Writing

I was born in Germany in 1967. Growing up my friends and I used to wonder why our grandparents hadn’t resisted Hitler’s rise to power. We were young and full of bravado and oh so sure about how outraged and [...]  Read more

My Twitter feed these days is full with back and forth on “cancel culture.” Much of it quickly reduces to bickering with each side assuming the worst possible interpretation of what the other meant or what their motives are. The [...]  Read more

ICE announced yesterday that foreign students at schools that only instruct online this fall (which includes my alma mater Harvard) must leave the US. I was a foreign student on an F1 visa and would have been distressed by this. [...]  Read more

In my book World After Capital , I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the [...]  Read more

Today Algorand and Blockstack are announcing that they are collaborating on the Clarity smart contract language . Clarity is a decidable (i.e. non-Turing complete) language inspired by lisp. I am extremely excited about this development and have spent a few [...]  Read more

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” goes an adage that is often recited as if it were some kind of profound truth (misattributed to Deming ). And of course there is some logic here. Let’s say you [...]  Read more

I watched a livestream organized by BLCK VC yesterday. It was incredibly powerful and should be widely seen. Read more

Watching what is happening in the United States, my adopted home country, is incredibly painful. I have seen the last few days coming for years based on the ever more untenable income and wealth distribution combined with militarization of the [...]  Read more

“Two out of three ain’t bad” is the title of a Meat Loaf song but is also the idea behind triangles : situations in which you can achieve only two of three objectives. The classic example is the idea that in [...]  Read more