Source of 1 percent
Where did I see it? Last week, an article about how telling stories paved the way for the reining in of the Robber Barons. Muckrakers created a narrative that explained how the new technology upset the established order and allowed rapaciousness to flourish. How the flush of money from steel, railroads and oil upset the balances of institutional trust. How flush money perverted control and allowed corruption to flourish. By clearly describing the webs on a personal level, the narratives pointed out ways to unravel the layers of intrigue.
Today, what is the equivalent of the railroads, the land grants, the oil? What is interactions?
Internet providers challenging NSA in order to maintain trust in the Internet.
AT&T discontinuing "land lines" in order to get out from under the FCC regulatory regime — broadband and wireless are not regulated.
Amazon proposing to initiate Pantry service to challenge Costco et al
The Internet of Things
"But by creating 'third places' (home and work are the first and second) that aren’t actually open to the public, that benefit is severely compromised.
"'Community space' implies something that is open to, well, the community. Subverting of naming conventions to suggest public access and transparency, while providing neither, is troubling and increasingly pervasive." — NY Times
Hacking the planet? Water is not a "human right"?
Domain Awareness Centers — tracking political protesters — "a matter of control". http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-real-purpose-of-oaklands-surveillance-center/Content?oid=3789230
Super cookies from MS and Google — http://www.extremetech.com/computing/168418-microsoft-google-working-on-super-cookies-to-track-your-behavior-everywhere
Mosaic Theory: http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2013/12/19/the-information-singularity-is-coming/
" Innovation has never been faster. And in fact, if you look at the underlying statistics, productivity growth is doing pretty well. Productivity levels are at an all-time high, and in the 2000s, productivity growth was faster than it was in the 1990s, which was a great decade.
"On the other hand, you have the median worker doing worse. And the median household and the median worker in the United States have lower incomes today than in 1997. What’s more, the employment-to-population ratio has fallen; it’s almost like falling off a cliff. And similar things are visible in the OECD statistics for nations around the world. And that is exactly the great paradox of our era."
Net neutrality: the big players won't mind "paying" a surcharge to the ISPs because it will keep the upstarts at bay.
Wage collusion in Silicon Valley - robbing the Peters to further enrich the Pauls.
"Movie producers have little to fear from online distribution in the long term," the report states. "It is the distribution part of the movie business that should be worried because online distribution will replace a sizable portion of their current industry." So much for the service economy...
How monster tech firms are taking over — http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/09/how-a-few-monster-tech-firms-are-taking-over-everything-from-media-to-space-travel-and-what-it-means-for-the-rest-of-us.html
New Yorker on Amazon: Amazon’s identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good?