CCTV Installations

Something’s been bugging me about Tik Tok. I’ve almost downloaded it about a dozen times over the past few months. But I always stop short. I don’t have a ton of time ( here’s why ) so forgive me as I resort to some short form tricks here. To wit: China employs a breathtaking model of state-driven surveillance . The US employs a breathtaking model of capitalist surveillance . We on the same page so far? OK, great. Now let’s consider Tik Tok , which is a robust combination of the two. Don’t know Tik Tok? Come on , you read Searchblog for God’s sake. Ok, well, fortunately for you, there’s the New York Times . Or…maybe not. I almost threw up in my mouth as I watched the paper of record run through its decades long practice of “ Gee, Golly, Isn’t This Shiny New Tech Thing Culturally Significant, and Aren’t We Woke for Noticing It ” journalism last weekend. Read it if you must. Ok. Time for more shorthand. Tik Tok is owned by a Chinese company . Tik Tok is addictive, seductive,...

A scenario from the future (cross posted from NewCo Shift) In my last post I imagined a world in which large data-driven platforms like Amazon, Google, Spotify, and Uber are compelled to share machine-readable copies of data to their users. There are literally scores, if not hundreds of wrinkles to iron out around how such a system would work, and in a future post I hope to dig into some of those questions. But for now, come with me on a journey into the future, where the wrinkles have been ironed out, and a new marketplace of personally-driven information is flourishing. We’ll return to one of the primary examples I sketched out in the aforementioned post: A battle for the allegiance – and pocketbook – of one online shopper, in this case, my wife Michelle. *** It’s a crisp winter mid morning in Manhattan when the doorbell rings. Michelle looks up from her laptop, wondering who it might be. She’s not expecting any deliveries from Amazon, usually the source of such interruptions. ...

Let’s be honest with ourselves, shall we? We’re in the midst of the most significant shift in our society since at least the Gilded Age – a tectonic reshaping of economic systems, social mores, and political institutions. Some even argue our current transition to a post-digital world, one in which technology has lapped our own intelligence and automation may displace the majority of our workforce within our lifetimes, is the most dramatic change to ever occur in recorded history. And that’s before we tackle a few other existential threats, including global warming – which is inarguably devastating our environment and driving massive immigration, drought, and famine – or income inequality, which has already fomented historic levels of political turmoil. Any way you look at it, we’ve got a lot of difficult intellectual, social, and policy work to do, and we’ve got to do it quickly. Lucky for us, two major political events loom before us: The midterm elections this November, and a presi...

Cloudflare founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn ( image ) The company could seek rent. Instead, it finds false market barriers and merrily breaches them. (Cross posted from NewCo Shift) We don’t usually cover news here at NewCo Shift , this is more of a place for analysis and Thinking Out Loud. And it’s rare that one company appears more than once here in any given year. But today – again – Cloudflare has upended an important piece of Internet’s real estate , and it’s just too rich to not note the why of it. So first the news. To celebrate the company’s eight birthday, Cloudflare is announcing the launch of a domain registrar. And because the company operates at massive scale, and can afford to do things most companies simply can’t (or won’t – looking at you, Google, Amazon, Facebook) – the company is offering domains *at cost.* In other words, Cloudflare isn’t making one red cent when you register a domain with them. What they pay to register a domain (and yes, that numbe...

Or, Will Nature Just Shrug Its Shoulders? If you pull far enough back from the day to day debate over technology’s impact on society – far enough that Facebook’s destabilization of democracy, Amazon’s conquering of capitalism, and Google’s domination of our data flows start to blend into one broader, more cohesive picture – what does that picture communicate about the state of humanity today? Technology forces us to recalculate what it means to be human – what is essentially us , and whether technology represents us, or some emerging otherness which alienates or even terrifies us.  We have clothed ourselves in newly discovered data, we have yoked ourselves to new algorithmic harnesses, and we are waking to the human costs of this new practice. Who are we becoming? Nearly two years ago I predicted that the bloom would fade from the technology industry’s rose, and so far, so true. But as we begin to lose faith in the icons of our former narratives, a nagging and increasingly ur...

So far, it’s mostly shit. Seven or so years ago, a famous VC penned a manifesto of sorts. Writing at a time the world was still skeptical of the dominance to which his industry has now ascended (to think, such a time existed, and so few years ago!), Marc Andreessen had a message for the doubters, the naysayers, and the Wall St. analysts who were (credibly!) claiming that his investments amounted to not much more than a bubble: Software, he claimed, was eating the world. Seven years later, no one can dispute Andreessen’s prescience. The man was right: If you had purchased a basket of his favorite stocks back then – he name-checked Apple, Amazon, and Facebook directly – you’d be up at least 10X, if not more. Software, it seems, has indeed eaten the world, and those smart (and rich) enough to put money into technology, as Andreessen has been, have done very, very well for themselves. Of course, not many people have in fact been that smart. As of last year, ten percent o...

The Los Angeles Times was the first newspaper I ever read – I even attended a grammar school named for its founding family (the Chandlers ). Later in life I worked at the Times for a summer – and found even back then, the great brand had begun to lose its way. I began reading The Atlantic as a high schooler in the early 1980s, and in college I dreamt of writing long form narratives for its editors. In graduate school, I even started a publication modeled on The Atlantic ‘s brand – I called it The Pacific.  My big idea: The west coast was a huge story in desperate need of high-quality narrative journalism. (Yes, this was before Wired .) I toured The Washington Post as a teenager, and saw the desks where Bernstein and Woodward brought down a corrupt president. I met Katherine Graham once, at a conference I hosted, and I remain star struck by the institution she built to this day. And every seven days, for more than five decades, Time magazine came to my parents’ home, ...

At dinner last night with my wife and our 14 year-old daughter, I noticed a circular table of four teenage girls eating alone. They were about the same age as my daughter, who wasn’t exactly thrilled to be stuck with her parents as company on her first weekend of the school year. As we ate, I paid attention to the group’s dynamics, imagining them to be a possible reflection of what my daughter would be doing once she started going out alone with friends in New York City. The most striking characteristic of the group was how they used their phones. The default position for each of them – their resting state, if you will – was to hold  their device at chin level while gazing into the blue grip of its screen. They looked away only to point out something happening on that screen – at no time during an hour or so of observation did any of them put their phones down to simply talk to one another. I pointed this out to my daughter – I’m used to seeing kids on their phones, but this was...