Oops, a month went by. In the winter, it's just as well. A mild winter except for one weekend when it went to 15 below one night and 36 hours later hit 50 above with rain. Whatever clears the solar panels.

Just published this month, here is some election year reading: Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason. Here is the Bernie vs Hillary part: "The central challenge of contemporary politics is to discover new ways to reconcile networks with hierarchies through the institutions of representative democracy." The Trump part? That just about the rise of fear-mongering demagogues in a time of demographic change.

Mason's thesis is that "capitalism is a complex, adaptive system which has reached the limits of its capacity to adapt" and now will evolve into something else. The good news is that "Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which breaks through, reshaping the economy around new values, behaviours and norms. As with feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s demise will be accelerated by external shocks..." Right. There is that global warming thing.

The thing I am continually doing is looking for the "unseen within the old system." And I do see the disappearing act of technologies quickly superceded by new, more highly networked technologies. I like noting the tiny ways in which I am a participant: I now configure a virtual server in Georgia to write web apps that run faster than old programs ran on a local machine. I monitor the heat in the apartments downtown over the web. I run an AirBnB over a phone app. I do volunteer coding for non-profits in exchange for tax credits.

On 15 September 2008, the Nokias and Motorolas pointed at Lehman Brothers HQ, and the free wifi signal in the Starbucks opposite, were in their own way just as significant as the bank that had collapsed. They were conveying the ultimate market signal from the future to the present: that an information economy may not be compatible with a market economy – or at least not one dominated and regulated by market forces primarily.