Writing this essay, I am doing what I do with most of my time: sitting at a desk, ensconced in my iMac’s blue glow, creating, reading, sorting, or sending some immaterial thing or another. I talk to my friends about this sometimes. And despite the radically different lives they lead—some are world-famous CEOs. Others are painters—they all do the same thing. We are computer operators who specialize in email.

A strange thing about this work is that it is difficult to estimate its consequence. Working on an assembly line, it would be quite obvious how many widgets one produced in a day, and the value of those widgets. Building a house, one could look at the progress each week, the rooms framed, the concrete poured, the windows installed. But this relatively new digital work leaves in its immediate wake only fatigued hands and eyes, and a cascade of digital activity that is more difficult to apprehend. And I don’t just mean this metaphorically: For all the track-ability of digital activity, there is so much activity that it is hard to track, and even harder to analyze.

What are we all doing all day? What is the impact of this work? What is attached to the other side of the pulley?

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Why “Compassionate Capitalism” is kind of a scam.

Imagine a store in your neighborhood that sells toilet paper for a dollar a roll. Each roll costs sixty cents to manufacture and sell, generating forty cents net profit. You typically buy ten rolls a month, generating a total of four dollars profit for the store’s proprietor.

Now imagine that an entrepreneur, Henry Hygiene, has an epiphany: toilet paper is a massive, unrealized lifestyle branding opportunity! Everyone needs it but no one loves it. What if a new brand spoke to the consumer’s unique personal style, home decor, and ethos? Henry sets out to start this brand, “Flush,” and opens a store next to the old one, offering rolls in hundreds of different stylish prints. In order to make the switch a no-brainer for the consumer, Flush sells its rolls for a dollar, too. And then Henry adds the coup de grace. He announces that for every roll he sells, he’ll donate a nickel to a new charity that provides toilet paper to orphans in Bangladesh. For each roll sold, then, the company will net thirty-five cents, less than its competitor, but a perfectly fine profit. Of course, Flush will heavily promote its charitable business model to consumers. They will learn that buying Flush means buying style and justice.

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There is an incredibly boring problem in the music industry for which Bitcoin offers a potentially fascinating solution. In fact, I think this might be one of the coolest and most immediately worthwhile applications of distributed ledger and payment network technologies such as Bitcoin.

The problem is simply that no central database exists to keep track of information about music. Specifically, there are two types of information about a piece of music that are critically important: who made it and who owns the rights to it. Right now, this information is fiendishly difficult to track down, to the great detriment of artists, music services and consumers alike.

Decentralized, open-source, global cyryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ripple (full disclosure: I am an investor in Ripple Labs, which is developing this currency) offer a model for how we might address this bedeviling status quo. By applying the technical breakthroughs of these networks, we can sensibly organize data about music for the first time in human history and, more importantly, reinvent the way artists and rights-holders get paid.

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Legacy content providers can still be in Fat City. But only if they overcome fear and greed.

I’ve recently come to think about digital media’s competitive environment as a layer cake with 7 distinct layers. These are, in ascending order:

1. Hardware
2. OS
3. Connectivity
4. Apps
5. Creators
6. Advertising (sometimes)
7. Content

Each layer requires those beneath it to reach the consumer, whose ultimate interest is primarily the content itself, but who also cares a great deal about the convenience and experience of discovering and accessing that content. For example, if I want to watch my favorite new show, Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories, my goal is to get the show exactly when I want in as few steps as possible. This can only be done by what is an astonishingly complicated hack: I must rely upon a deal that Tim and Eric have done with the Cartoon Network (creators), a licensing deal that Cartoon Network has done with Apple (content), Apple’s distribution through the iTunes Store (app), Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service (connectivity), iOS (OS), and my iPad (Hardware). If I want to hear the two new Prince albums, by contrast, I might rely upon a different slice of the cake: a license that Prince has given Warner Music Group to distribute his albums (creators), a license that Warner has granted to Spotify (content), Spotify (app), Verizon Wireless (connectivity), Google’s Android (OS), and Samsung (hardware).

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One of my favorite technology provocateurs, Marc Andreessen, recentlycontributed to the conversation regarding whether robots will progressively eat all of our jobs. His conclusion: they won’t; but even if they do, it’s not much of a worry. I do share Andreessen’s view that this won’t happen as soon as alarmists might imagine. The sci-fi cultists who believe it’s just around the corner espouse a speculative utopian faith in accelerating, compounding technological singularities that I struggle to take seriously (Google, please forgive me for underestimating your majesty if you do become our government three years from now).

But I suppose I have always just assumed that robots will eventually eat all of our (current) jobs. And that seems like a wonderful thing for humanity in the long run: liberation from machine-like labor, flexibility to explore our most genuine passions, and lots of free-time to spend as we wish with those we love. Marc describes this potential future, as well:

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I was so excited to wake up today to my friend Leon Neyfakh’s well-researched summary of the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI):http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/02/09/should-government-pay-you-alive/aaLVJsUAc5pKh0iYTFrXpI/story.html

This idea, of delivering to every citizen (in a nation or, ultimately, in the World) an unconditioned cash transfer, has a long lineage of supporters spanning the ideological spectrum, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Milton Friedman. I first encountered the concept when I read Phillippe Van Parijs’s work in a philosophy course during my sophomore year of college, and it struck me for its reasonableness and simplicity. If our goal is to provide every citizen with as much “real freedom” as possible, Van Parijs argued, then we must untether income from labor and give everyone a minimum income capable of supporting a healthy and safe life irrespective of their work choices or capabilities.

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I have come to believe that there is a false choice represented in the debate around climate change these days. On the one hand, we are told, we may choose environmental conservation and productive moderation. And on the other, we are told, we may choose social and ecological adaptation along with unfettered development. Either we keep carbon at bay and India and China languish, or we allow the World’s populations to continue pursuing prosperity and bear the consequences of its externalities.

This analysis, obscured itself by the juvenile pre-occupation with the debate concerning the validity of global warming, obscures alternative possibilities that might preferably balance our valued commitments. Indeed, we need neither sacrifice ecological conservatism nor global prosperity.

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