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: misha.lepetic@gmail.com
by Misha Lepetic “Except for a wig of algorithms, and tears and automation.”~Noah Raford, Silicon Howl Last month I attempted to set up two conflicting frames. On the one hand, there is the advance of technology in its myriad forms, eg: social media, artificial intelligence, robotics. This may seem like an arbitrary selection. For example,…
by Misha Lepetic “People for them were just sand, the fertilizer of history.” ~ Chernobyl interviewee VM Ivanov For a few years, if you were on Twitter and you used the word “inconceivable” in a tweet, you would almost immediately receive an odd, unsolicited response. Hailing from the account of someone named @iaminigomontoya, it would…
by Misha Lepetic “For the people are all in all.” ~ Herodotus III.80. Last month I reviewed a small but representative selection of instances of Internet vigilantism. Whether we are talking about Cecil the Lion or Justine Sacco, the causes and the consequences may vary, but they share several characteristics, such as the speed with…
by Misha Lepetic “Dear Cecil! I have no secrets from you.” ~ Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost Remember Cecil the Lion? It wasn't that long ago, but given the half-life of outrage on the Internet, I will forgive you a moment of head-scratching. Let me summarize that Cecil was lured from his protected home in…
by Misha Lepetic “We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity.And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required.”~Neuromancer Consider a few hastily conceived scenarios from the near future. An android charged with performing elder care must deal with an uncooperative patient. A driverless car carrying passengers must decide between suddenly stopping, and…
by Misha Lepetic “I see your infinite form in every direction, with countless arms, stomachs, faces, and eyes.” ~ Bhagavad-Gītā 11 16 About ten days ago, someone posted on an image on Reddit, a sprawling site that is the Internet's version of a clown car that's just crashed into a junk shop. The image, appropriately…
by Misha Lepetic “I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.” ~ John Cage Not long after moving to New York around 2000, I picked up an odd little side gig, as a gallery sitter at a space called Engine 27. Taking its name from the decommissioned…
by Misha Lepetic “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.” ~Oscar Wilde I've recently become obsessed with a TV show, which is rather unusual for me. I like to tell people that, after HBO wrapped The Wire, I went ahead and sold my TV. Perhaps more…
by Misha Lepetic “I would like to understand things better, but I don't want to understand them perfectly.” ~ Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas A few weeks ago I went to an evening of presentations by startups working in the artificial intelligence field. By far the most interesting was a group that for several years had…
by Misha Lepetic “New York isn't your fantasy. You're the fantasy in New York's imagination.” ~ John DeVore, New York Doesn't Love You There is a time-honored genre of literature that masochistically trucks with the fatalism and rejection of living in, loving and eventually leaving New York City. I know this is a real genre,…
by Misha Lepetic “Data made flesh in the mazes of the black market.” ~ William Gibson, Neuromancer Sometime last September, to add to what was already a fairly stressful month, I received a text message from my bank inquiring about some charges that had been made to my credit card. Once I got on the…
by Misha Lepetic “A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, if that's what you wanted.” ~ New York State chief judge Sol Wachtler About a dozen or so years ago, I had the instructive misfortune to be called for Manhattan grand jury duty. To this day, though, it has armed me with plenty of…
by Misha Lepetic “All this – all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon See, hear and am silent.” ~ Walt Whitman On a recent Facebook thread – about what, heaven help me remember – someone posted a comment along the lines of “This is what happens when we live in…
by Misha Lepetic “A New Yorker is someone who longs for New York.” ~Anonymous These days, when the inevitable question of “What do you do?” pops up at a cocktail party or some such, I now simply answer, “I live in New York.” A credulous follow-up might wish to clarify whether that is, in fact,…
by Misha Lepetic “Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now.” ~ Conrad, Heart of Darkness Marlow, the protagonist of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, remorsefully blames an old obsession with maps for his eventual captaincy of a ramshackle steamship, set on a doomed mission up the Congo River. But Marlow was irretrievably…
by Misha Lepetic “If you explain to a musician he'll tell that he knows it but he just can't do it”~ Bob Marley It's hard to imagine that the Beastie Boys released “Paul's Boutique” around this time, 25 years ago. Even more astonishing is the fact that I recently had two separate conversations with members…
by Misha Lepetic “For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was.” ~ Paul Valéry, 1931 Ever since Napster tore through the music industry like an Ebola outbreak, there has followed a ceaseless hand-wringing about the ever-decreasing “value” of music. Chart-busting hits have been replaced by body blows…
by Misha Lepetic “I'm afraid my Japanese is a little rusty.” ~ Raymond Burr, Godzilla, King of Monsters Sixty years on, is it still possible to care about Godzilla? Anyone who has consented to suffer through the latest defibrillation of the Godzilla franchise should set aside a few minutes to ponder the ongoing relevance of…
by Misha Lepetic “Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle?”~Baudrillard I usually buy my cigarettes at a corner store, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, that, not unusually for such establishments, also does a brisk trade in lottery tickets. Now, buyers…
by Misha Lepetic One fish says, “So, how's the water?” The other fish replies, “What water?” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Richard Stallman, shuffling onto the stage at Cooper Union's Great Hall. Accompanying Stallman is the veritable Platonic Ideal of a potbelly; left behind are his shoes, which are almost immediately discarded and left…