Happy Holidays!

In Los Angeles, recording some of the interviews we’ll bring you in Series 3 of The Next Billion Seconds, when frequent guest Rob Tercek drew this (freehand, unprompted) on a paper tablecloth at a local Indian restaurant, Electric Karma. 

A drawing by Rob Tercek

Wishing all of you the happiest of holidays and a joyous next 31,557,600 seconds.

1.10: Original Sin (We Shouldn’t Have Made the Internet Free) with Robert Tercek

The decision to make the World Wide Web a free-to-all source of news had consequences no one expected, leading us down a path of advertising, analytics, targeting and profile auctions that leave us increasingly exposed to big data systems that know us better and better.

Here’s a video that presents an accurate picture of how all that works in practice – and be warned, it’s all a bit scary:

Robert Tercek has watched all of this develop – and, in his early days at MTV, helped it happen. Should we repent our ways? Can we? Here’s a clip:

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