Author Archives: admin

[thermometer raised=2005 target=2000] I want to go to Ferguson, MO to cover the unfolding story there. But I can’t do it without money — I need expense money and, quite frankly, I need to cover my own bills while I’m down there, as I won’t be able to do the contract work and part-time editing […]

All the genuinely smart, talented, funny people I know seem to be miserable these days. You feel it on Twitter more than Facebook, because Facebook is where you go to do your performance art where you pretend to be a hip, urbane person with the most awesomest friends and the best relationships and the very […]

Here’s one thing we know, and know for sure: dumb matter and energy can become self-aware. How do we know? Because we know; because we are dumb matter and energy, and we are self-aware. Si cogitationem mundo: if we can think, the world can. The only question — but boy, it’s a doozy — is how. Is consciousness […]

I’ve spent the past week and a half in Yakima, Washington. It’s a town in Central Washington with a population of around 93,000 in the city itself and almost a quarter million in the greater metropolitan area. The primary economy is agricultural: nearly 80% of the hops used in beer production in the USA come […]

I’m going to maybe expand this into an actual piece of journalism soon, but I just wanted to write down some thoughts here. Why do techies — or, really, any well-to-do demographic — feel the urge to move into the place that poor people live and then change it? To tear down the crappy little […]

This is an email I just sent to Facebook, via their feedback form. Hi there! Apparently someone complained about one of my posts, claiming that it violated your Community Standards. I reviewed those guidelines at length and determined that the post very clearly and unambiguously violates none of them. The post was a parody bit […]

[Update: a clarification here, based on thoughtful feedback: this idea is something I discussed extensively with local tech people in Nairobi when I was there. All of them were very enthusiastic and excited about this idea. I don’t want to give the impression of, as one commenter put it, White Saviorism. Kenyans do not need […]

It’s New Year’s Day of 2014, and I’m feeling confessional. (Not in the legal or moral sense, more in the poetic sense.) I get the impression that I am widely regarded, by those who know me and those who follow my work and my social network postings, as an angry person. I can’t really deny […]

This is the first draft of my introduction to my upcoming book, which is currently (tentatively) entitled Digging For Fire: Seeking Innovation In East Africa. This may not make it to the final book, or at least not exactly like this, but I thought I’d post it as a teaser. There’s a trunk, sitting in my living […]

This is an email I just sent to myself, in case anyone is reading my accounts. Maybe you’re not reading this. Maybe you’re just collating it, my words encoded on a hard drive in some weird anonymous building out in the middle of Cheap Real Estate Land, where the only sound is the big trucks […]