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Stop Applauding the Forced Apology

There is no such thing as a sincere statement made with a boot on the neck, and we have built a culture that pretends otherwise.Watch what happens now when someone steps out of line. A demand goes up for a statement. The statement arrives, in the approved shape, full of the approved words, and a crowd gathers to judge whether the sorrow inside it looks real enough to accept. We have a name for that performance when a dictator stages it. We call it a show trial. What we have not admitted is that we run a softer version of the same machine every week, on our phones, for sport.

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The Wealth Defense Industry and the Working-Class Republic: What Equity Means Here

Henry Demarest Lloyd’s 1894 Wealth Against Commonwealth made the case that liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. The question 132 years later is whether equity against the one percent can still be won inside a system they pay to keep tilted. Equity against the one percent describes parity of political voice, of legal protection, of access to courts and schools and air and water and a livable wage, with no implication that fortunes themselves must be equal. The republic was built on that equality of standing, however imperfectly executed and however brutally suspended along racial and gender lines. The wealth concentration of the past forty years has retired the idea entirely.

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The Rehearsal State: When Governance Becomes Performance

There is a scene in every disaster movie where the official steps to the podium, adjusts the microphone, and assures the public that resources are being mobilized, plans are being activated, and the full weight of the institution is being brought to bear. The audience in the theater knows the official is lying or incompetent or both. The audience at home, watching the real version of the same press conference after the real hurricane or the real chemical spill, has no such certainty. They take the performance at face value. They go to bed believing the plan exists.

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The Invisible Ledger: How Digital Currency Threatens the Last Private Thing You Own

There is something seductive about the promise of digital money. It arrives dressed in the language of progress, efficiency, inclusion, and modernization, as though the ability to hold a coin in your hand were a primitive embarrassment that civilization ought to outgrow. Cryptocurrency evangelists speak of decentralization and freedom from institutional control. Central bankers speak of reduced transaction costs and expanded access to financial services. What neither camp mentions with sufficient urgency is that the digitization of money is, at its operational core, the digitization of permission. And once your ability to buy bread requires permission, you no longer live in a free society. You live in an administered one.

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Real ID: Federal Mandate, National Card, or Something Worse?

The Real ID is now the law of the land, but it is not the law most Americans think it is, and the story of how it arrived at your local DMV is a twenty-year saga of congressional sleight-of-hand, serial postponement, and a quiet transformation of the American driver’s license into something it was never designed to be. The question everyone should be asking is not whether they need one. The question is what the Real ID actually represents in the architecture of American civic life, and whether the reassurances offered by the Department of Homeland Security hold up under any meaningful scrutiny.

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Trumpanization of a Nation

It seems insane that a man who has excellent government health insurance is able to lift himself from a surgeon’s table, hop a plane from Arizona to Washington, D.C. and then cast the Senate’s deciding vote opening the opportunity to strip healthcare protection from everyday citizens; but this is the world now in which we hurl, where the sky is green, and the Grim Reaper is now the Giver of Life, and facts are lies, and the truth isn’t published anywhere, and can never be known — because nothing is understandable, and everything else is just all made up to set up the next spin of a still life into a grave.

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Beware the Ides of February: Your Identity Has Been Stolen!

It’s tax season! Beware the Ides of February! Yesterday, Janna and I were disappointed to learn someone filed a tax return in our name. We discovered this identity theft when we diligently filed our 2015 taxes online via TurboTax and quickly learned our returns had not only been rejected by the IRS, but also by the New York and New Jersey tax offices! I later learned if the Feds reject your return, the States, in turn, will automatically reject your return, too. That’s good there’s some sort of communal, emergency, trigger that is in place for this homegrown brand of unsophisticated, commonplace, thievery.

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From Wrist to Hand and Back Again: Apple Hands You a Future as Your iWatch Watches You

I love it when Apple unwittingly, but always purposefully, hands us our future — for a steep admission price. Watching our new watch-centric Futureworld unwind yesterday — in the din from a bright new set of iPhone 6 twins — was a surreal and foreboding experience. Apple takes us by the hand and we lovingly follow, and play along, all while paying up — and we believe we’re all better for it in the effervescent end; but are we?

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The Wounding of Surprise and the Danger of Imagination

Surprise and imagination can be both wonderful experiences and dangerous concepts.  We’re trained early in life to find surprise in the world around us, usually juxtaposed against the wilds of nature. We are often encouraged to “think outside the box” and to reimagine reality in ways that can fundamentally change the way we view the world and our role within it. Nothing is out of reason. Everything is possible.

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Is Compassion a Melting Virtue in a Modern World?

Compassion — or the lack of it — has been a recurring theme on this blog recently, perhaps understandably as we do not shy away from topics that raise questions about the behaviour of society and in particular those who govern us.  The absence of compassion is evident worldwide — it is not confined to one country or one group of people — it is universal.

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