Bahama Rescue

Frank Leister and I set out from Lake Worth, Florida to sail to Marsh Harbour on Great Abaco in the Bahamas. 

Frank and I were friends from IBM days in Germany. His wife Re, a German, Katherine, and I had great adventures while living Am Taunus, in Falkenstein,  outside of Frankfurt Germany. We skied, road motorbikes in England, Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.

After we all moved back to the US, Frank bought a Catalina 32 and we decided that he and I would sail the boat to Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas and Kath and Rae would fly and join us for a 2-week vacation in a house we rented on the water.

The trip across the Florida Straits to the Bahama Banks is only about 90 miles but when sailing, the practice among most is to gather in Lake Worth and flotilla to the Bahamas in case some boat gets in trouble. Boats leave about midnight so that the Bahama Banks are reached before dark the next night.

But the Florida Straits are known to be very difficult under the right wind conditions. The Gulf Stream flows through the straits at about 5 knots and under a Northeast wind against that current, a 6-foot short chop is raised that can pound a sailboat hull unmercifully.

After coming down the Inland Waterway, we anchored in Lake Worth, had dinner ashore, and about midnight got on channel 16 and asked for any boats making the passage to the Bahamas tonight. About 12 boats responded and we made a line...we were in the lead, and started out the channel, marked by buoys and lights from Lake Worth through an inlet to the ocean.

The wind was right off our port bow...the channel is a straight line out to deep water so we motored...no tacking under sail, the chop was big and we pounded...As we glanced back to check on the line, we noticed that several boats had turned around...within 10 minutes all the boats had turned around... so we did too.

The next night the same thing happened...the third night the same thing, even though we thought that the wind had shifted...but, by then, we were tired of Lake Worth so we said the hell with it and kept going, although we were the only boat.

It was pitch black and there were no friendly flotilla boat lights to keep us company. We rigged jack lines and put on harnesses and life jackets and clipped in. I steered because, if not, I get seasick. The chop came at us just over the port bow first, then the wind shifted to the Southeast off our starboard bow, but the waves were high enough that on occasion we would almost broach, so we headed into the waves, off course slightly, now to the Southeast instead of the rhumbline due east...and while we pounded the boat made some way under power. About dawn, we were able to set sail, and the pounding eased a little because we sailed off the wind a little....a bit more east-south-east. Frank had to manage the jib halyard ...we changed to a smaller storm jib...because if I went even as forward as the mast, I would get sick.

We maintained a course using handheld GPS receivers and the compass...but our aim was to reduce the pounding.

A rogue wave hit us right after noon and green water came over the starboard side and soaked both GPS devices. We had Loran on board, but neither of us knew how to use it...we were somewhere between Florida and Grand Bahama... but where exactly we had no real idea, especially since we had been heading off course from the beginning to ease all the pounding.

So we decided to seek help.

I ventured down into the cabin after all night at the helm, got on channel 16 and said the magic word...Mayday...Mayday...this is sailing vessel Puff...yes that was its name...Puff...Mayday... Mayday we have lost all electronic positional equipment ...This is sailing vessel Puff.

Almost immediately a voice, a laconic voice, speaking slowly and emphasizing each word, came on channel 16 and said:

"Sailing vessel Puff, this is Bahama Rescue, who is in command of your craft..over...

This is sailing vessel Puff, my name is Jim Ingram..over...

This is Bahama Rescue, sailing vessel Puff, "Captain" Ingram, please tune to channel 20 and callback...confirm....over...(It is the maritime practice to identify the person on a vessel talking as the 'captain' although I did not feel like a captain at that moment...nor did I believe Bahama Rescue thought I was 'in charge' either.) 

This is Captain Ingram, sailing vessel Puff, confirm to tune to channel 20...out

This is Captain Ingram, sailing vessel Puff, on channel 20...over...(it is the practice to move off the public channel 16 to another channel so as not to monopolize the public channel 16. Going to another channel does not provide privacy, however, as anyone can tune to any channel and listen in.)

Sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, this is Bahama Rescue, we understand that you have NO positional equipment ...confirm...over" 

This is Captain Ingram, sailing vessel Puff, affirmative, we have lost two GPS devices due to water damage. We have Loran but do not feel competent to operate it...over

Sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, you have lost two GPS devices and do not know how to operate your Loran... confirm..over..

BahamaRescue, this is sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram speaking, confirm we have lost 2 GPS devices and do not know how to operate the Loran..we hope that you can assist us to determine if there is a boat in the vicinity with directional equipment...over

Sailing vessel Puff (by this time the voice has taken on a slightly incredulous tone), Captain Ingram (the voice emphasized the word 'Captain' in a way that led me to believe he really did not think I deserved that title.)...we would be happy to assist you as soon as we determine where you are likely to be...

Where do you 'think' you were when you last checked your GPS device before it was damaged by water...over

Bahama Rescue, this is sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, we believe we were 90 miles east of Lake Worth on heading 110 degrees...(The 'rhumb line' from Lake Worth to Bahama Banks is about 90 degrees or due East.)

(We actually were not absolutely sure since it had been an hour or so since we last checked the GPSes before they were doused..but we decided that we had appeared as idiots too long so we guessed and hoped...and the 110-degree azimuth would give Bahama Rescue a position.)

Sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, this is Bahama Rescue...are you under sail?.. over

Bahama Rescue this is sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram..yes, we are under sail...

Sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, please take in your sails, proceed under power on course 48 degrees, sail for 40 minutes and contact us again on channel 20...confirm..over

Bahama Rescue, this is sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, we are to take in sail, proceed under power on a course of 48 degrees for 40 minutes and call again on channel 20...over

Sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, this is Bahama Rescue...out

We proceed for 40 minutes, by this time, the wind had shifted more south, and the chop had subsided significantly, and on our starboard bow appeared a small island that we both recognized from our charts as the entrance to the Bahama Banks that we were steering toward when we lost GPS.

Bahama Rescue did not perform magic...48 degrees was a reasonable course given our direction and the current and the wind.

Bahama Rescue, this is sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, we have proceeded course 48 degrees for 40 minutes...over

Sailing Vessel Puff, Captain Ingram what do you see off your starboard bow?...over..

Bahama Rescue, this is sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, we see an island which we believe is the marker for entrance onto Bahama Banks...over

Sailing vessel Puff, Captain Ingram, this is Bahama Rescue, we believe you are correct.

We suggest that you stay in the area until you sight another vessel approaching, make contact on channel 16 and ask for assistance. And, if you remove the covers GPS devices and carefully dry out the circuits with a cloth, there is a good possibility that the GPS units will begin to work...We hope that you enjoy the remainder of your voyage...and you might consider taking a few moments to familiarize yourself with the features of your Loran directional equipment.

Bahama Rescue... out.

We didn't need to wait...the GPS devices ...without removing the covers.. had dried out and we continued the voyage, seasoned... but chagrinned...sailors now, to Marsh Harbour without further incident...hoping to never again encounter the implicit derision of 'Bahama Rescue'.  And we did read the Loran manual.

Marvin Davis Limerick

To ole Marv who had a tough life

We got to know each other in Sunset Park

a mutual love of sports probably the spark

but as friends the main reason

is that we defined as treason

any activity that was not fun and a lark

we built tunnels and forts and fashioned rubber guns 

fought fierce battles against the Japs and the Huns

we kicked tin cans down the long dusty road

searched for Camel packs with a certain code

drank RC cola, ate peanuts & moon pies by the tons

played football on a vacant lot on Jefferson Street

hitched to Wrightsville Beach to escape the heat

body surfed waves off long Lumina Pier

swam out to the shrimp boats with no fear

lived an innocent carefree life that was hard to beat

we shot out the tire of a guy who dated West's girl

visited Bill Orr's men's fancy shop all in a whirl 

feigned to repair a car on Front Street

and to abuse a friend inept on his feet

foretelling the lives that were just about to unfurl

Marvin's favorite thing was a good old tale 

Irty Glover or Mitch Celibi just out of a jail

He had tens if not more

And after if not before

He would always laugh the loudest never fail

Communitarianism...how I would define it..

