December 2014

There were 29 posts published in December 2014 (this is page 1 of 3).

Some politicians seem to act as if “terrorism” means a terrible crime committed by someone who doesn’t fit the speaker’s own racial & religious profile. Just because something induces terror in some or many people, that doesn’t make it terrorism. That diminishes the concept as well as grouping routine crime – for which society has millennia of experience and solutions – into the same bucket as a more subtle and serious phenomenon that preys on the meshed society.

Terrorism isn’t just performing a terrifying act. It’s provoking society’s immune system into attacking itself, making its defence systems attack the values and people they are supposed to be defending. Terrorism is an autoimmune disorder of democracy. You don’t fight terrorism by attacking the virus; you fight it by strengthening the immune system.

Two eras of the internet: pull and push

Two eras of the internet: pull and push

Chris Dixon tries to find patterns in the evolution of the Internet and comes up with a very interesting point of view, pull and push:

Pull is when you are seeking information, usually an answer to a question. You want to know the closing time of a restaurant, the description of a hotel where you are thinking about staying, the details of an historical event you heard about, etc. You go to your computer and pull the information. The killer app for pulling information was Google.

Push is when you are using the internet in a more passive way and content comes to you. The killer app for push is social networks, the most popular being Facebook. Information is pushed from user to user via likes, shares, tweets, etc. People tend to push things they find funny, interesting, moving, outrageous, etc which usually means they push media: articles, videos, lists, gifs, photos, etc.

The article is worthwhile but here’s an issue: it seems like Chris is arguing somehow that Wikipedia or Yelp are not as successful as they were in the 2000s. Surely their growth rate decreased but the overall number of people who use these services definitely increased. So the pull era is definitely not over and I would say it’s still as prevalent as the current push services.

Uber was founded in 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the worst financial crisis in a generation. As the ride-sharing app has risen, so too have income disparity and wealth inequality in the United States as a whole and in San Francisco in particular

Leo Mirani, arguing for Quartz that Uber’s success lies in wealth inequality. He talks about his youth in Mumbai where he could have a single can of coke delivered to his doorstep, long before Uber for X startups existed.

The same is true for many poor countries, including Lebanon.