Articles 2024
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Dynamism, Stasis, and Popular Culture
Camden Technology Conference, "Pop!Tech", October 23, 1999
Instead of talking about the Internet, I want to start with a technology we take for granted. This is a portable CD player. This particular one is a pretty fancy model and costs $70--you can get them for half that much. Seventy dollars is about a day's work, after taxes, for the average blue-collar American worker, or what the Census Bureau calls "production and nonsupervisory employees." You still have to buy the disks, of course, but a couple more days' work will supply a good collection, especially if you shop for used CDs. The sound will be perfect, and the disks won't wear out. -
A World with All Kinds of Music
Intellectual Capital, October 22, 1999
Obituary writers marked the recent death of Sony co-founder Akio Morita primarily as a reminder of business and technological success. Morita, in most accounts, symbolized the rise of Japanese industry from the ashes of World War II. But Morita also represented one of the greatest cultural transformations of the 20th century, a transformation in which Sony played an important, but by no means singular, role: the spread of on-demand, increasingly personalized music. -
A Niche of One's Own
Forbes ASAP, October 03, 1999
A recent study from Xerox PARC seems to confirm what some critics have long feared: that the Web is fostering not diversity but a "winner-takes-all" world.
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"Dangerous Remedy"
The other problem with extending Medicare.
Reason, October 1999
Bill Clinton has done some incredibly reckless, irresponsible things as president. But his campaign to expand Medicare entitlements has to rank among the worst
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Made in the USA
Forbes ASAP, August 22, 1999
It may seem like old rhetoric--talk of anarchy and chaos on the Internet. But the notion turned up again on newsstands early this summer in the British magazine Prospect. The cover featured a picture of a bomb with the tag line "Anarchy.com:Can We Tame the Net?"
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Socialists need tall fences
Forbes, August 08, 1999
Edward Hanna, the mayor of Utica, N.Y., seems perplexed. Ever since The New York Times ran a story about how his town is rebuilding its economy by welcoming refugees, he has been deluged with calls. Reporters as far away as Germany want to know what's going on in Utica: Aren't immigrants, especially refugees, supposed to be a drag on the economy? Don't they consume tax dollars and take jobs?
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The Pleasures of Persuasion
The Wall Street Journal, August 02, 1999
Obituaries for advertising pioneer David Ogilvy, who died last Wednesday, emphasized his respect for the consumer. "The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife," was a popular Ogilvy refrain. "His greatest legacy," declared the Associated Press, "was an approach to advertising that assumed the intelligence of the consumer."
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Creative Matrix
What we lose by regulating culture.
Reason, August/September 1999
"Whereas the distracted state of England, threatened with a cloud of blood by a civil war, calls for all possible means to appease and avert the wrath of God, it is therefore thought fit and ordained by the Lords and Commons in this parliament assembled that, while these set causes and set times of humiliation continue, public stage plays shall cease and be forborne."
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Our anxiety about what's to come is just the wish for things to stand still
The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 18, 1999
We used to think the 21st century would look like The Jetsons - flying cars, robot maids, high-rise apartment buildings, and 1950s-style corporations and sex roles. -
When Movies Become 'Product'
The New York Times, June 14, 1999
LOS ANGELES--Showing the public relations savvy we expect from media moguls, the heads of the Hollywood studios declined to testify last month when the Senate Commerce Committee held hearings on "marketing violence to children." So when television reported the story, viewers saw movie clips of Keanu Reeves facing off against evil, rather than a tape of an anonymous executive squirming in the witness chair. Films remained works of art, protected by the First Amendment, rather than mere corporate products to be regulated at Washington's whim.