I'll try to write this web log entry emulating the style of the Economist newspaper...its writers (or editors) construct...  typically... an article that poses a question...then spends the first part of the article discussing all the reasons why it's possible to answer the posed question oppositely to the response warranted by the facts presented...and then takes the remainder of the article to patiently persuade the reader to come around. 

 So!!! The modern version of communitarianism arose, I think, and in my mind, as an alternative to the cult of individuality and personal freedom rampant among conservatives. ...that is an ideology with little emphasis ...maybe paying lip service ...'oh sure we have to have an army'.. ...on responsibly to the common. 

I maintain that individual freedom is only desirable in the context of the presence of other human beings. It is not a relevant subject, for example, if there is only one individual on earth. 

So to the eternal question of whether the individual exists first and then the community, I think the answer is obvious...the individual technically...but it' an irrelevant question... except in the context of a community of people....don't you agree?...

It's not an issue independent of context....so in the important and salient sense, community precedes the individual...that is an individual exists in concept only when there is more than one...and more than one means there is a 'community' and by the existence of more than one, there is a necessity to begin to define the rights and responsibilities of the individual versus the rights of the community. 

Succinctly, then, communitarianism is, again to me, the belief that individual freedom (i.e., the condition where minimum restraint is imposed by individuals or groups on any other) must be balanced by individual responsibility. 

And until that goal is accomplished (which, of course, it never will be...at least not in my lifetime because its Utopian or non achievable) the 'community' or 'civil society'.... within the confines of which individualism defines itself by 'contrast' .... must assume the responsibilities not otherwise accepted by individuals who shirk or are unable to fulfill ...that is the community must assume it if there is to be a just society. 

{Maybe an example is useful here: since individual health is mostly beyond individual control...that is health is less a matter of choice and more a function of genes inherited from parents,  lifestyle often influenced greatly, if not outright controlled (as, for example, children by parents) by others, a common physical environment, and eventually age which, at least so far, is inevitable by nature.}

So one's health while not entirely out of the individual's control...but I maintain is mostly so... and since individuals.... and the communities they form... exploit common resources and wealth from a common source...the earth...social justice demands a proportionate contribution from each toward the maintenance of the health of all. 

I like John Rawls on this subject...he developed a theory of justice that boils down to 'fairness as justice.'

If an individual shirks her responsibility or is unable to fulfill it, then the community is obligated to cover the shortfall. The concept of community or civil society emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century in part to describe private business activity. From Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith to Bernard Mandeville and David Hume, the philosophers who developed this idea spoke of the unintended good to society that results from selfish economic activity. 

In Mandeville's famous phrase, "private vice is public virtue." This concept that an unintended consequence of the sum total of all acts of individuals responding to their own desires is collective good is a principal argument against communitarianism.. that communitarianism is, simply, superfluous. 

I'm in complete agreement with the social objective that each individual must be free to exercise as much autonomy as is compatible... in the real-world context that no individual is an island...and moreover...no individual life is really worth living except within the community of other individuals collectively....with the counterbalancing responsibility to the community that ensues from a concept of justice as fairness.

Disintermediation and blockchain...a little wonky

China Club Discussion February 7, 2018

Digital intermediation

As a conceptual ‘lens’ through which to foresee fundamental changes…or is the future pretty random?

This is to be, hopefully, a ‘beyond Trump’ discussion about the future in the conviction that our country is resilient enough to survive the horror of his presidency...not to digress into the political, of course.

So for our purposes tonight, I want to mean by ‘digital intermediation’: the supplanting of the role of the middleman in economic and social transactions by some form of new digital entity.

‘Middlemen’ were the necessary economic innovation to overcome limitations to interactions created by physical distances, the span of control between business and customer and citizen and government, and perhaps a general philosophical bias toward decentralization. Examples of middlemen are: The local drug store is a traditional middleman between you and the drug manufacturer. Online Internet-based websites offer mail order drugs and disintermediate the local drug store and the local pharmacist.

