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Book Review

'Who Owns The Future?' Jaron Lanier thinks Google and the government should pay for your data

who owns the future review lede

In Who Owns the Future?, Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist and musician who became the face of virtual reality in the 1990s, pins the devolution and ultimate destruction of the Western middle class on accelerating technological change, and on the internet in particular. He then suggests a way to re-engineer our networked world to recreate a middle class. His critique of the conditions that led to America’s economic crisis, while flawed, is mostly a sharp and enjoyable read. The last 150 pages (nearly half of the book) dedicated to the solution, however, get bogged down in the contingencies of something that will never occur.

Lanier would have done better with a blast of pure pessimism or by embracing far simpler and more probable fixes. But some surprisingly knee-jerk reactionary political prejudices lead him away from the more...

How the web killed the middle class and what's coming next

Jean-Claude Van Damme's 'Timecop' targeted for possible remake

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The sci-fi films of the 1980s and '90s have been ripe for remakes lately — and the latest project that could be reinvented is none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme's time-travel action flick Timecop. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Universal Pictures is putting a reboot into development, with Tom McNulty and Marc Shmuger (We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks) producing. The original 1994 film was based upon a story published by Dark Horse Comics, and featured Van Damme as a...


Listen to Giorgio Moroder's US DJ debut at Brooklyn's Output club

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If you're a fan of electronic, disco, or dance music, you'll probably enjoy the stylings of Giorgio Moroder — he's been an influential record producer, songwriter, and performer for nearly five decades. He's also featured on a track from Daft Punk's new Random Access Memories album, which was just released yesterday. If you're looking for more from Moroder beyond his one-track appearance on the new Daft Punk, Red Bull Music Academy has a...

Google's new 'Top Charts' will tell you which celebrities, planets, or dog breeds top its searches

via puu.sh

One of the best parts of Google's search engine is its ability to plot trends: sometimes for practical reasons, like the search-based Flu Trends map, and sometimes for clever snapshots like its year-end Zeitgeist of top searches. Google Trends, likewise, allows you to check the popularity of a search term over time or see what's showing up most frequently in people's searches. Now, Google has expanded Trends with some fresh organization tools....

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