Misha Lepetic is a consultant and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology, energy and social venture, with current interests in urban design and food policy. A BA in Music from Swarthmore College led to several years of professional DJing in South America, whereas an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University has resulted in less exciting but perhaps more productive pursuits. Lately, his idea of an exciting Friday night has been parsing complex compounds in classical Sanskrit. Email: [email protected]
by Misha Lepetic “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” ~ Thelonious Monk It’s with a certain pleasure that I can recall the exact moment I was seduced by the musical avant-garde. It was in the fourth grade, in a public elementary school somewhere in New Jersey. Our music teacher, Mrs. Jones, would visit the…
by Misha Lepetic "The edge of the unnavigable, the region of no information." ~ Pynchon, Bleeding Edge Last month I ended with a question: If art is partly about eliciting a diversity of reactions that come from a shared experience of a single object, gesture or construct, then how do the potential meanings of art…
by Misha Lepetic "Genuine aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things." ~ Walter Benjamin These days, if you want to buy music, there is no shortage of ways to do so. But there is more going on than the usual tug-of-war between compact discs, downloads, streaming and vinyl. So far,…
by Misha Lepetic "A grandes problemas, ¡grandes soluciones!" ~ Nicolás Maduro One area where proponents of technology customarily get trounced concerns the consideration of unintended consequences. (This is also regrettably true for most commentators.) It's not that people don't take them into account, but rather that when they do, those consequences are extrapolated out to…
by Misha Lepetic "It is not humiliating to be unhappy." ~ Camus It was only a few days ago that I heard about Joe Frank's recent passing, which was an odd feeling, because I'd thought he was already dead. Further reflection made me realize that I based this opinion on no evidence whatsoever, but if…
by Misha Lepetic "To be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show, and be good for nothing." —Mary Astell It seems appropriate that, in its waning hours, the phantasmagoria that was 2017 should have delivered an investment bubble equal parts preposterous and inscrutable. And so we witnessed the stratospheric…
by Misha Lepetic As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. ~ The Wizard of Oz There is an old joke that deserves to be made popular again. A CEO is touring the company's newest factory. The manager, with a great deal of pride, points out how everything is automated. As the tour…
by Misha Lepetic "These are the guys that were too tough for the chain gang." ~ Bomber Back in the mists of time, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, the promise of an open, decentralized, disaggregated network seemed to stretch limitlessly past the horizons of doubt and cynicism. Most iconically, John Perry Barlow's…
by Misha Lepetic "Machines…quell the revolt of specialized labor." ~ Marx In my previous post, I wrote about alternative ways of viewing the encroaching effects of automation on employment. I suggested that, instead of viewing it as a zero-sum game, with industry hell-bent on automating everyone's jobs out of existence, that it is rather a…
by Misha Lepetic "In economics, the majority is always wrong." ~ JK Galbraith One of the unfortunate gifts of the current, star-crossed administration is that there's something for everyone that will get their knickers in a twist. If immigration or climate change isn't your thing, just wait a few days, and some administration official will…
by Misha Lepetic There's a certain kind of conversation in which I find myself every so often, which can roughly be summarized as "What's the big deal about DJing"? As someone who was a quasi-professional DJ in a former life, and is currently what one friend terms a 'monastic DJ', I've sensed a substantial gap…
by Misha Lepetic "Wonder was the grace of the country." ~ George W.S. Trow At a recent cocktail party, the conversation turned to conspiracy theorists and how to engage them. I offered a strategy that has served me fairly well in the past: I like to ask my interlocutor what information they would need to…
by Misha Lepetic “On the way from mythology to logistics… machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.”~ Adorno & Horkheimer A few years ago I heard the Seattle Symphony play Carnegie Hall here in New York. There were three pieces on the program. The first two – Claude Debussy's La Mer and John Luther…
by Misha Lepetic The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.~ Debord Now that Pokémon Go has had a few weeks to work its way through our collective psychosocial digestive tract, we can begin considering the effects of this latest, and by far most successful, manifestation…
by Misha Lepetic “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts.” ~ Marinetti There's that old saying that goes “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”. Certainly, weird times such as these demand weird explanations. Old explanatory frameworks that have been dying long, slow deaths continue to have nails pounded into…
by Misha Lepetic “I got my own pure little bangtail mind and the confines of its binding please me yet.”~ Neal Cassady, letter to Jack Kerouac One of the curious phenomena that computing in general, and artificial intelligence in particular, has emphasized is our inevitable commitment to metaphor as a way of understanding the world.…
by Misha Lepetic “The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.” ~ Salvador Dalí Last month I looked at the short and ignominious career of @TayandYou, Microsoft's attempt to introduce an artificial intelligence agent to the spider's parlor otherwise known as Twitter. Hovering over this event is the larger question of…
by Misha Lepetic “She was Dolores on the dotted line.”~ Nabokov Artificial intelligence – or rather the phenomena that are being shoved under the ever-widening rubric of AI – has had an interesting few weeks. On the one hand, Google's DeepMind division staged a veritable coup when its AlphaGo AI soundly thrashed the world #1…
by Misha Lepetic “Facts all come with points of view/ Facts don't do what I want them to.”~ Talking Heads What is it with Silicon Valley and the “disruption” of education? Is it just another sector of public life that is moribund and therefore in need of a serious intervention, as if it were ‘that…
by Misha Lepetic “No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau Over the course of my last few posts I have been groping towards some kind of meeting point between, on the one hand, the current wave of information technologies, as represented by…