These ‘necessary’ intermediate entities, while a solution at the time, have often become the sources of additional cost and inertia...they naturally resist change and slow adaptation to disruptive technologies… while, at the same time, often offering convenience and diversity.

But the overwhelming cost and convenience advantages of new digital technology has powered a momentum that often overcomes the inertia of intermediates...hence the advent of ‘disintermediation’ which, in the opinion of most writers that I read, is a positive, technological, innovation, not a ‘luddite’ curse.

But ‘cutting out the middleman’ by automated digital processes often results in uniformity and commoditization. Counterintuitively, digital disintermediation often increases the personalization of a service or product, for example, the website digital process is able to check a new prescription easily against all of a customer's prescriptions to determine if one interferes with another.

I propose this ‘lens’ of dis- and re-intermediation’ as an analytic tool, but I do not pretend that it is some ‘silver bullet’ or ‘fundamental principle’ that explains all and solves all… rather it's a concept that might enable interpretation of the technological trends that profoundly influences the future…

and the idea of intermediation as a tool is not original...the subject is written about widely.

Plus to make such a claim would ignore the wisdom of the old aphorism: “If the only tool is a hammer, then every problem is a nail.”...attributed to Abraham Maslow and sometimes to Mark Twain who often is assigned credit for pithy sayings that he never made.

A classic...and current... example of the ‘removal of the middleman’ or ‘disintermediation’ is Tesla which sells its cars via the internet directly to customers negating any requirement for local sales showrooms. But local dealers also service cars and resell used ones...so Tesla will offer regional service centers supplemented by mobile service vans. Resale will be via the Internet...an example of substitution of intermediaries.

Netflix now produces movies and streams them directly bypassing movie theaters.

Geico and Progressive have made the life of local insurance salesman miserable and often obsolete.

An example of substitution of one intermediary for another is Amazon which offers, famously, its digital commerce Internet-based platform as an alternative to local bookstores and, of course, similarly, for many...maybe most... other products…

ATM’s disintermediated bank branches.

Quicken Loans has disintermediated local mortgage brokers.

Amtrak disintermediates its own ticket counters in train stations through its website.

MOOCs ...massive online courses...... disintermediate campus college courses. However, colleges face a supply and demand problem.

FundRise…...a local DC digital web-based platform, created by a son of Herb Miller, who developed Georgetown Park, facilitates small investments in residential real estate...thus disintermediating REITs.

The ‘Cloud’ is the disintermediation of in-house computer capability...Ross Perot started this trend of computing as a 'service' as early as the 1970s.

Even book publishing has been democratized by disintermediating self-publishing services such as are offered by Amazon.

I’m sure you can think of many more examples. It's hard to think of a collective activity that has not been impacted by ‘digital disintermediation.’

Middlemen who have not been disintermediated might be restaurants...although even restaurants are under attack by disintermediating competitors like Blue Apron, and hyper-locally by, for example in Washington, Via Umbria or Stachowski's or any PIzza deliverer.

And writers, athletes, lawyers, scientists, actors,...although animated films seem to me to be a threat..., stuntmen, physicians, ministers, rabbis, priests, and emans...TV evangelists are maybe an exception, and, of course, many people don’t want access to a higher being in any form …

Although many doctors and lawyers are at risk to AI which already reads x-ray images more reliably than a radiologist and certain surgical procedures performed more accurately than surgeons…

and Members of Congress and State Legislatures are intermediaries... perhaps desirable ones... to calm passions and to bring practicality to bear...perhaps not...although State level referenda are becoming a principal means of expressing popular will, prevalent especially in California.

Direct Internet-based voting would be the ultimate political disintermediation.

To create a context for our discussion maybe a paraphrase and shortening of the famous opening sentence of Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens might work: “today..this year...2018.. is the best of times and the worst of times….”

