The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics: Podcast with Max Read and John Ganz

Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media in ways that lower the odds that democracy will be a problem solving system, and increase the likelihood that it will be a problem creating one.

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Other Writing:

Public WritingReview

Review by Paul Krugman, “The American Way of Economic War”

Suppose that a company in Peru wants to do business with a company in Malaysia. It should not be hard for the firms to make a deal. Sending money across national borders is generally straightforward, and so is the international transfer of large quantities of data. But there’s a catch: whether or not the companies ...
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Essay

The Panama Papers and Thomas Piketty: How the Leak May Transform Politics

The Panama Papers—the massive collection of leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that helps set up offshore shell corporations—have already had political consequences. Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, resigned after the leak revealed that he had partly owned an offshore firm. David Cameron, the British prime minister, is facing criticism over ...
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