I remember after the fall of communism in 1989 one of our famous political analysts said that our Romania will need at least 20 years to recover after communism and we were all laughing. And here we are, exactly after 20 years, seeing that he was perfectly right. And probably from somewhere up there he [...]

Bucharest to Brasov. Shot completely on my 1st generation iPhone using Cycorder. For those in the West with any conception of Romania at all, it is likely composed of images from the various interpretations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and, depending on your generation, a 2006 episode of South Park in which Colorado rallied against Romanian [...]

For some reason just about everyone these days seems to dislike Dave Eggers. I ask friends – people who love the craft of writing – what they don’t like about him and they just shrug. “I can’t put my finger on it,” they say, “but something about him bugs.” Well, I remain an Eggers loyalist. [...]

Along with the G5, some friends from college, and many others who I’ve never met and have no idea where they come from, I belong to a mailing list for music lovers. We share our favorite new albums, often with brief descriptions of how we discovered them and why we like them. What I love [...]

Richard M. Stallman, the pioneer of free and open source software, is the perfect subject for a biography. He is as intriguing as he is repulsive; as staunchly idealistic as he is constantly uncooperative. I began reading Free as in Freedom, admittedly, because it is one of the few contemporary works available on Stanza (one [...]

A book about farmers and farming might seem like a strange segue after having just read a book about artificial intelligence, but then consider this quote from Darwin Among the Machines: Garrett found it ominous that only half the world’s population was still concerned with producing food: “The new, non-agricultural half is the industrial part; [...]

On Monday I had the pleasure of introducing the three winners of this year’s Prix Ars Electronica in the digital communities category and moderating a forum in which they shared their experiences as communities that have formed around a particular purpose. Video and audio of all three presentations is available on the Ars Electronica Festival [...]

A video of my talk is available here. My slides are on SlideShare. What follows is a hyperlinked text of the notes in my slides. Darkness is our natural state. During the 200,000 years of human existence our species has only known electric light for .06% of that time. Yes there were candles and torches, [...]

The festival energy has arrived to Linz. The Bruckernerhaus is full of monitors, art installations, and computers. The Ars Electronica Center is filling up with laptop-toting digital nomads from all over Europe and beyond. And the Twitter stream for #ars09 is starting to slowly gain momentum. Tomorrow evening at 7:30 p.m. the festival officially kicks [...]