Here is a pretty epic and accurate description of the hubris of the new Internet-rich. Now that a small group of people has accumulated vast amounts of money, employing desperately few Americans, paying very little in taxes, isolating itself in wealthy bubbles while the rest of America slowly smolders, what will we do when they try to take over the government? Nope, not in some hypothetical far future; pretty much it all starts right now. First one off the Internet wins.

"The information economy that we are currently building doesn't really embrace capitalism, but rather a new form of feudalism," writes Jaron Lanier, in Who Owns the Future? That book is published today, and you can order it from all the usual places. (Indiebound; Amazon; McNally Jackson; Barnes & Noble; Powell's. See what I did there?)

Jaron Lanier is the author of You Are Not a Gadget, and is a "scholar-at-large" at Microsoft Research. LOL he's also working on an alternative to the space elevator.

But right now, he's looking at how things have come to work on the web. "The primary business of [...]

"It's a trend—thanks to peer pressure, and the Internet."

Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis made the call yesterday to speculate and crowdsource about the Boston bombings—"'Shut up and let the cops do their job’ in the case of a terrorist attack is EXACTLY wrong"—but he needn't worry, Reddit is all over it. They have a spreadsheet even! So let's find out how the nice folks at /findbostonbombers are doing.

• "I hate to even bring up this point, but when I have seen videos of radical Islamists yelling 'allahu akbar' in the past, I seem to recall seeing them make something like the pinched thumb and forefingers gesture he is making in the second picture."

• "also could it [...]

Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton issued an edict this morning: headlines for his sites running on his Kinja system will now be auto-truncated to 70 characters. He's doing this to appease Google and Facebook. Apparently, the company couldn't identify a technical solution yet to issue different headlines to different venues. Most publishers send out different headlines to Facebook, Twitter, their sites and for Google. (For instance, there's a couple free WordPress plugins that do this, just FYI.) The sites will also shorten summaries on sites, like here, to convey more information.

Let's see how today's Gawker headlines stack up at 70 characters!

• ‘Religious Freedom’-Fighting NC Lawmaker Opposes [...]

The day was long coming, but it's still okay for bloggers to feel a little bit proud this morning: The "Top Stories" on Google News on this busy Monday morning lead with a blog recap of "The Walking Dead." Stick that in your nuclear missiles, North Korean guy!

If you needed some "hard news," the next top story of the moment is "On Easter Sunday, Google Honors Cesar Chavez, Not Jesus."

In January 2009, when architecture writer Andrew Blum arranged to have his home internet service repaired, the technician who arrived at his Brooklyn apartment told him that the source of the problem was relatively low-tech: a squirrel had been chewing the rubber-coated wire that ran from Blum's building. Not much could be done, the technician said, other than wait for things to get better on their own, and they did. But Blum was shocked by his realization that the emails and websites he'd been reading on the computer had first passed through a wire in his back yard; his wonky home service was a physical problem, not a strictly technological [...]

Internet, yay! Internet, oh no!—surely, it’s obvious by now that there is as much reason for hope as there is for fear from our technological future. A rational and nuanced criticism will seek to define our true circumstances, identify dangers, and encourage beneficial progress. Thus far, however, tech critics have tended to extremes, either for or against the Internet: wringing their hands á la Nicholas Carr (The Shallows), or busting out the pompoms in the manner of Jeff Jarvis (What Would Google Do?). This simple-minded stuff will no longer do. It's into the vacuum of a powerfully felt need that contemporary theorists like Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier have been [...]

Highly educated Americans tell the world that young people are increasingly distracted or emotionally incompetent due to incessant pointer-clicking and unrelenting thumb-pressing. From the stuffed genre of airport-friendly socio-criticism, we’ve learned that networked technologies are making us lonely and small-minded. Apparently no one has ever sent Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, or Sherry Turkle, of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other, a tastefully brief Snapchat. In their best-selling sermons, "the Net" is the devil. Search engines, hyperlinks, and texts ensnare our intellect with the seductive fork tongue of reptilian temptation.

From these admired [...]

In real life, William Gibson looks like you would imagine. A little older than the Gibson you imagine, but he was born in 1948, so it only stands to reason. He is gaunt and affable, clothes black, smart looking frames on his eyeglasses, more avuncular than professorial. And he really talks like that! Those neologisms and the sizzling chrome-finished turns of phrase? They fall out of his mouth in the course of conversation. He lives the gimmick.

Gibson appeared at the New York Public Library on Friday night for the LIVE From the NYPL series, and it was something of an occasion. Gibson, as active as he is in [...]

Emily Witt's great piece today on the nofap movement-thing—all about the subreddit where men get together to talk about not masturbating!—points out that it's mostly all about men trying to get their "alpha" back. Or get it for the first time.

When you look at the subreddit, the themes come up again and again: "I relapsed less than a month away from my one year milestone." "Skeptic hooks up with chick he's been trying to bag for months. THANK YOU NOFAP!" "At Day 39, first 'Super Power.'" Magical self-realization!

And then the rest of their talk is couched in the language of 12-step recovery: relapse, shame, triggers, [...]

My office was the living room closet in a huge one-bedroom in a 1920s East Hollywood apartment court, across the street from the big blue Scientology headquarters in the old Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. There were built-in bookshelves and just enough space for a chair and a laptop and an ashtray. The neighbor lady's rescued pit bulls romped outside in the overgrown garden, and that electric L.A. sunlight came filtered through the grimy old French windows to the hardwood floors. It was a very pleasant place to work, my friends lived within walking distance in other cheap apartments in Los Feliz, and I had a bad case of being in [...]

What the hell was that about, yesterday? Suddenly everybody (except your racist uncle in the Midwest) had changed their profile pictures and avatars to some little parallel lines symbol. It was as if millions of people tried to make a pink ribbon icon and failed, utterly, because they could not do the curve thing. But it was actually about the Supreme Court deciding who we can marry and then later divorce—the justices are not looking at the usual arguments against marriage such as "bad idea," "everybody else was doing it," "I want a baby" and "I was drunk that year." Instead, they are focusing only on the gender of the [...]