Month: June 2014

Change is bad unless it’s great:

App developers need to be honest with themselves about whether a redesign is about solving a customer problem in a better way or is part of a corporate strategy.

Powerful Ideas Need Love Too:

The reason is that understanding–like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors–is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling.

Economic Power in the Age of Abundance:

The obvious reaction to this case, as with the Belgian one, is to marvel at the publisher’s nerve; after all, as we saw with the Belgians, Google is driving traffic from which the publishers profit. “Ganz im Gegenteil!” say the publishers. “Google would not exist without our content.” And, at a very high level, I suppose that’s true, but it’s true in a way that doesn’t matter, and understanding why it doesn’t matter gets at the core reason why traditional journalistic institutions are having so much trouble in the Internet era.

Everything is Broken:

The NSA wasn’t, and isn’t, the great predator of the internet, it’s just the biggest scavenger around.

The Case Against Sharing:

For all its troubling externalities, the sharing economy is largely heralded as a “return to the village,”…But our society is not returning to a past utopia of collective social confidence and equality because this utopia never existed. The sharing economy doesn’t build trust — it trades on cultural homogeneity and established social networks both online and in real life. Where it builds new connections, it often replicates old patterns of privileged access for some, and denial for others.