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The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

In February of 2010, I wrote about a small but symptomatic failure in our digital manners. Young people, then aged eighteen to twenty, would send you a message, receive your reply, and disappear. No acknowledgement, no “Ok,” no “Got it,” just the digital equivalent of someone slamming the door after asking you a question through the mail slot. The piece was called “How to Ack Back,” and the argument was that the etiquette of the early internet, the discipline of acknowledging every transmission, had been lost on a generation that grew up assuming delivery was guaranteed and silence was a defensible reply.

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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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Crumbling Infrastructure as America Deconstructs

The crumbling of an Interstate bridge in downtown Minneapolis brings to the forefront the Dirty Little Secret of the American Urban Core: Our national infrastructure is neglected and deconstructing and instead of rebuilding it we are rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure.

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