For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse. Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.

The internet has become the nervous system of the 21st century, wiring together devices that we carry, devices that are in our bodies, devices that our bodies are in. It is woven into the fabric of government service delivery, of war-fighting systems, of activist groups, of major corporations and teenagers’ social groups and the commerce of street-market hawkers.

This is important. It means that someone is mixing their public comments related to both their personal views and their work. Effectively, you could say that one is being used to bootstrap an audience for the other. This means that you can't separate these issues by the medium in which they are placed because people are actively mixing their personal and professional speech and benefiting from it in one context while avoiding accountability in the other context.

In my exuberance about all the awesome tweets I was reading, I didn’t think about the thousands of men out there who would be reading the same tweets and feel incensed at the injustice of this one poor man being pilloried for a single comment he made in bad taste. If you don’t look at the situation from the perspective of millions of women who work everyday in a world where unconscious bias against women in science and technology is pervasive, you see only this one man and what happened to him. I hope some people out there, men in particular, who have only been looking at this situation from Tim Hunt’s perspective, will try to open their minds to the way systemic bias impacts your female colleagues and see the whole event from that lens.

centralized systems was a less-solved problem (even at far smaller numbers). More importantly, though it was easier due to this setup, we weren’t creating network effects. Though (I believe) we had more people publishing with Blogger than anything else, that didn’t make Blogger better. In fact, it made it worse, because it got slow and harder to add features to.

If Google and Facebook screw up treatment of people's data it is easy to move to another internet service.

When you hear people talk about Slack they often say it’s “fun”. Using it doesn’t feel like work.

One can conceivably imagine a scenario where a large group of stakeholders collude to first undermine specific highly undesirable types of transactions (eg. child porn, to use a popular boogeyman of censors and civil liberties activists complaining about censors alike), and then expand the apparatus over time until eventually it gets into the hands of some enterprising young hotshots that promptly decide they can make a few billion dollars through the cryptoeconomic equivalent of LIBOR manipulation

As you read this online, the United States government makes a note

had not stopped a single terrorist attack

Such structural technological changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the arbitrary passage of anti-privacy laws, such as those now descending upon Russia.