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What are the Internet’s dependencies?
In my last post, I looked at the Internet’s energy use, broadly construed, and contended that we might offload other societal functions onto the Internet. In this post I’d like to consider in what...
View Article…And We Thought Nation States Were A Bad Idea
There’s a notion that I’ve been seeing crop up in more places: that our options for the future have narrowed. I’ve been wondering about this for a while—it’s a pretty basic set of questions when I...
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Limiting the Complexity of Complex Systems
It’s widely known that financial system is very complex. Even just the credit system is complex: One question we might ask is “is the global financial system complex?” The answer is obvious: yes. But...
View ArticleThe Wisdom of Deathbed Conversion
In 2005 it seemed that everything had changed. And then in 2007 it happened again. All of a sudden the only thing to expect was the unexpected. I’m talking of course about the weather, and the changes...
View ArticleInternet vs. Travel
A few months back, I was asked the following question via email: I am trying to find out how much power will be used, both in my home and on the systems computer hubs, if I were to use Skype for and...
View ArticlePrinciples of Terraforming
A few months back I started exploring the idea of terraforming. In this post I’d like to consider two important questions about it. First, what is terraforming, anyway? And second, why should we do it?...
View ArticleNetworking for Undeveloping Regions
I wrote the short position paper below, with a bit of help from a colleague, for an academic audience, but never published it. Today I was thinking about it and realized that it synthesizes some of my...
View ArticleRube Goldberg Nature
The more I learn about it, the more Nature looks like a Rube Goldberg machine: energy and materials flow through convoluted paths to accomplish something seemingly simple. Take the process by which a...
View ArticleThe Societal Cost of Computer Science
(I’ve been sitting on this post about abstraction, indirection, and disintermediation for nearly a year, figuring I’d flesh out the argument into a long post with numerous examples; Greer’s post...
View ArticleEfficiency as a Vice
In modern economic thought, efficiency is paramount. The goal of economic systems, and entities within those systems, is to maximize efficiency. Policymakers are supposed to remove impediments that are...
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