The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Another cycle around our star and we're still stuck in the same rut. Still talking about dealing with uncertainty; about counting your blessings; about stopping and smelling the roses because  life is short  and it's better to appreciate the small things when a virus can snatch your life away any second should you dare step outside. Is Omicron deadlier? More contagious? Resistant to Pfizer? To Moderna? How many mutations did you say it had? Does it evade natural immunity? But it doesn't affect your smell? Oh, the symptoms are the same as the common cold? But masks still work, right? Oh, but not cloth ones?  The noise is  maddening .  Our hyper-mediatized, over-stimulated minds can't think of nothing other than what's in our handheld screens. And at the same time, our hyper-cynical minds won't believe those very same incessant, flickering alerts, either. Somehow our collective mind has entered a sort of  Schrödinger -like, superposition state. We  ...

There seems to be hysteria these days around AI and algorithm-based consumption. The algorithmic economy  threatens to bring to the realm of the tangible that totem of economic dogma called the "invisible hand." Computers are finally linking --through big data-- individuals' behavior with algorithms that sort them, allowing machines to predict reactions: the "invisible hand" materializes(!). Nothing like predicting human conduct to be able to make money. That damned watch I dared to search for 3 weeks ago in a moment of stupid leisure has haunted me everywhere I go on the internet. Please, stop it Google. I'm not buying it. The idea that we are just soft machines  is a fascinating one. It feeds the collective dread of an algorithmically-dominated Armageddon, making people fret about a time in the not-so-distant future when we will decide nothing for ourselves, and when everything will be dictated by an algorithm --surreptitiously creating the illusion of  ...

It appears that "hacking" is in the news  lately. Often . And I mean,  big time . The meaning of the word is almost unanimously attached to an act of law-breaking with the clear, malicious intent of stealing someone else's property. But not everyone  grants this buzzword a bad meaning, no. The Zuck is famous for turning its meaning around to make it appear something idealistic --grandiose even. "Hacking," he says, is the trade of heroic, altruistic visionaries who are doggedly determined to make the world a better place --for example, by attempting to  bring internet to the entire Saharan Africa. Forget about the fact that starving people in poor countries and desolate refuge camps can't sustain on a kilobyte diet. Internet, the wacky  technorati  elite trumpets, is to become the end-all-be-all of human prosperity. Hacking, the way I understand it, is gaining access to the inner workings ("the code") of something to be able to manipulate it fo...