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Brownstone Institute

Is the WEF the Headquarters of Evil?

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This article is printed with permission of the Brownstone Institute
Back in 1983, Ronald Reagan colorfully described the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Today, it seems we have a new candidate for the headquarters of all evil: the World Economic Forum headed by Klaus Schwab.

The WEF has no borders, includes all nationalities, embraces governments, NGOs and big business, has no military, nuclear arsenal, flag or anthem, and purports to solve all the world’s problems at its annual conference each year while delegates down champagne and caviar. It sponsors a leadership training program that boasts such covid cultists as Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau. Is Klaus Schwab the first honest-to-goodness Bond villain, bent on taking over (or depopulating) the world?

Professor Schwab certainly looks the part with his German accent and his prize place on top of the Swiss mountains. He also certainly pretends to run the world. In fact, he has been pretending to run the world since the 1970s, when he started his yearly conferences, hoping to get noticed. Getting noticed took decades. Many of the WEF Young Leaders program graduates presently in power around the world only entered his ‘classes’ 30 years after the WEF started. For decades Klaus has lived the ‘fake it till you make it’ adage. Has he finally made it?

The title of Klaus’ 2020 book “The Great Reset”, coauthored with Thierry Malleret, was catchy enough to be taken on as a slogan during 2020-21 by a slew of political leaders wanting to communicate for myriad local political reasons that the pandemic has opened up some kind of grand reinitialization opportunity in global politics.

Few of these leaders will have read the book though, because if they had, they would have been taken aback by some of its contents. For example: “First and foremost, the post-pandemic era will usher in a period of massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labour.”

Such a view is not commonly spouted by the über-rich barons running global corporations or the governments they influence, for the obvious reason that it constitutes a direct attack on their stash. Certainly they might publicly express the wish for less inequality – who wouldn’t? – but many would baulk at a “massive wealth redistribution,” Robin-Hood style, to labourers and away from capitalists like themselves.

In fact, over the last two years the exact opposite has happened: the world now contains more billionaires and more poor people. “You will own nothing and be happy,” another oft-quoted and much-maligned Schwabism, also describes the opposite of what has actually happened, which can be summarized instead as “the rich own lots more while the poor own nothing and are miserable.”

This year, the WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland held from May 22-26 triggered the usual outpouring of hatred on Twitter and other platforms. The gossip implies that the WEF is secretly plotting to take over the world by means of a secret collaboration between government and big business, as if rich and powerful people needed a vehicle like the WEF for that. It feels satisfying to those wronged by covid policy to think they have identified the head of the snake responsible for the mess.

The WEF, they claim, is the coordinating platform for all the secret deals that make the rich richer and the entrenched heads of government more powerful, while national and local sovereignty is being clandestinely forfeited, leaving the ordinary person to rot away slowly with neither resources nor rights.

These accusations against the WEF are accompanied by misrepresentation and outright fakery. Photos were recently circulated on social media of hundreds of private planes lined up on an airfield, claimed to be those of attendees at Davos 2022 who were (for shame!) flouting their own pretensions to reduce carbon emissions. According to Reuters, one of the two widely circulated photos was in fact taken years ago at Las Vegas Airport around the time of a boxing title fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao, while another was taken in January 2016 at a Swiss air force base that is often used by Davos attendees and was probably associated with the event that year.

None of us was able personally to fly to Davos this year (though some of us have attended such events in the past), but no matter: every session of the 2022 meeting from May 22-26 was posted online.  This included the opening address, via video link, by none other than Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, resplendent in his trademark brown tee and staring down the camera with unblinking intensity. Invigorated by the President’s defiant address, attendees turned their attention to the remaining 220 or so sessions that covered every weighty and worldly topic under the sun.

We took the time to watch a few, and found them to share a few characteristics.  First, those involved expressed overblown expectations of what would be achieved during the discussions.  Second, the discussions themselves were intelligent and informative. Third, the discussions all led to no particular kind of action.

The basic model of a WEF conference session is to subsidize smart people (the presenters) to say smart things to rich people (the audience), who themselves pay the exorbitant conference registration fees in order to network with each other and have smart people pretend to take them seriously for a few days.

In a word, Klaus Schwab is a glorified and very talented conference planner selling flattery. He pretends that $60,000 provides the attending customer with access to crucial world decisions, all made in 4 days. The hordes paying the entry fee schmooze together, down vast quantities of wine and canapes, and participate in panel discussions that purport to solve problems associated with the world’s economy, environment, and society in end-on-end blocks of 45 minutes each. (Actually, it is closer to 35 minutes, because of 10 minutes of Q&A from the audience squeezed in at the end of each session.  Given the price tag of attendance, the organizers rightly expect some delegates to feel justified in having their moment on the mic.)

Typical of the level of ambition evident in WEF conference sessions, in his introduction to this year’s session on global taxation, host Geoff Cutmore announced that the incipient panel discussion was about getting to a point where “we all feel comfortable about what we’re paying, and we feel comfortable about what other people are paying and we feel comfortable about what corporations are paying and we all feel comfortable about where that tax revenue is ultimately going.”

