Jon Evans
The Latest from Jon Evans
Where have all the pilots gone?
You’d think everybody would want to fly. It’s been a universal human dream since the first cave person saw the first pterodactyl¹. You’d think better technology, greater demand, eco
Mutual assured dronestruction
Western airstrikes on the Middle East: déjà vu all over again. Twenty years ago, the USA attacked Sudan and Afghanistan with Tomahawk cruise missiles. Two days ago, the USA attacked Syria with ̷
SurvAIllance
You may not be aware that the rough consensus in the tech community is that Cambridge Analytica were almost certainly bullshit artists. Oh, don’t get me wrong, what they tried to do, and/or clai
Parasitism and the fight for the wrong century
Generals are famously always “studying how to fight the last war,” with the last war’s technology, while dismissing how the world and its tech have changed in the interim. This is tr
Towards a world without Facebook
Dear blockchain people: this is your hour. Abandon your transparently greedy get-rich-quick schemes, turn away from your casinos of de-facto modern-day penny stocks, and focus your decentralized atten
Everything is terrible: an explanation
Facebook is a breeding ground for fake news and polarized outrage, accused of corrupting democracy and spurring genocide. Twitter knows it has become a seething battleground of widespread, targeted ab
The un-lonely planet
It used to be easy to get lost. Pick up your passport, board an airplane, and zoom, you were gone, disconnected, all on your own, until and unless you stopped by an Internet cafe or an international p
Notes from Shenzhen — the next Greater Bay Area
I just walked into Shenzhen, and boy, is my mind boggled. Let me just get all my knee-jerk chorus-line reactions out of the way, before we get to the weird stuff: yes, this place is amazing. Yes, the
The three key CTO skills
I’ve been CTO of HappyFunCorp since last year, and it has been a deeply edifying experience. Everything people told me was mostly true: I write less code; I go to more meetings, and turn up in m
The Falcon Heavy backlash and the public trust
I watched the Falcon Heavy launch this week. Not as an accredited journalist, from an observation tower, but as one of the masses on Alan Shepard Beach twelve miles south. Watched it arc across the sk
Here comes the sun
Let’s talk about the side effects of the creeping apotheosis of solar power. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’re a ways away yet — but we’re definitely heading in that dire
The insight-industrial complex
I don’t like tech conferences. I mean, of course I don’t, they’re not meant for people like me. I’m an introvert, so I find them exhausting, and am (presumably) less likely tha
Sex, the final frontier: Cindy Gallop raises $2M from mysterious investor for social sex tech
“Everything’s a battle,” Cindy Gallop sighs, although it’s clear she relishes those battles. What she means is that the entire Internet has long been divided into two separate,
A modest primer for Ethereum programming
The world is full of web programmers, but there's a real paucity of cryptocurrency developers, and the chasm between the two fields is hard to cross. So I thought I'd take what I'd learned from archit
Everyone hates us, and it’s not because of our sex parties
It was, briefly, the zeitgeist’s perfect Silicon Valley story: a sex-and-drugs party hosted hosted by since-ousted top-tier VC Steve Jurvetson, at an official Draper Fisher Jurvetson event,atten
The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation
Sure, fine, maybe it’s a bubble. OK it’s definitely a bubble, but that’s a good thing, a bubble brings attention and investment in infrastructure, which breeds real innovation. Right
It’s the Jons 2017!
Happy New Year! It’s been a transformational year in tech. The golden era of startups ended. Sorry about that. The tech industry finally rolled over a big rock it had ignored and/or leaned on fo
Ted Chiang is a genius, but he’s wrong about Silicon Valley
Ted Chiang isn’t just one of the greatest science-fiction writers alive — he’s one of the greatest writers alive full stop. Which is why I was so saddened and disappointed by his rec
ICO-lateral damage
The ICO regulators are here, and they’re carrying big sticks. (PDF) “Coins or other digital assets issued on a blockchain may be securities under the federal securities laws… tokens
The Flying Eye and you and I
It’s refreshing, in this difficult time, when technology and the tech industry seem trapped in a quicksand of endless ethical compromises and disconcerting emergent properties, to come across so