An Interview with Kevin Kelly

Our guest for episode 119 is Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will Shape our Future. Kevin and I share many views – from skepticism about the recording industry’s effort to control their digital files to a similar skepticism about EFF’s effort to control private data – but he is California sunny and I am East Coast dark about where emerging technology trends are taking us. The conversation ranges from Orwell and the Wayback Machine to the disconcerting fluidity and eternal noobie-ness of today’s technological experience. In closing Kevin sketches a quick but valuable glimpse of where technology could take us if it comes from Shenzhen rather than Mountain View, as it likely will.

The news roundup leavens deep thoughts about the future with loose talk about sex and politics. I ask whether the FOIA classification review of Hillary Clinton’s email is compounding the damage done by her use of a homebrew server. I discover the weird connection between leak defenders like Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum and sexual extortion – and even offer a theory to explain it (caution: involves threesomes). And we award the Dumbest Journalism of 2016 prize to Jason Leopold, Marcy Wheeler, and Ky Henderson for a VICE article that spends thousands of words trying in vain to justify its headline – and also manages to bury the only interesting news the reporters turned up. (They have pole-dancing competitions in China? And the organizer invited Edward Snowden’s girlfriend to compete, just as Snowden was getting ready to release NSA’s files? Sounds like a great story, but the authors dropped it in favor of tendentious NSA bashing.) And to cap the week off, North Korea cloned Facebook for its nomenklatura, only to have a Scottish teen take it over because the logon credentials were left at “admin” and “password.”

More seriously, I report that USTR will in the future try to negotiate limits on data localization even for financial institutions. Maury Shenk reports on the successful EU jawboning of big American tech companies to crack down on “hate speech” on line.

Organizations whose hate speech has mainly been aimed at Smith v. Maryland and the third party rule had a bad week, I note, as the only circuit to require warrants for cell-site location recedes in an en banc opinion that drastically cuts the Supreme Court’s incentive to grant cert on the issue.

Maury reports on delays to the EU’s Paris-related changes in anti-money-laundering regulation. And I puzzle over the newfound enthusiasm in Republican and cable industry circles for FTC-style privacy regulation.

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Download the 119^th episode (mp3).