Ben Moskowitz | beta

2018—just the facts. Internet pioneer John Perry Barlow died—and with him, perhaps some of my internet utopian streak. Stephen Hawking died, leaving warnings about automation and capitalism. “Space Force” is a thing. Corruption and the murder of journalists...

Twenty seventeen: Donald’s first year. A year of exhaustion and planetary confusion and excess. Bitcoin briefly topped $20,000. Geopolitics is a reality show and no one knows what’s real anymore.
This year we arrived at, and moved well beyond, some of the foreseen conditions of technological and political dystopia. Civilization-warping crises of public trust....

My 100% unironic take:
Dwayne Johnson, the former WWE superstar known as The Rock, should run for president of the United States of America.
Check it out on Quartz.

I wrote a piece for Quartz Ideas on irony and tragedy of Hillary Clinton, architect of the internet freedom agenda, and the prospects of a “splinternet”:
The open internet, she suggested, could help open up closed societies and support the “peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.” (…) Seven years later—and in light of US intelligence community’s consensus that Russia weaponized...