Victor Rozek
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As I See It: Ned Ludd Has Left the Building
April 7, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreAlthough historians are much too stuffy to admit such things, it was the desire for sex that launched the Industrial Revolution. And contrary to accepted thinking, it all started about 200 years earlier than the dry retelling of history would have us believe. As earth-shaking occurrences go, it was surely unintended, a solution to a private problem that, one could say, went viral.
And although the event has been relegated to historic footnote status, it is worth recounting because it also spawned a notable oddity: a Luddite of royal lineage.
The year was 1589 and the Reverend William Lee was
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As I See It: The Sleeping Giant
March 31, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIt was high noon at the SXSW corral. Ed Snowden, seated before an enlarged image of the constitution (ours, not Russia’s) called out the tech community. Of course it’s hard to sound intimidating when you’re calling people out from an undisclosed location through seven proxies. But in a time when speaking the truth is considered seditious, extreme caution has become de rigueur.
Snowden’s message was simple, although the telling of it is fraught with complexities. His famous/infamous (chose your modifier) revelations about the NSA’s drift toward global Big Brotherhood have been met with applause and condemnation. Hero/traitor, courageous/cowardly: how software
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As I See It: The New Face of Followership
March 10, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreThere is a great deal implied in the classic cartoon greeting attributed to extraterrestrials: “Take me to your leader.” Notably, that such a person exists, and that he or she is empowered to speak for the rest of the community. It exposes a hierarchical bias that assigns power and decision-making to a single individual. And it presumes that the only decision that matters is the one at the top.
And so it has been for most of recorded history. Whether in the statehouse or the workplace, hierarchy has been the unquestioned leadership model favored by dominant cultures since humans began
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As I See It: Peeking Under the Hood
February 24, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreThere would have been no AS/400 without it; no iSeries or System i or Power Systems, no servers of any kind, and no cloud in which to assemble them. Without it, there would be no smartphones, no tablets, no Internet. In fact, without some advanced evolutionary form of it, we would probably still be trolling around the African savannah looking for food. The “it” refers to the three pounds of our neuroanatomy that are the source of all human progress and invention: the brain.
If that was not immediately obvious, it is because (please forgive the pun) we don’t give
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As I See It: Googling The Future
February 10, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreStop the presses! (Or whatever the digital equivalent of that would be.) Nick Bilton sees the future of technology and its name is Google. OK, so Bilton may be more perceptive than prophetic, but given the direction of industry drift, his analysis appears to be spot on. Looking at the galaxy of tech giants greedily circling the sphere of 21st century opportunity, there are signs of orbital decay.
Microsoft and IBM have lost their sizzle. Like Greece they’re still cashing in on their Golden Age, but time and technology seem to be passing them by. Both Facebook and Twitter
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As I See It: MLK And The NSA
January 27, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreFor those of us who lived through those terrible days, it would be impossible not to reflect on the life of Martin Luther King as the nation again commemorates his birthday. But there are now two-plus generations who were not yet born when King was assassinated. They know him in sound bites, as a civil rights leader who had a dream. They perhaps notice that every year, shortly after Christmas, he is prominently mentioned in the media. But what happened 50 years ago is shrouded in the haze of history. Over time, legacies are encapsulated by granting a day off
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As I See It: ITCare
January 13, 2014 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIf you’re a mouse but aspire to grow into something as large as an elephant, evolution may oblige you, but it will take about 24 million generations–give or take a mass extinction. But there are faster ways. You could become a government program. Conceived through the biological mastery uniquely resident in the U.S. Congress, a mouse built to government specifications instantly becomes an elephant. Just add money.
Thus we have the grotesque specter of Obamacare. All 1,990 pages of it. Neither fish nor fowl, it crawled out of the primordial ooze of the healthcare lobby, a fully formed pachyderm. But
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As I See It: Traditions
December 16, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIt’s during the Christmas season that I miss my parents most. All I have left of them are memories and an old album of faded pictures; familiar faces frozen in time like insects caught in amber, remnants of a different era. Each year, as I look around the holiday table, it’s poignant to notice not only who is there, but who is missing.
Among the gifts passed down to me, was a ritual which we practiced on Christmas Eve. Like many customs and rituals, this one arrived with immigrants–my parents were both born in Poland–and it was maintained as a
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As I See It: Poisoning The Well
December 2, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreA long time ago, I was in an elevator with five or six other people when the power died and the box hung suspended between floors. There were a few gasps of shock and moans of annoyance, and more than one profanity hurled at the vicissitudes of fate so bold as to interfere with our individual designs. But after our protestations fell on fate’s indifferent ears, we gradually lapsed into an uneasy silence. It was very dark and very quiet, and amid the growing anxiety it felt like we were dangling in a group coffin.
One woman in particular was
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As I See It: Permissionless Neutrality
November 18, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIt happened to radio, it happened to television, and there is no reason to believe it won’t happen to the Internet. Communication media–at least in their infancy–have always been idealized for their potential to serve our better angels. But in the end, the hopes of visionaries are reduced to a single dominant construct: entertainment. And the more successful the medium, the more vacuous the entertainment. Once the potential for revenue is evident, the medium quickly becomes co-opted, and the greatest good for the greatest number devolves to the greatest profit for the fewest number.
For all its flaws, the Internet