By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 6.5 minutes This is the 3rd installment in a series that reflects my time in January & February 2023 serving on a grand jury in Rhode Island.  You can read about part 1 and part 2 if you need to catch up. Overwhelmingly, when I mentioned that I had grand jury duty, I was met with two responses, nearly straight down the line.  In fact, I can remember any other reaction that did not fall into these two buckets.  A few folks did ask how I felt about it before reacting, but when their thoughts were shared, they were typically these buckets. An upfront note here:  While I’m going to break down and explore these responses, they are not critiques of the individuals themselves.  People are people and they’re often doing some level of projection of their own thoughts. They also might not be fully sharing (intentionally or unintentionally), what they bring to the conversation that leads them to that thought.  But in the collective, the f...

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things that Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal My rating: 4 of 5 stars McGonigal always gets me thinking. Ever since I read her first book, Reality Is Broken, McGonigal is one of those people who I'm always willing to read. Imaginable is another great book to check out. McGonigal uses her expertise in games and future casting to think about how we as individuals and a society can think about the future in more productive ways. It's not about predicting the future but rather by imagining and playing out different simulations about the future, we are more prepared to navigate its complexities. The book, in part, comes from her work at the Institute for the Future and also, from her experience playing simulations over the years, including one about a decade ago that focused on an airborne respiratory virus that creates a pandemic (sound familiar, ahem, COVID). She not...

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin My rating: 5 of 5 stars I'm a big fan of Cory Doctorow and this was now the second Kickstarter of his that I have participated in to help produce an audiobook.  And the money was more than worth it because Giblin and Doctorow bring an analysis of capitalism that is next level.  To me, it goes where Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism doesn't and blends in a good deal of Naomi Klein's work about capitalism.  The initial framing of the book focuses on the fact that while we have some safeguards against monopolies, we do not have real safeguards from oligopolies or monopsonies.  Many industries (particularly creative industries such as books, music, film, television, comics, etc) are held up by oligopolies wherein a few large companies control most of the market and because of that, they can (...