…globalization and information technology are not transforming the international order to the extent suggested by all the hype. One thing that is changing, however, is this: the feasibility of solving our domestic problems by pursuing further expansion abroad is shrinking. What Niebuhr referred to as “quantitative solutions” are no longer solutions. The pursuit of more has become self-defeating—for Americans, the chief products of that pursuit are more debt, more war, and more damage to the environment. So we need to look to qualitative solutions—revising the American way of life so as to restore a sense of harmony and balance.

What makes all this melodrama so interesting today is that we are all in the midst of an unprecedented and unavoidable global re-thinking of what a lot of things really ‘mean.’ Economy. Home. Family. Security. Entertainment. Identity. You name it. There are a shit-ton of grenades still rolling around on the floor right now, and I’m one of those crazy fringe types who publicly, ardently hopes that at least one of them blows out a few load-bearing walls inside industries that are in overdue need of a bottom-up redesign.

Data is almost as good as money, but I don’t don’t know of a single consumer Web application where access to data is guaranteed by a third-party private entity, much less by the government.

Dreams come from the past, not the future. You aren’t bound by them. The dreams are bound by you.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.