Jon Evans
The Latest from Jon Evans
Into and after the viral storm
The path forward now seems pretty clear. First we get through the grim month-and-more ahead, supporting health care workers in any way we can. (Tip: findthemasks.com lists where to donate PPE, persona
Our infected machine
We are handling the first real global crisis since the Cold War with staggering incompetence. People are already dying en masse. We all need to stay home and stay away from one another. If we wait unt
Burn the EARN IT Act
I want to talk about malignant incompetence on the part of our elected officials, and this isn’t even about the pandemic. Rather, it’s about the spectacularly misguided, counterproductive,
May we live in interesting times
It’s never a good sign when, in order to discuss the near future of technology, you first have to talk about epidemiology, but I’m afraid that’s where we’re at. A week ago I wr
What happens if a pandemic hits?
What happens if a COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic hits? What will the repercussions be if the virus spreads worldwide? How will it change how we live, work, socialize and travel? Don’t get all dis
DeFiance: billion-dollar finance, million-dollar hacks, and very little value
Over the last year or so, most of the cryptocurrency world has pivoted from the failure of “fat protocol” tokens and ICOs, and the faltering growth of “Layer 2” payments like L
The war against space hackers: how the JPL works to secure its missions from nation-state adversaries
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designs, builds and operates billion-dollar spacecraft. That makes it a target. What the infosec world calls Advanced Persistent Threats — meaning, general
Everyone loves the coronapocalypse
The 2019-nCoV coronavirus is a global public health emergency of significant concern. It is also, simultaneously, a fount of misinformation, wild conspiracy theories and both over and under-reactions.
Technology is anthropology
The interesting thing about the technology business is that, most of the time, it’s not the technology that matters. What matters is how people react to it, and what new social norms they form.
The marketplace of ideas is a weapons market now
The most interesting thing I saw online this week was Venkatesh Rao’s “Internet of Beefs” essay. I don’t agree with all of it. I’m not even sure I agree with most of it.
R.I.P. Goofy Times
A strange new sensation has settled across the tech industry, one so foreign, so alien, it’s almost hard to recognize. A sense that some great expectations are being radically revised downwards;
Software and the war against complexity
Look around: what is happening? Australia, AI, Ghosn, Google, Suleimani, Starlink, Trump, TikTok. The world is an eruptive flux of frequently toxic emergent behavior, and every unexpected event is lac
It’s The Jons 2019!
Happy New Year! It’s been another wild and wacky ride of a year in the tech world: breakthroughs and disgraces, triumphs and catastrophes, cryptocurrencies and starships, the ongoing rise of uto
Whatever happened to the Next Big Things?
In tech, this was the smartphone decade. In 2009, Symbian was still the dominant “smartphone” OS, but 2010 saw the launch of the iPhone 4, the Samsung Galaxy S and the Nexus One, and today
The new new weird
Neo-Pentecostal gangs in Brazil, driving out other faiths at gunpoint. A mob of 100 lawyers attacking a hospital in Pakistan to revenge themselves on violent doctors there. Anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazis and
Away with them
Every so often a story comes along which is unremarkable on its face but erupts into wider attention because it seems to represent some larger social fracture zone. And then there’s the recent s
Mass media vs. social media
In the waning years of the last millennium, at my university, one of the cause célèbres of the progressive left was a concept known as “Manufacturing Consent,” the title of a book and fi
Reasons to be climate cheerful (ish)
The International Energy Agency published its annual World Energy Outlook ten days ago. In this era of climate crisis, that outlook includes, as you would expect, stern warnings of catastrophic warmin
Bored of the coins
Something strange is afoot in the world of cryptocurrencies. For the first time since Satoshi dropped Bitcoin on us like a benevolent bomb, this painfully new, highly bizarre field has become …
The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law
My MacBook Pro is three years old, and for the first time in my life, a three-year-old primary computer doesn’t feel like a crisis which must be resolved immediately. True, this is partly becaus