For the last few months, there's been a lot of conversation around the "Department" of Government Efficiency, which is ostensibly an effort at improv...

Just to document a conversation that I've had a number of times in the last year, its important to understand the implications (and indeed, the motivations) of...

If a company is debating whether a user's account should be suspended, they've already failed to build a modern platform that follows best practices. Why are t...

Security reports from other sites are welcome. Why aren’t safety reports? One of the most fundamental triumphs of the last few decades of open source culture...

Here’s how you do it. Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to t...

You can't win unless you know what you're fighting for. Many of the most important and valuable milestones of progress in society have been achieved through...

Though he’s one of the most gifted and important artists to have ever created popular music, Stevie’s legacy as a tireless and fearless advocate for justice ma...

A while back, when I wrote out in plain words that we have a politically dominant death cult ruling America right now, I worried about the risks of saying my...

With authoritarianism at our door, the policies that progressives are driving for will be dependent on whether the fundamental institutions of democracy are pr...

I keep having to explain a principle I arrived at a few years ago when I realized the modern conservative movement is grounded almost entirely in a contrived s...

I’ve been fortunate enough to get to speak at a lot of events over the years, in front of an amazing variety of audiences around the world. But I can honestly...

There are going to be endless think-pieces and armchair analyses about why America elected Donald Trump as its next President. But you already know why. Don’...

I’m skeptical about “teach the kids to code!” as a panacea for all of society’s ills. Yet today, I’m at the White House to participate in a summit on Computer...

Red Book, Yellow Book, Green Book Stay within the lines. The Red Book There’s a specification that Phillips published in 1981 , for optical digital en...

Presidential candidate Piyush “Bobby” Jindal has said he’ll take questions over social media today. I’ve got some questions, but let’s start first with some ba...

Though I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, I haven’t lived there for years. So why should anybody in the state listen to me about who to vote for as their g...

We have very nice lawyers! The team over at Wilmer Hale have been very helpful to us, and it’s been nothing but a pleasant experience for us. As is typical...

I’ve seen a lot of hand-wringing from techies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley saying “Why are we so hated?” now that there’s been a more vocal contingent o...

Today is New York City’s mayoral primary, where the two major parties select which candidate will represent the party. Due to my being on the board of the N...

Hello, Americans who work in the technology industry! Did you know comprehensive immigration reform is coming? This is a thing that is more important than the...

Mark Zuckerberg built himself a political action committee called FWD.us , and they’re diving headfirst into trying to change immigration policy as their firs...

Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Bill Gates as part of a small group, in a discussion focused around the release of his annual letter and the progr...

Much of the conversation about the shortage of technology talent in the United States focuses on how we can encourage more young people to go to college to bec...

Today marks the launch of The Internet Association , a laudable effort from a number of prominent Internet technology companies to address our industry’s hist...

Oh, hello there! I didn’t see you come in. Well, as long as you’re here, let’s look at some links around the web that I’ve found to be related to what we’ve be...

The idea of “public space” used to be pretty simple; There were places that we all agreed would be maintained by, and for, the public good. But the past few de...

I’m an idealist. I want all governments to work in an ideal, uncorrupted state. But I’d settle for the governments which I live under to work in a way that wer...

Considering how much conservatives and right-wing political personalities in the United States claim to hate the liberal media, it’s remarkable how much money...

This week, many of the web’s most popular sites shuttered their doors in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the pair of bills that had been winding their way through co...

A few nice conversations around the web, either in response to or inspired by what I’ve been talking about here: My favorite TechCrunch post in a long time...

I think we’ve had more debates in the past few weeks for the Republican candidates so far than are typically held in the entirety of an election season, but th...

The conventional wisdom is that the American people are too cynical, too jaded, and too burnt out on politics to ever engage with the actual governance of ou...

For the past several days, Apple’s stock has been rising high enough that the company has flitted between being the first and second most valuable company in t...

Two years ago, I said that the executive branch of the U.S. federal government was the most interesting tech startup of 2009 . That optimism started to bear f...

Summary: The White House is looking to build a web community to get its questions answered, sort of their own Quora, and they’re trying to do it the right way....

Thank you to those of you who supported my bid for a board seat in the New York Tech Meetup election. Being considered amongst such talented and accomplished...

Update: Voting is now open . I’d appreciate your support. Update #2: There’s video of my platform speech at this month’s tech meetup, if you want to see a...

I travel often, and until relatively recently I was doing over 100,000 miles a year. I’ve cut back a lot because my jobs have changed and I felt bad about my c...

Bob Metcalfe’s most famous pronouncement is known these days as Metcalfe’s Law, the idea that the value of a network increases with the scale of its number of...

Malcolm Gladwell gets started with “The revolution will not be tweeted” in this week’s New Yorker , condemning social media’s ability to enact real cultural c...

There’s been a recent re-emergence of the perennial tech industry conversation about how the venture capital industry can stop excluding women from both joinin...

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and among many observances was an event at the White Hous...

When there’s no time for original content, we link! These are the places I’ve popped up lately, or things that caught my eye: We published our initial res...

The White House tweeted that they want feedback on the Grand Challenges in science and technology that face our country. That’s not so new. But today, if you...

Today is Ada Lovelace Day , a wonderful idea that was started to help us celebrate our heroes in technology and science, and to identify female role models. I...

Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke federal law, did it in plain sight of the world’s leaders and traditional media, and...

A few months ago, I started as director of “Expert Labs”: http://expertlabs.org/ , a new independent non-profit effort with the goal of improving government by...

I love seeing people start new companies, especially in the tech world. But I’ve probably gotten a little bit jaded about new startups, especially when the sto...