Whoa.  He might have added, “And if we have a few minutes left over at the end, we’ll work out how to restore the Amazonian rain forest.” The panel consisted of the heads of both Oxfam and the OECD, plus a heavily masked economics professor from Harvard. Imagine what the head of Oxfam would have thought about Cutmore’s pronouncements, given how critical Oxfam has been of the tax evasion and self-enrichment of elites, particularly in the last 2 years.  If only he could get the conference delegates to pay their taxes and stop robbing poor people, he could axe Oxfam altogether!

Some sessions do make the stomach turn. For example, in one, Pfizer announced an “Accord for a Healthier World,”  with its CEO sitting alongside Bill Gates and two African potentates. Announcements like this are made at the WEF, but would they really not exist if not for the WEF? Unlikely. By providing a platform for such announcements, however, it becomes a lightning rod for suspicion. The WEF styles itself an “International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation,” and like any large entity of its kind, it wants to get even bigger and more influential. But at heart, this is business. Klaus Schwab’s business.

The WEF claims serious positive impacts. For example, its ‘First Movers Coalition’ consists of 50 companies that have committed to investing in green technologies and removing carbon. Sounds great, right? The snag, of course, is that they have set up the measurement in such a way that they are able to decide themselves what is meant by ‘green’ or by ‘removing’ carbon. You can count caretaking a forest today as ‘removing’ carbon, and as long as the audience doesn’t know that you cut down and burned a mature forest in the same place last year, they will applaud!

Similarly, the WEF champions a system of reporting called ‘Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics’ (containing environmental, social, and governance, or “ESG,” measures), developed in a cooperative effort with major accounting firms and adopted by 70 companies. Paying a reasonable amount of taxes is not in those KPIs. Nor is free speech. Metrics, but not as you know them.

But what about the smoking gun represented in the many top politicians of today’s world who graduated from the WEF’s Young Leaders program? What about the creepy 2019 WEF conference about what to do in a pandemic?

On the Young Leaders program, it is undoubtedly true that the WEF has become a very successful job networking organization. But it did not invent networking. Networking societies for the rich and powerful have existed for centuries. Think of the Freemasons, the Rotary society, Chatham House, private high schools, Oxbridge, or the Ivy League. The rich and powerful will network with each other, come hell or high water, WEF or no WEF.

Perhaps those who met at the WEF have gelled together on an evil ideology that is bad for the world, but that ideology is clearly not the “Great Reset” ideology articulated by Schwab, since they are not following it in the slightest. Why then does Schwab not protest at how politicians are pretending to enact a Great Reset that is the very opposite of what he advocated in his book? Because he does not really care about his own ideas. A puffed-up conference organizer, Schwab follows his flock of customers rather than leading them. He is being used as a stooge.

OK, but what about that 2019 pandemic simulation conference? Again, you can read all about it online, a level of publicity for their plans that is surely not what you would expect of Bond villains. In these simulations, the WEF folks came to the conclusion that during a pandemic, movement and trade should not be disrupted because of the high costs to society. Yes, you read that right.  Once again, this is the very opposite of what was actually done.

The WEF pandemic conference was just one of the many ‘war games’ simulations that entertain people continuously all around the world. Pandemic simulations this week, asteroid simulations next week, killer bee simulations after that. Rather a lot of problems can be covered off in 220 sessions, and one of them is bound to be tomorrow’s news.

The total disconnect between what his pandemic conference said should be done and what actually happened during covid times is once again proof that Klaus is not led by his principles.  If he were, he would have been loudly protesting what has gone on over the past two years. Instead, he is merely riding his “good luck” that the leaders who came to drink champagne at his events have now embraced him as their supposed figurehead.

Since he is well into his 80s, Klaus probably figures that if an angry world population came to believe that he was responsible for the disaster that has befallen them, he’d be dead long before they came for justice. Thierry Malleret, his younger co-author on “The Great Reset,” has more to worry about in that regard!

The WEF, in sum, is hot air all the way.  It is led by a man who epitomizes pomp, which is nothing new in the circles of the rich and powerful. WEF-approved hot air is no different to the regular variety.

Sure, it’s a place where schmoozing and coordination happen, but the WEF invented neither schmoozing nor the idea of an old-boys club. It is simply the current clubhouse. The real culprits will find another venue the day after the WEF’s shingle is taken down.

Authors

  • Paul Frijters is a Professor of Wellbeing Economics at the London School of Economics: from 2016 through November 2019 at the Center for Economic Performance, thereafter at the Department of Social Policy

  • Gigi Foster, senior scholar of Brownstone Institute, is a Professor with the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales, having joined UNSW in 2009 after six years at the University of South Australia.

  • Michael Baker has a BA (Economics) from the University of Western Australia. He is an independent economic consultant and freelance journalist with a background in policy research.

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Brownstone Institute

The CDC Planned Quarantine Camps Nationwide

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A Tucker Jeffrey A. Tucker 

The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy. 

