This post is a lightly-edited version of one that went out in my newsletter. If you like it, please consider signing up. I send out about ten newsletters a year. They include posts like this, reading recommendations, and sometimes some of my writing. My son just came home from fighting wildfires in Washington State. The …
Fire and Water…Musings on Climate and Governance Read More »
I finished reading 2140 the day that the United States announced it would pull out of the Paris agreement on Climate Change.  I believe today may go down in history as the day we lost global political power and destroyed the global good will of other nations towards us, and maybe worse. But that’s a different blog …
Reading Recommendation: New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson Read More »
Someone interviewing me for a magazine asked me what current technology tomorrow’s children would find obsolete. I almost answered “The Internet.”  Then I decided to think about that answer a little bit because it’s pretty scary.  Then I decided it’s true. Shortly, humans may find today’s wide open Internet as archaic as we now find …
Three Strikes and We’re Out (of the open Internet) Read More »
Every May, a force for conservation holds an awards breakfast. ForTerra fills a huge auditorium in the Seattle Convention center with a broad assortment of northwest people. There are elected officials and people who want to be elected officials. There are suited-up businessmen and women, and retired dowagers in pearls.  There are teenagers and indigenous …
The pace of change continues to increase. Â Someday I feel like if I simply blink I’m in the future, that this week is different than last week is different than last month is different than last year in a way that has never happened before. I suspect some of that change is about transformation. Â I …
I am lucky enough to know one of the best technology futurists – Mark Anderson of SNS. Â He runs the best conference I’ve ever attended: Â FiRE, or the Future in Review (yes – it’s even better than science fiction cons). Â But that’s a different topic. Â He also publishes a newsletter, and a piece of that …
The strangest things happen to writers.  This morning, I woke up with an essay in my head: I gave a talk to a bunch of eighteen and nineteen year-old students at the University of Washington earlier this week. None of them were old enough to remember a pre 9/11 world. They have never traveled without …
Stop by Futurismic and take a look if you get a chance. This was a particularly tough article to write because the problem is so diffuse and our actual knowledge so hard to quantify. Climate is a complex system full of chaotic elements and strange attractors, including political strangeness. But the fact that it’s difficult …
New column up at Futurismic, in which I rant a bit about climate change Read More »
My newest column at Futurismic explores the power of crowds. Before I started researching this, I knew about crowd-sourcing used to get people to a particular place to do something interesting like perform the Thriller dance in mass in public, or for demonstrations (Tahrir Square). I knew about crowd-sourced translation projects.  I didn’t know …
At the moment I am feeling very international as I am using a portable computer in the “ICT Experience Center” in the Seoul airport. This is relevent because after being a speaker at the FutureGov Asia conference, I came away very impressed with the clear and committed focus of South Korea on internet infrastructure (including the …
