David Benjamin is a Brooklyn-based journalist and novelist who writes on technology issues, usually from the Luddite point of view.
When the editor of EBN approached me to author this column, I objected, saying, “Wait a minute. I don't know nothin' about supply chains,” to which he replied that his readers are eager for variety and would be happy if I wrote about “anything but supply chains.” And so I have. But I have to…
Last week, meandering back in history to the Joe McCarthy era, I touched on the conflation in broadcast news of journalism and showbiz. This week I found, while reading Michael Bilton's and Kevin Sim's 1992 book, Four Hours in My Lai , another example of how American journalism tends to prefer entertainment to hard news.…
When troubadour Don McLean referred to rock 'n' roll great Buddy Holly's death on February 3, 1959, as “the day the music died,” he was crafting a metaphor about a period of remarkable innocence and idealism in American history. McLean's lyric came to me last week while I watched, again, a movie set in the…
I used to attend Earth's biggest mobile phone conference, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, when it was still called 3GSM and being held in Cannes. Despite this apparent wealth of experience, I remain the one person I know whose only habitual mobile device is a book. I still make telephone calls. When I try…
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun — Seamus Heaney A few years ago, I read about a contest in Japan that pitted cellphone texters against one another in a thumb speed competition. The results were astounding. Hundreds of teenagers tapped out staggering amounts of digital copy, their…
The economy is still sluggish, and we know who to blame — sort of. We can't quite put our finger on the culprit. Deep within the greatest economic system ever devised, there lurks a gnawing parasite that devours the nourishment of capitalism from within. Every day, almost complacently, our captains of industry invoke this dark…
As I sit here in Brooklyn, New York, awaiting the horrific onslaught of Hurricane Sandy as it roars up the Gulf Stream, takes aim at Atlantic City, and veers northward toward the Envy of Western Civilization, I feel a thrill. I know Sandy is already destined to go down in history as the Greatest, Most…
Long before Steve Jobs founded {complink 379|Apple Inc.}, and even before Bill Gates turned MS-DOS into the Operating System That Ate Everybody's Brain, Gene Roddenberry and William Shatner planted in my mind a vision of personal computing so sublime that no real-life advance in this technology has given me the slightest thrill. I can't identify…
Among the myriad dubious claims associated with last week's first presidential debate was that Republican candidate Mitt Romney's “tax plan” is too mathematically complicated and too conceptually abstruse to explain to ordinary voters in the mere 90 minutes of TV time (about a half-hour longer than Bill Clinton's entire speech at the Democratic convention) allotted…
Last week, I mildly mocked the efforts of the mobile phone industry to “self-regulate” the idiot practice of texting-while-driving. This prompted way more comments than I usually get, reminding me that anti-regulation — an ideology long promulgated by the forces FDR once aptly labeled “Organized Money” — has been so well marketed that we all…