No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse. 

Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.

It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.

Features of the CDC’s edicts did incredible damage. It imposed the rent moratorium. It decreed the ridiculous “six feet of distance” and mask mandates. It forced Plexiglas as the interface for commercial transactions. It implied that mail-in balloting must be the norm, which probably flipped the election. It delayed the reopening as long as possible. It was sadistic.

Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel. 

The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy. 

It was called “Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.” 

By absence of empirical data, the meaning is: nothing like this has ever been tried. The point of the document was to map out how it could be possible and alert authorities to possible pitfalls to be avoided.

“This document presents considerations from the perspective of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) for implementing the shielding approach in humanitarian settings as outlined in guidance documents focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings. This approach has never been documented and has raised questions and concerns among humanitarian partners who support response activities in these settings. The purpose of this document is to highlight potential implementation challenges of the shielding approach from CDC’s perspective and guide thinking around implementation in the absence of empirical data. Considerations are based on current evidence known about the transmission and severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and may need to be revised as more information becomes available.”

The meaning of “shielding” is “to reduce the number of severe Covid-19 cases by limiting contact between individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease (‘high-risk’) and the general population (‘low-risk’). High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or ‘green zones’ established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector, or community level depending on the context and setting. They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.”

In other words, this is what used to be concentration camps.

Who are these people who would be rounded up? They are “older adults and people of any age who have serious underlying medical conditions.” Who determines this? Public health authorities. The purpose? The CDC explains: “physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population” allows authorities “to prioritize the use of the limited available resources.”

This sounds a lot like condemning people to death in the name of protecting them.

The model establishes three levels. First is the household level. Here high-risk people are“physically isolated from other household members.” That alone is objectionable. Elders need people to take care of them. They need love and to be surrounded by family. The CDC should never imagine that it would intervene in households to force old people into separate places.

The model jumps from households to the “neighborhood level.” Here we have the same approach: forced separation of those deemed vulnerable.

From there, the model jumps again to the “camp/sector level.” Here it is different. “A group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector (max 50 high-risk individuals per single green zone) where high-risk individuals are physically isolated together. One entry point is used for exchange of food, supplies, etc. A meeting area is used for residents and visitors to interact while practicing physical distancing (2 meters). No movement into or outside the green zone.”

Yes, you read that correctly. The CDC is here proposing concentration camps for the sick or anyone they deem to be in danger of medically significant consequences of infection.

Further: “to minimize external contact, each green zone should include able-bodied high-risk individuals capable of caring for residents who have disabilities or are less mobile. Otherwise, designate low-risk individuals for these tasks, preferably who have recovered from confirmed COVID-19 and are assumed to be immune.”

The plan says in passing, contradicting thousands of years of experience, “Currently, we do not know if prior infection confers immunity.” Therefore the only solution is to minimize all exposure throughout the whole population. Getting sick is criminalized.

These camps require a “dedicated staff” to “monitor each green zone. Monitoring includes both adherence to protocols and potential adverse effects or outcomes due to isolation and stigma. It may be necessary to assign someone within the green zone, if feasible, to minimize movement in/out of green zones.”

The people housed in these camps need to have good explanations of why they are denied even basic religious freedom. The report explains:

“Proactive planning ahead of time, including strong community engagement and risk communication is needed to better understand the issues and concerns of restricting individuals from participating in communal practices because they are being shielded. Failure to do so could lead to both interpersonal and communal violence.”

Further, there must be some mechanisms to prohibit suicide:

Additional stress and worry are common during any epidemic and may be more pronounced with COVID-19 due to the novelty of the disease and increased fear of infection, increased childcare responsibilities due to school closures, and loss of livelihoods. Thus, in addition to the risk of stigmatization and feeling of isolation, this shielding approach may have an important psychological impact and may lead to significant emotional distress, exacerbate existing mental illness or contribute to anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide among those who are separated or have been left behind. Shielded individuals with concurrent severe mental health conditions should not be left alone. There must be a caregiver allocated to them to prevent further protection risks such as neglect and abuse.

The biggest risk, the document explains, is as follows: “While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings.”

(It should go without saying but this “shielding” approach suggested here has nothing to do with focused protection of the Great Barrington Declaration. Focused protection specifically says: “schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”)

In four years of research, and encountering truly shocking documents and evidence of what happened in the Covid years, this one certainly ranks up at the top of the list of totalitarian schemes for pathogenic control prior to vaccination. It is quite simply mind-blowing that such a scheme could ever be contemplated.

Who wrote it? What kind of deep institutional pathology exists that enabled this to be contemplated? The CDC has 10,600 full-time employees and contractors and a budget of $11.5 billion. In light of this report, and everything else that has gone on there for four years, both numbers should be zero.

Author

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. TuckerDebbie Lerman  

For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.

It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.

What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.

We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.

To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”

When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.

Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.

Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.

Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.

Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.

This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.

Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.

Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.

No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.

All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.

One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.

Authors

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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