Future
In Marker. More on Medium.
No Mercy No Malice
The economic flood gates are about to open wide
Post-crisis periods are among history’s most productive eras. London rebuilt after the Great Fire with grand new architecture, and Europe, after the worst of its plagues, underwent a commercial revolution. The Marshall Plan turned enemies into allies, fomenting peace and prosperity for more than half a century. Leaders also emerge from crises. Ulysses S. Grant was a washed-up soldier without prospects until war broke out, but that war created the opportunity for Grant to save the Union and advance the cause of freedom. This is all to say: In the next 36 months, I believe our economy will birth a…
Money Talks
Welcome to the new tragedy of the commons
In the 1950s, the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland was, as it had been for centuries, one of the richest fisheries in the world, home to a massive and endlessly replenished population of cod. The fishery provided food for people across North America, and jobs to tens of thousands of fishermen and fish plant workers. But new technology — radar, sonar, electronic navigation systems, and massive drift nets — was allowing trawlers to fish for longer, and to take more fish with every trip. The result was that cod were being pulled from the ocean faster than they…
Object of the Week
The new fleet of electric vehicles paints a brighter future where the post office actually still exists
Object of the Week is a column exploring the objects a culture obsesses over and what that reveals about us.
It’s been a rough year — well, a rough decade or two — for the U.S. Postal Service. So it’s notable that in addition to enduring another round of criticism for subpar delivery performance this week, the venerable government agency also made news that struck a potentially positive note: It has awarded the contract for up to 165,000 new and redesigned delivery vehicles, some of which will run on electric power. …
Expect cryptocurrency booms, intrusive biometric tracking, and the mainstream embrace of universal basic income
In the early months of the pandemic, I published my predictions about how the coronavirus pandemic would reshape our lives. While many of these predictions are currently bearing out, it is increasingly clear that the disruptions caused by Covid-19 are only just getting started. The magnitude of any crisis is a function of both its striking force and of the strength — or fragility — of the system it attacks. Long before this pandemic, developed societies were plagued by widening inequalities and staring down a technological abyss. …
Number Crunch
Just one of those green new jobs we’ve been hearing about
$80,000: That’s the typical annual salary for an electric vehicle charging station technician according to The Mobilist, Steve LeVine’s new Medium blog covering batteries, electric cars, and driverless vehicles. (Hint: Follow the blog here!)
This type of reimagined technician is a newly developed profession, and ChargerHelp, an EV charging station servicing company, says it takes just a week of training to pick up the basics of the job. With electric vehicle adoption picking up momentum, charging stations will continue to proliferate; inevitably, that means routine problems at those stations will require a tech to resolve.
This has already emerged as…
Marc Lore joins Bill Gates and Peter Thiel as the latest founder to create a city in his own reflection
In historian Ben Wilson’s new book on the history of cities, Metropolis, he notes that the ancient Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, considered urbanization’s first draft, actually came thousands of years after an elaborate stone worship site was assembled on a mountainside in present-day Turkey. “The temple came before the farm,” he wrote. In other words, beliefs are more important than buildings.
This truism of city hatching is just as relevant today, at a time when tech moguls seek to refashion themselves as a different kind of founder. In a recent interview with Recode, Marc Lore, a billionaire serial e-commerce entrepreneur…
The 12,000 satellite Starlink constellation could fund rocket development by selling faster, worldwide internet service
Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, SpaceX is the first private company to launch a reused rocket, to complete a resupply mission to the International Space Station, and, in 2020, to launch humans into orbit. Its reusable rockets allow the company to charge some of the cheapest rates available for carrying space cargo, and its spaceships have successfully ferried astronauts to the ISS for a fraction of what it cost predecessors. But Musk has far greater ambitions for his company, including building bigger rockets, bringing down cargo costs further, and most famously, transporting the first humans to Mars.
That’s Dickson Despommier, PhD, professor of microbiology and author of the book The Vertical Farm, quoted in a story by Laura Marie in Future Human. Despommier discusses the promise that…
No Mercy No Malice
Why we’ll never go back to life before Covid
The pandemic’s most enduring feature will be as an accelerant of existing trends. The trend that encapsulates the greatest reshuffling of stakeholder value in recent history is… the Great Dispersion. Similar to prior macro trends like globalization and digitization, it offers enormous opportunity, but also real threats.
In 1997, I was asked to address the board of Levi Strauss on the future of brands and retail. The title of my presentation was “The Death of Distance.” My basic rap was that all brands needed to establish a direct relationship with the consumer (e-commerce). …
Dear Readers,
Today, I’m thrilled to announce that the Marker family is growing with the addition of a new blog, The Mobilist, about the future of batteries, electric cars, and driverless vehicles. Every so often, we write about something that our readers clearly have an insatiable appetite for. That’s exactly what happened recently, when Medium editor-at-large Steve LeVine wrote a series of stories chronicling the fast-moving, ever-changing, high-stakes mobility industry unfolding before our eyes.
More than a year ago, Steve began writing for Marker about Tesla’s million-mile electric car battery and the EV industry’s woman problem. More recently, he wrote…
