I read this science-fiction short story which is reminiscent of Ann Leckie’s books in how it plays with gender and militarism, but I think this is better.

A government that’s certain to win

I’m not that negative about the Dominic Cummings job ad, because:

  • Unlike a lot of people in governments everywhere, he seems to have a clue what he is doing.
  • That a person who’s winning would quote Boyd is not a coincidence.
  • Using a blog in this way (or Trump tweeting like he does) is the direct e-government that everybody has always been asking for. Not so fun now that we have it, is it?
  • Governments and institutions are breaking or already are broken in this age. They do need large scale overhaul.
    This is even worse in Germany where the institutions are bigger and the ahistorical denial of reality is immense. It’s going to be really ugly when they go down.
  • A city like Berlin, that can’t get anything done to save its life, would probably be massively improved by this approach. Our local government here can’t find its own asshole without help from McKinsey. Please somebody do this for Berlin.
‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos…

The disappearance of Page and Brin is one of the weirder and more foreboding things. You have to wonder whether we will ever hear from them or anybody similarly rich ever again.

When, in their famous 1998 grad-school paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” they introduced Google to the world, they warned that if the search engine were ever to leave the “academic realm” and become a business, it would be corrupted. It would become “a black art” and “be advertising oriented.”

Larry and Sergey: a valediction