Author: Johannes Ernst

  • If I were 19 again; thoughts on college

    The cost of college has been going through the roof. But the last time I saw a job candidate who stood out because of something related to college was a long time ago. And in my field, I cannot think of a single piece of academic research in the last 10 years that impressed me.…

  • Global war in your pocket

    Imagine you are the Chinese government, and you read the various Snowden stories this summer. What are you going to do? For argument’s sake, let’s pretend that the Chinese government was perfectly innocent and totally oblivious to any of this before. I cannot imagine that they would do anything other than immediately start a crash…

  • The IndieWeb community has it nailed: #selfdogfood

    Endless meetings. Disagreements over gory details that may never even get implemented in the real world. Philosophical grandstanding. Paper standards. etc. etc. We’ve all been there, and it can be terminally annoying. Which is why the Indie Web community is so refreshing. Other than that they are doing extremely useful work on re-decentralizing the internet…

  • Picture from the Concord Debate in June

    Subtitle: lonesome among lawyers :-) There’s a video recording , too.

  • Articulating the cost of the “feudal” big internet company model

    The internet has turned into warring fiefdoms of new feudal overlords: Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc. There are advantages of this new feudal model: free products. No system administration hassles. Higher security etc. I’m trying to articulate the costs and downsides. Less “control” for the individual is not a downside in itself. What are the things…