The best of times:

“Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data. Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water…...” Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times

Homo Deus..a Brief History of Tomorrow Yuval Noah Harari

“If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this—the most inspiring book I've ever read." —Bill Gates (May, 2017) “Steven Pinker's point is that over the last thousand years, violence has gone down and people have gotten nicer. He sketches out possible causes for this but without ever going as far as saying violence has been conquered or that this or that institution will guarantee peace. Quite the contrary. Violence might return, and it would be foolish to be blind to that possibility. Nevertheless, it would be equally foolish to deny that things really are much better today than they were 100 years ago.“ The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker

So  the question must be asked: Is intermediation a factor in these ‘best of times?’

Quickly, the answer might be yes, while not digital so much but in general: Increased food production may be attributed to the disintermediation of small farmers and the improvement in world health to the disintermediation that resulted from formation of large agents such as drug companies (Pfizer), University Laboratories (Johns Hopkins), and centralized government support (NIH) and health care ‘insurance’ organizations such as Social Security.

And the worst of times...

Poverty... extreme poverty persists......in a capitalist economy ...is there really any alternative economic system today even contemplated..so don’t we have to deal with capitalism?

A potential advance toward a solution to extreme poverty in a capitalist system is the empowerment... by technology... of every human being in the world as an economic entity and the identification and credible recordation of each human being’s assets as well as liabilities….

Such a scheme is possible using BlockChain technology that disintermediates bureaucracies at all levels and smart cell phones as mobile depositories of identity as well as communication.

Read Hernando De Soto on ‘Dead Capital.’

Inequality of income and wealth...maybe the creation of a ‘birthright’...proportional ownership of the world’s net worth by each individual human being...

maybe something like a small value added tax on an economic activity such as financial transactions that funds ‘birthrights’ in the form of baby bonds that can be accessed at age 18 and used for a limited number of economic activities...to pay for education...a business start-up...a home…’Baby Bonds’ would disintermediate traditional social support programs…

(Baby Bonds are the name given to small denomination bonds that are exchange-traded and often have attractive yields..for example...at 5% yield a baby bond for each child born in the US would require the investment of ~$19K to create a fund of $50K at the end of 18 years.

About 4M babies are born each year in the US…$84B would be required to fund a baby bond for each child born in America that invested at 5% would be valued at $50K for each child in 18 years…$84B is about 2% of the $4T federal budget.

~130 Million babies are born in the world…$2.6T would be required each year to fund 130 Million baby bonds at ~$20K each year. The world’s wealth..that is its net worth... is estimated at $281 Trillion. A value-added tax of 2.6% on the world’s GDP of roughly $100T collected easily by taxing money transfers would fund a baby bond for all children born in the world each year.

Perhaps ‘birthrights’ are utopian...requiring political will never before exerted..but less utopian, maybe, when actual numbers are considered and means of funding identified..then the idea becomes at least ‘contemplate-able.’

Various universal basic income schemes are being tested around the world and it is technology and in particular, disintermediation that makes such schemes practically feasible, if not, in fact, politically adoptable. Practical, feasible implementation of a scheme is, I would argue, a ‘necessary’, if not sufficient, prerequisite to change...hence digital, technological, disintermediation plays a ‘huge’ ‘enabling’ role.

Global warming...the only solution may be a disintermediated global agreement between entities other than or in addition to national governments... when the US refuses to participate. Global warming, a transnational threat, is a classic example of a  free ‘market failure,’

Food availability.. Inadequate food availability has always been mostly a matter of distribution, not availability, but the creation of economic identifies for every person embodied in each individual’s smart cell phone can cause markets to come into being that reduces the distribution problem..

Healthcare….remote sensing and remote diagnosis and remote treatment plans implemented on smart cell phones disintermediates the lack of critical intermediary effects such as government health care support, physicians, and hospitals. Economic identities for individuals enable markets to be created to distribute drugs at affordable prices.

