Jon Evans
The Latest from Jon Evans
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
The surprisingly boring road to self-driving cars
At last, it is here! The truly self-driving car, no human behind the wheel! For the public! …A few hundred of them, in a closed beta, in a small corner of sun-drenched (never snow-drenched, almo
Stochastic disaster
As I write this, massive fires are erupting all over California, and massive protests are erupting all over the world. Is the former a facet of the climate crisis? Is the latter a symptom of hyperpola
Facebook isn’t free speech, it’s algorithmic amplification optimized for outrage
This week Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech in which he extolled “giving everyone a voice” and fighting “to uphold a wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible.” That s
Surfing the reverse mullet with Alexis Ohanian
For many years the allure of Silicon Valley was contingent on the ability to move here. Its ecosystem didn’t work remotely. “We see a very strong indication that where you’re located
Armenia and the technology of diaspora
It’s a tough world out there for small countries. Technology is the future, everyone knows that; but how do you claim your share of that future when you’re competing with America, China, t
The siphon and the forge
The tech industry has won at capitalism. From America to China, from Amazon to Alibaba, from Alphabet to Tencent, the most valuable and most dynamic companies in the world are technology companies. Bu
Facebook’s plan for our post-web future
Let us connect some dots. Five years ago, Facebook acquired VR pioneers Oculus for $2 billion. This week, it snapped up neural-interface pioneers CTRL-Labs for somewhere north of $500 million, and ann
Our motto: Dronepocalypse Now
Last week someone knocked out 5% of world oil production with a small swarm of drones and cruise missiles, and in doing so, inaugurated “a change in the nature of warfare globally,” to quo
Please get your digital affairs in order
I really wish I hadn’t had cause to write this piece, but it recently came to my attention, in an especially unfortunate way, that death in the modern era can have a complex and difficult techni
Would we miss the Media Lab if it were gone?
A friend and MIT grad wrote to me yesterday, “I don’t know if the Media Lab is redeemable at all.” This in the wake of the bombshell Ronan Farrow piece in the New Yorker, reporting t