The internet has a sustainability problem. Many of its critical services depend on the dedication of unpaid volunteers, because they can't be monetized and thus don't have any revenue stream for the maintainers to live on. I'm talking about services like DNS, time synchronization, crypto libraries—software without which the net and the browser you're using couldn't function.

Local is the frontier of truth at the dawn of our Digital Age. The internet showed up in our house in 1995. When that happened, I mansplained to my wife that it was a global drawstring through all the phone and cable companies of the world, pulling everybody and everything together—and that this was going to be good for the world.

It's time to embrace 5G, starting with the Edge in our homes and hands.

Will our digital lives leave a fossil record? Or any record at all?

The more digital we become, the less human we remain.

Is it possible to figure out how we're being profiled online? This past July, I spent a quality week getting rained out in a series of brainstorms by alpha data geeks at the Pacific Northwest BI & Analytics Summit in Rogue River, Oregon. Among the many things I failed to understand fully there was how much, or how well, we could know about how the commercial sites and services of the online world deal with us, based on what they gather about us, on the fly or over time, as we interact with them.

I don't know where to begin—and I mean that in a very positive way. I can best describe Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) as a "literary documentary". The book provides a sort of oral history of the Valley from the legends who built it.

On the one hand, Facebook is on fire, and soon the whole surveillance economy will start burning down too (including publishers who depend on that economy no less than Facebook does). On the same hand, lots of Linux wizards work in that economy, which is a lot larger than Facebook alone.

Flatland, an 1880 novella by Edwin A. Abbott, is about a world with just two dimensions, inhabited by lines and polygons. Trouble starts when a sphere shows up.