Happy New Year! 2016 was … well, we will not soon forget it. Brexit; Trump; the Grim Reaper’s celebrity killing spree; and, on the upside, a lot of magnificent tech achievements and breakthroughs. But The Jons are not about that. The Jons, an annual award named (in an awe-inspiring fit of humility) after myself, go to tech’s more dubious achievers. And hoo boy were there a lot… Read More

 Is the tech industry partly responsible for the rise of Donald Trump? That’s what John Robb, who’s always worth reading, suggests in a series of recent posts, citing the great Nassim Taleb in support. His vision: “The nation-state as we’ve known it is rapidly hollowing out … this century’s spike in globalization, financialization, and technological change… Read More

 Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having nothing particular to interest me in meatspace, I thought to visit the Vale of Silicon. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen. Whenever my meds get such an upper hand of me, that I yearn to troll passersby–then, I account it high time to get to cyberspace. Read More

 The water in Flint is toxic. The state of Michigan inadvertently poisoned the city’s well, and it will take years to flush the system. And that might not be the worst part. The state has yet to reveal how it will repair Flint’s image. Read More

 Oh, the drama, such drama. Last week, longtime Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn declared “the Bitcoin experiment…has failed,” and resigned from that community with a fusillade of verbal grenades (and a New York Times profile of his dissent.) This in turn provoked a whole torrent of hot takes and reactions, which mostly had one thing in common: contempt for all who disagree. Read More

 Remember e-books? Those were the days, weren’t they? Those crazy few years when the fad of reading on a Kindle swept the nation. Now, of course, that fit of mass hysteria is behind us. E-book sales are falling, down more than 10% in 2015 — YA down 44%! — while used bookstores are coming back. Yes, that’s right; print is regaining its regal primacy; e-books are dead. Right? Read More

 Action cameras are like tablets. Lots of people want ONE. But very few need to constantly update to the latest model. I suspect this is why GoPro’s sales are slowing, it’s reduced sales forecasts, and it had to lay off 7% of its employees this week. It’s hitting market saturation. Many of the people likely to buy a GoPro already have one and don’t need another.… Read More

 There are few people in technology more infuriating than Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, who earlier this month dropped a brilliant summary and analysis of the ongoing refragmentation of modern societies, followed immediately by a blinkered, muddled, wrong-headed essay on technology’s role in economic inequality. The response from his fellow tech VCs was remarkable. Read More

 The most epochal financial transaction of this century, to date, occurred on May 22, 2010. It did not involve Wall Street, or the City of London; it took place in Jacksonville, Florida. It did not feature collateralized debt obligations, or credit default swaps. It was a purchase of two Papa John’s pizzas, in exchange for a payment whose present value currently exceeds US $4 million. Read More

 Merry Christmas! 2015 was a truly great year in technology, bringing us self-driving electric cars, reusable orbital rockets, the rise of precision gene editing… and some lesser achievements. Since nothing of interest will happen in the next four days, I have decided to jump the gun; today I announce my annual dubious achievement awards, named, in a fit of awe-inspiring humility,… Read More

 The ratio of overcooked concepts to ideas that might genuinely be called ‘revolutionary’ has long been skewed on crowdfunding platforms, but when a “founder” is pitching a “revolutionary” sponge holder with a straight face a line has surely been crossed. Read More

 Donald Trump; Bernie Sanders; Jeremy Corbyn; Marine Le Pen. If you had suggested only a decade ago that any one of those four might become a significant political figure, you would have been laughed out of any room. What has happened to politics as we knew it? Where are the military-industrial complexes of yesteryear? Is this all Facebook’s fault? Sort of. Not really. Let me explain. Read More