How to Track COVID-19 Without Mass Surveillance
Apple and Google's Bluetooth-based app would reportedly be voluntary and anonymous. Privacy advocates say we should accept nothing less.
Decentralization
Snorkel Respirators, 3D-Printed Masks, and Other Grassroots Efforts To Fight COVID-19
People around the world are working together in unprecedented ways to help their neighbors and produce critical medical supplies.
Will COVID-19 Help Americans Break the Habit of Deferring to Centralized Authority?
We may find that we like making our own decisions.
The 2010s: When the Media Lost Their Gatekeepers
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan's work best explains how the world changed in the 2010s—and what we can expect in the decade ahead.
The Decentralized Web Is Coming
Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are in the federal government's crosshairs, but the technology necessary to undermine their dominance may already exist.
Judge to Charlottesville: You Can Put a Statue Up, but You Can't Take It Down
A judge has ruled that the town's Confederate monuments must stay.
Bitcoin at 10
A new book aims to chronicle the digital currency's ideological origins.
Want to End Urban-Rural Conflict? Stop Looking for a Victor.
Whether red vs. blue or city vs. country, political tensions are best addressed by letting people run their own lives.
Blockchain Is Changing Lives in Africa
Startups from Cape Town to Nairobi think the budding technology is the future of the continent.
Facebook Slams Independent Voices With Latest Political Purge
It's time to move beyond the social media giants to a more decentralized world that's harder to control
Can Bitcoin Become the Global Monetary Standard?
With its supply permanently capped at 21 million units, Satoshi Nakamoto's invention may turn out to be the best form of money ever conceived.
'Warlords Will Take Over' and Other Lines Libertarians Are Tired of Hearing
We asked the attendees at PorcFest 2018.
Exclusive: Ronald Reagan's 1980 Election Eve Speech Draft Was Lost to History. Until Now.
In a speech drafted but never delivered in the waning weeks of the 1980 campaign, Reagan was to say: "The overriding question is not one of Left or Right. It is one of reversing the flow of power and control to ever more remote institutions."
In Memoriam: Marcus Raskin, Radical and Decentralist
His critique of concentrated power is still relevant today.
How Jane Jacobs Challenged the Centralized Urban Planning Groupthink
The death and life of a great American urbanist
Maine's Food Sovereignty Win Is a Big Deal
Cities will be able to set local rules governing food production and sales.
Princeton-Trained Computer Scientists Are Building a New Internet That Brings Privacy and Property Rights to Cyberspace
Meet the developers behind Blockstack, who are using blockchain technology to reconfigure the web. It'll make NSA mass data collection impossible.
The Brief, Half-Serious, and Sort of Visionary Political Career of Jimmy Breslin
The candidate who told an audience of cops that he'd abolish the New York Police Department
Disasters Should Be Dull
But as long as distant authorities are in charge, that's impossible.
Reanimating Detroit
A new book offers some decent ideas for revitalizing the Motor City—but it doesn't go far enough.
You Could Make a Radical Push for Grassroots Empowerment, Or You Could Just Cut a Country-Pop Record
The "Points of Light" program and the path not taken
Postmodern Politics in Action
Ten signposts, past and present, to the coming decentralized political order
Welcome to the New—and Private—Neighborhood
Local government in a world of postmodern pluralism