Max Gross

Joe Nocera’s piece in the New York Times from January 2014 came across my feed as a “blast from the past”, and the points seem particularly prescient:

With unemployment seemingly stalled out at around 7 percent in the aftermath of the Great Recession, with the leak of thousands of National Security Agency documents making news almost daily, with the continuing stories about the erosion of privacy in the digital economy, “Who Owns the Future?” puts forth a kind of universal theory that ties all these things together. It also puts forth some provocative, unconventional ideas for ensuring that the inevitable dominance of software in every corner of society will be healthy instead of harmful.

— Joe Nocera, Will Digital Networks Ruin Us?, The New York Times. January 6, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/opinion/nocera-will-digital-networks-ruin-us.html

The answer seems more obvious now, after 2024 has come and gone — yes.

Just earlier today, the president of the United States called upon members of the military to “remember your oath” in his last address to the military before the second inauguration of Trump.

That is not something that anyone could have envisioned happening in 2014. Nor can the impact of digital networks, like Facebook and the platform formally known as Twitter, in the rise of Trumpism be understated.