Infrastructure...public-private partnerships..as Trump via Cohen wants to do have some merit. Such a scheme leverages cheap federal money with private incentive schemes ... disintermediates the federal/state bureaucracies but more importantly the Congress...digital mediation enables taxing the revenue or capturing part of the revenue for the public so as to not enrich private companies, but gain the efficiency of private construction and profit incentives to manage well...best when there is a revenue stream earned from infrastructures like toll roads, air and sea ports and intercity train...water and sewer systems ..even schools.

Factory animal farming...The substitution of alternatives to animals as sources of food such as synthetic biology may triumph when compassion for animals has failed. Technology will create synthetic biology's that can be created from readily available local materials. This synthetic food will disintermediate the current system that relies upon ‘factory’ efficiencies to enable cheap food from animals.

Incarceration...the most pernicious of policies...recent data in states indicates crime rates decoupled from incarceration rates...phone apps would enable parolees to be monitored... disintermediating prisons...happy days

Guns...universal registration is easily done technologically..maybe universal gun management education is a more realistic achievable objective..

Syria/Yemen...both of these conflicts have... and will most likely to a greater extent.. become proxy wars...mediated by drones, cyberwar tactics, disinformation...all disintermediating ‘troops-on-the-ground’.

Cyber...all the intermediate computer-based systems that manage activities are vulnerable to criminals, accident, negligence, and state action

AI….the ultimate technology that has the potential to disintermediate humans

Nuclear War...remediation may be in order here..some mechanism between Trump and the trigger.

Gambling…NBA proposing a new federal law permitting gambling which will quickly migrate to the Internet disintermediating bookies etc, generating huge revenues, and enabling easy taxation..a tempting opportunity.

Drugs…If marijuana legalization extends rapidly to more states, interstate marketing of cannabis-based products will occur...already marijuana is packaged in so many forms and other drugs will soon follow. Already ‘Canadian’ pharmacies are disintermediating US controls. But Internet-based marketing is also a technological basis for regulating and taxing the sale of drugs.

National referenda...the ultimate disintermediation...Here’s a discussion. Internet voting which has many advantages is impossible, however, without a means of unequivocally establishing identity. Read this discussion of how a free-to-use universal identity protocol could be created along with existing public protocols.

So I would argue that intermediation..dis and re... may be such a pervasive trend fueled by technology that it can serve as a lens through which we can imagine the future and predict how we, as a species, might confront the ‘worst of times’ as, at the same time, we preserve the benefits of ‘technological progress’ that make 2018 the ‘best of times.’

Some salient realities to consider:

Many private corporations and even individuals have resources greater than many countries…read Roger Cohen on the disintermediation of nation-states by private companies.

The IOS economy.. which is entrepreneurial independent developers of apps for the iPhone... earned $25B last year greater revenue than McDonald's.

Blackrock manages 5.7 Trillion dollars of assets or 2% of the world’s assets...Besos’ fortune has been over $100 Billion...Entities other than governmental are major ‘factors.’

Oxfam says 82% of all wealth created in the last year went to the top 1%, while the bottom 50% saw no increase at all.

The net worth of the world is estimated to be $281 trillion...the population of the world is 7.8 Billion...the NW/person is $36K…..

in the US its $94 Trillion of net worth or $290K/person man, women, and child. These numbers often estimate asset values at book value or original cost rather than current market value...so net worth may be higher at the market.

Public entities don’t use double entry bookkeeping so we never see their net worth..that is assets minus liabilities when assets are often enormous but undervalued. The large unfunded debt that so concerns many pales into insignificance when compared to the value of the assets of the US…

For example, the US has about $150 Trillion in assets both private and public or for 340 million population so that’s $441K/capita....a 4% return on those assets would earn ~$18K/year.

So potential solutions via disintermediation and in some case re-intermediation.

Of course, the fundamental, essential, all-encompassing technology that enables disintermediation is the Internet...

