Digital advertisers track your online behavior, creating a detailed personal profile that is owned by the company that constructs it, which can do whatever it pleases with that information, including sell it. Emerging technologies could support a different model that respects our privacy, acknowledges our intelligence, and responds to actual needs, not manufactured desires. (more)

In the future, our current extravagant habits will no longer be an option. An unwillingness to take a hard look at the assumptions underlying our notion of a normal lifestyle has driven a certain amount of wishful thinking, and roughly the same amount of unnecessary dread, among those who have begun to grapple with the challenges ahead of us. (more)

Since the Fukushima disaster began, proponents of nuclear power have tried to spin the situation with claims that go back to the Eisenhower administration -- that nukes will be clean, safe, and cheap, if we just go with the new technology that's not yet off the drawing board. Computer geeks have a term for this kind of song and dance: vaporware. (more)

The Internet as built will always be subject to government control and corporate domination. We must smash the fiction that it is some sort of uncontrollable, decentralized free-for-all, so that we can get on with creating something else that is. I've decided to convene a summit called Contact. (more)

Evolution, life, mind, and the technium are infinite games. Their game is to keep the game going. To keep all participants playing as long as possible. They do that, as all infinite games do, by playing around with the rules of play. The evolution of evolution is just that kind of play. (more)

This year, the crop of books on Peer-to-Peer related themes has been so overwhelming that I find it impossible to limit myself to the classic list of just ten books. I therefore have organized the list as a series of 10 clustered themes. (more)

While one can look at WikiLeaks as a political project, it can also be seen as the "pilot" phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency. (more)

We tend to think of our technologies in terms of the applications they offer right out of the box instead of how we might change them.  We are content to learn what our computers already do instead of what we can make them do.  This isn't even the way a kid naturally approaches a video game. (more)