“It’s a kind of benevolent Ponzi scheme, one that results in a lot of very cool services being…”
“It’s a kind of benevolent Ponzi scheme, one that results in a lot of very cool services being provided at or below cost to a select group of urban consumers, and a lot of traditional businesses being forced to paddle hard to stay afloat. The profitless start-up model should worry us about the future of commerce and competition, even as we take advantage of its gifts.”
theyear1968: On December 9, 1968, Doug Englebart and his team…
On December 9, 1968, Doug Englebart and his team from the Augmentation Research Center in Menlo Park, CA, presented what would become known as “The Mother of All Demos” to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
Among other highlights, the 90-minute live demo introduced the world to the computer mouse, word processing, hypertext and video conferencing. You can watch the whole presentation in the Doug Engelbart Video collection in the Internet Archive.
“The recent boom in “data-driven” journalism projects is exciting. It can elevate our knowledge,…”
“The recent boom in “data-driven” journalism projects is exciting. It can elevate our knowledge, enliven statistics, and make us all more numerate. But I worry that data give commentary a false sense of authority since data analysis is inherently prone to bias.”
“And yet the “real” world, like the “real” America, is an insidious idea. It suggests that the selves…”
“And yet the “real” world, like the “real” America, is an insidious idea. It suggests that the selves we are online aren’t authentic, and that the relationships that we forge in digital spaces aren’t meaningful. This is odd, because some of our closest friends and most significant professional connections are people we’ve only ever met on the Internet, and a third of recently married couples met online. It’s odder still because we not only love and socialize online but live and work there, too. Is it any less real when we fall in love and break up over Gchat than when we get fired over e-mail and then find a new job on LinkedIn?”