But here’s the rub…

“Once the inspiration for utopian dreams of infinite libraries and global connectivity, the internet has seemingly become, over the past year, a universal scapegoat: the cause of almost every social ill that confronts us. Russian trolls destroy the democratic system with fake news on Facebook; hate speech flourishes on Twitter and Reddit; the vast fortunes of the geek elite worsen income equality. For many of us who participated in the early days of the web, the last few years have felt almost postlapsarian. The web had promised a new kind of egalitarian media, populated by small magazines, bloggers and self-organizing encyclopedias; the information titans that dominated mass culture in the 20th century would give way to a more decentralized system, defined by collaborative networks, not hierarchies and broadcast channels. The wider culture would come to mirror the peer-to-peer architecture of the internet itself. The web in those days was hardly a utopia — there were financial bubbles and spammers and a thousand other problems — but beneath those flaws, we assumed, there was an underlying story of progress.

Last year marked the point at which that narrative finally collapsed. The existence of internet skeptics is nothing new, of course; the difference now is that the critical voices increasingly belong to former enthusiasts. “We have to fix the internet,” Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’s biographer, wrote in an essay published a few weeks after Donald Trump was elected president. “After 40 years, it has begun to corrode, both itself and us.” The former Google strategist James Williams told The Guardian: “The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will.” In a blog post, Brad Burnham, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a top New York venture-capital firm, bemoaned the collateral damage from the quasi-monopolies of the digital age: “Publishers find themselves becoming commodity content suppliers in a sea of undifferentiated content in the Facebook news feed. Websites see their fortunes upended by small changes in Google’s search algorithms. And manufacturers watch helplessly as sales dwindle when Amazon decides to source products directly in China and redirect demand to their own products.” (Full disclosure: Burnham’s firm invested in a company I started in 2006; we have had no financial relationship since it sold in 2011.) Even Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web itself, wrote a blog post voicing his concerns that the advertising-based model of social media and search engines creates a climate where “misinformation, or ‘fake news,’ which is surprising, shocking or designed to appeal to our biases, can spread like wildfire.”

If you have the patience to read about and the interest in what I think is the most profound change in technology, read this article in the New York Times Magazine section for January 21st. It’s worth the time...it's the best exposition... that I’ve read... of the issue.

If you would be interested in a little more detail about the fact that while ‘free’ public protocols developed before the 90s are the basis for Internet connectivity, and that these protocols did not include a ‘user identity’ protocol and therefore encouraged the advertising-supported business models that dominate services offered via the Internet today, then read this. These models have enabled the creation of monster companies that profit from accumulated user data. The user is compensated by free services, but the value of the free services is not proportional to the profit from the data. Read here about an idea for remedying this state of affairs.

So the topic of tonight’s conversation is ‘digital intermediation’...is it a useful tool, and, if so, what predictions does it allow us to make with greater confidence, and if not, is there another way of thinking about the impact of technology in the future…..in addition to, of course, Evolutionary Psychology.

see also this discussion of Digital Identity Management

It is clear that I did not succeed fully in making at least 4 topics absolutely clear to everyone's satisfaction. I'll make another attempt by recommending 4 articles:

1. The history and extent and current funding of the Internet... Here is an excellent presentation by VOX

40 maps that explain the internet Where the internet came from, how it works, and how it's used by people around the world

2. Bitcoin....most were convinced that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are nothing but scams... they may be, or, if not scams, simply fail, as new innovations often do, but the ideas...anonymity, transparency, security, decentralization... underlying Bitcoin, I predict, will survive in some form...again a good piece by VOX

Bitcoin, explained Timothy B. Lee Bitcoin is the world's first truly decentralized payment network, and advocates say it could revolutionize the f...

3. Blockchain...this is the public ledger technology that underlies Bitcoin and I think will become the next great innovation that is adopted widely...Take a look here.

Take a closer look at Blockchain technology (Infographic) There’s been a lot of noise recently about bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency. Some of it is hype, but some...

4. How would a company like Goldman Sachs use blockchain.....and what is this crazy-sounding idea of 'zero-knowledge proof' ...well read this

‘Mind-Boggling’ Math Could Make Blockchain Work for Wall Street Matthew Leising A major breakthrough in cryptography may have solved one of the biggest obstacles to using blockchain technology...