Stop Charging Admission to a Platform You’re Already Trying to Turn Into a Subscription Service I work in IT, and one of the things that has increasingly pushed me away from wanting to build and maintain Windows computers for people is surprisingly simple: Windows itself costs too much for what Microsoft is trying to make…
Read MoreBack in the early 2000s, somebody somewhere decided they were going to sell their soul on an online forum. It was one of those strange internet stories that sticks in your head because it sounds ridiculous at first. Selling your soul? Who would do that? Then you get older, look around at real life, and…
Read MoreWhen I began this series, I thought I was writing about one phrase. By the time I reached the end, I realized I was writing about civilization. Every generation inherits institutions it did not build. Some deserve to continue. Some deserve to be reformed. Some have fulfilled the purpose for which they were created. The…
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Throughout this series we’ve watched civilization become increasingly organized. Kings built armies. Merchants built trading companies. Industries built factories. Cities built charities. Governments built agencies. Philanthropists built foundations. Universities built professions. Technology connected all of them. None of these developments happened overnight. None of them required a grand conspiracy. Most began with people trying to…
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By this point in the series, we’ve watched civilization become increasingly interconnected. Industry expanded. Transportation expanded. Healthcare expanded. Education expanded. Finance expanded. Communication expanded. Government couldn’t remain organized as though it were still governing a nation of farmers connected primarily by dirt roads and horseback. It had to adapt. That adaptation produced something every American…
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One of the biggest mistakes people make when talking about progress is assuming that history moves in a straight line. It rarely does. More often, history moves in circles. Technology changes. Society adapts. Then one day we discover we’ve reinvented something our great-grandparents would recognize immediately. Only now it has a touchscreen. The Internet Didn’t…
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Author’s Note Before continuing, I want to acknowledge something about this series itself. The first several parts relied heavily on two ideas. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. George Carlin observed that people with converging interests don’t necessarily need a conspiracy. Those ideas served their purpose. They helped establish the framework for understanding…
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One of the more interesting things about Abigail is the world it quietly suggests beyond the immediate story. This is not simply a universe where vampires happen to exist. It appears to be a world where a mob-like criminal organization is controlled by vampires, with its own hierarchy, traditions, punishments, and methods of handling anyone…
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Author’s Note When I began this series in Part One, I had a fairly simple outline in mind. As I continued writing, researching, and connecting historical events, the series grew beyond that original plan. History has a habit of doing that. The more you examine how societies evolve, the more you discover that no institution…
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In the previous chapters, we’ve watched industry transform armies, commerce, transportation, and manufacturing. But factories didn’t simply produce steel, locomotives, ships, and machinery. They produced cities. And cities produced people with needs that individual families could no longer meet by themselves. This is where another kind of complex began to emerge. Not a military complex.…
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