Marty Manley on economics, politics, technology, and culture

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Lenin’s Rope: Universities Help Disrupt Universities

Lenin famously bragged that “Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” It would surely gall him to learn that the art of destroying capitalists with their own products has been mastered not by a militant, vanguard-led proletariat but by entrepreneurial capitalists. It appears that even universities, finally, are getting the hang of [...]

Draw This…

Henry Blodget is the former head of Internet research at Merrill Lynch. (Background: once upon a time there was something called Internet research. And once upon a time there was something called Merrill Lynch).  NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer convicted Blodget of touting stocks in public while sending emails disparaging those same securities. Spitzer was [...]

Will Technology Burst Higher Education’s Bubble?

Imagine a market with incumbents whose core processes are unchanged since medieval times that is held together by huge federal subsidies and protected by a system of self-accreditation designed to exclude rivals. Imagine that the resulting enterprises exploited their monopoly power by overcharging customers and wasting the revenue that resulted on guaranteeing senior employees lifetime [...]

Protection That Makes You Weaker

I have taken up running and, like boomers everywhere, I worry about hurting myself. Data suggest that between a third and half of runners get hurt running every year, making running a surprisingly high risk exercise. Why is this? Journalist Chris McDougall wondered why he was getting hurt when humans have been running for two [...]

My Two Worst Technology Predictions

In the spirit of the New Year, it is time to take stock, confront shortcomings, and resolve to improve. I’ll get 2011 off to a clean start byI confessing to two whopping errors. There were plenty of small things that did not work out as I said they would, but two of my predictions were [...]

Cory Booker: Tweet Theater or the Politics of Engagement?

In September of 1965, Hurricane Betsy devastated New Orleans. The damage was not as bad as Katrina forty years later, but large bits of Lake Pontchartrain again ended up in the poor and largely black Ninth Ward. Residents fled to the George Washington Elementary School on St. Claude Avenue, which had been hastily converted into a [...]

Wave Goodbye to Traditional Telcos

A third wave is about to hit the telecommunications industry. It is very unlikely to damage the industry, but it will force some of its biggest players to once again become dull and regulated. Consumers will celebrate because telcos that provide only dumb pipes are not a problem, they are a solution.  The first wave to [...]

A Whitman Deer in California Headlights

It’s a good time to live in the Bay Area. Not only do you get to watch the Giants absolutely pulverize the Texas Rangers, but you get to watch Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina spend a great deal of their own money on vanity campaigns. Politico reports that as of last week, Meg has spent [...]

Ben Horowitz: High Tech’s New Andy Grove

If Silicon Valley is rich, how come it ain’t smart? How is it that we consistently generate innovative companies but rarely produce management thinkers of consequence? Part of the problem is that many technology leaders are neurotic. They need to be: nobody really knows what is going to work and your idea will most likely [...]

Holy Cow Batman! Facebook just stole our Internet!

 TechCrunch just reported that Facebook has taken control of the Internet. Huh? What is the fuss about? Well, Facebook announced today a plan to reshape the Internet as profoundly as Apple is reshaping mobile computing. They today published a social software platform called the Open Graph. Founder Mark Zuckerberg called it “the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the web”.  [...]

Solar Power

There is a natural and healthy tension between politics and markets. The tension is the difference between socially oriented citizens who are often unfamiliar with business and in any case favor the strong, visible hand of government protection and their commercially-oriented brethren who prefer the invisible hand of market competition and generally view government as [...]

The Future of Twitter

Twitter just raised $100 million on a $1 billion valuation, making Twitter about as valuable as say, Barnes and Noble, which has 720 bookstores and about $5 billion in revenue. Twitter revenues? Well, none. But someday we can serve ads to all those eyeballs, right? Right. But the competitors are circling. And I don't mean [...]

Grading College Admissions Essay Questions.

The Jam Kid is applying to college. He will do fine, but his applications have exposed me once again to the college admissions racket. College applications are now standardized and online, which means that to apply to lots of colleges, a kid clicks a bit and send along a few more $50 dollar bills. He [...]

Employees: Free to Choose?

As befits a vanguard organization. Espresso Workers Local One was ahead of its time. It was a project of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or Wobblies), a  bunch of colorful commies who took their class struggle fully caffeinated and with a healthy dose of sugar. We organized the local in Santa Cruz [...]

iBrain

On two recent flights the person sitting next to me had an Apple iPhone. I asked them both "is your iPhone  taking over your brain?" Both times, my seatmate looked slightly embarrassed before confessing, "actually, yes". My iPhone has been taking over my brain — or at least the digital part of it. When I [...]

The Obama Transition: Missing Three Pieces

Your weaknesses will slow you down, but your strengths can kill you. You know your weaknesses, and you tend to compensate. But your strengths cast  shadows — blind spots that create real vulnerability. Smart leaders know this. They build leadership teams that help check their blind spots. There is early evidence that Barrack Obama is [...]

The JamKid Blogs China

Long-time readers of JamSideDown know a bit about the JamKid, profiled two years ago here, and featured in our trip to the Iowa caucus here. He is Jamie Manley, my oldest son and at 16, no longer a kid. During his freshman year in high school, Jamie studied Chinese history and seemed to like it. [...]

Media Wants to Be Digital, Downloadable, and Free

Moore’s Law famously describes an important trend in computer processing power: the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit increases exponentially. Specifically, Intel founder Gordon Moore observed that chip density doubles about every two years. Thanks to Moore’s Law, computer processing is now free for most intents and purposes. Metcalfe’s [...]

Will Google Free the Phone?

Google is about to become your phone company. Indeed, if current technology pans out, Google won’t charge you much if anything for your phone, which may serve nicely as your computer and your TV. As of tonight Google stock trades at $700/share making it the fifth most valuable company in the United States. Google is [...]

The Ten Best Insights from the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit

"The future is here, it’s just not yet evenly distributed" - William Gibson "So too, the past" – Jam Side Down The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco is a chaotic, frenzied, demanding conference event that offers one of the best peeks over the technology horizon anywhere. As with the technologies they review, not everything about [...]