was both. On the one hand, Rauch argues, wearing his unashamedly liberal cap,…
“There is one winner regarding the most significant story this week,” Keith Teare writes in his That Was The Week (https://www.thatwastheweek.com/p/elon-silicon-valley-and-government) technology newsletter. But, as he explains, there are, in fact, two winners: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneurs trusted by Trump to reform and shrink the federal…
In association with our friends at Digital-Life-Design (https://www.dld-conference.com/) (DLD), Europe’s iconic annual tech conference which next January celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we are starting a series of conversations with DLD speakers looking back over the last twenty years. First up is Silicon Valley entrepreneur, speaker and author John Hagel (https://www.johnhagel.com/about/)…
The endless culture wars rage on. In his new book, The War Against the Past (https://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Past-Fight-History/dp/1509561250) , the sociologist Frank Furedi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Furedi) believes that unless what he calls “the West” fights for its history, the “grievance entrepreneurs” will take over and undermine all our hard won intellectual freedoms. It’s the…
As the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-neoliberal-order-9780197519646?cc=us&lang=en&) , the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle (https://www.garygerstle.com/) was one of first people to recognize the collapse of neoliberalism. But today, the real question is not about the death of neoliberalism, but what comes after it. And,…
Gary Shapiro is my Pivot Guy. As the longtime CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, the organization that puts on Las Vegas’ annual CES, Gary knows a thing or two about pivoting. And now he’s put his pivoting wisdom into a pivotal new book, Pivot or Die: How Leaders Thrive…
It’s the race that will change the world. In Supremacy (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250361622/supremacy) , one of the FT’s six short-listed (https://www.ft.com/content/27f60ee7-94cc-4098-9f5a-52fbf2f71b39) best business book of the year, Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson (https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/AVYbUyZve-8/parmy-olson) tells the story of what she sees as the key battle of our digital age between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and…
Might November 5 mark a new dawn for both Silicon Valley and America? Palo Alto based serial entrepreneur Keith Teare (https://x.com/kteare/status/1855652547031122403) is ambivalent. In his That Was The Week (https://substack.com/@thatwastheweek) tech newsletter for this week, Keith confesses that while he voted for Harris, he recognizes that the Trump victory probably…
