When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.

I wrote a piece of software in 1998 that created fictional weather.

A very small group of powerful people is deciding what's going to happen with your data, and they're using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It's all about efficiency. And that's the really scary thing about it.

At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition.

Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.

But if they're so successful, why haven't parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven't noticed. That's because successful parasites don't kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce.

I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.