Five companies to fear, fondly, Mark Morford
What, you were expecting Viacom? You were expecting Time Warner, AT&T, Disney, maybe even Walmart or the twitchy knuckle-draggers of the Tea Party or Fox News? You were thinking the CIA? Wall Street? How cute you are. And how very 2003.
Those mediocre players are, right now, just a sideshow. I’m reading a rather brilliant annual exchange, a “State of the World 2014” chat between the always illuminating sci-fi author, journalist and all-around vivid intellect Bruce Sterling, who’s been tracking the tech zeitgeist since long before San Francisco’s current army of pale tech bros were knee high to a first-gen iPod, and Jon Lebkowsky, a “social polymath,” futurist and activist, over at famed chat spot The Well, which BTW I’m delighted to report still exists and which, for those who don’t know, is the original uber-forum for smart, adult conversation, well before anonymous commenting destroyed civilized discussion, before texting and tweeting ruined the English language, before BuzzFeed gutted deep thinking and made media for stoned 5-year-olds.
(Roundabout side note: the original founder/visionary of this very SFGate website, one wonderful guy named John Coate – who has long since moved on – was also a co-founder of The Well. Neat.)
Sterling and Lebkowsky, they chat and they dissect and I find myself nodding and sighing in equal parts, delighted at the astute observations (Sterling’s apt summation: “An extraordinary atmosphere of sullen, baffled evil, as the year opens”) but also realizing how deep is the craving for, and how notable the lack of, such intelligent discussion elsewhere in various tech forums.
The Rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/01/07/five-companies-to-fear-fondly/
