Thoughts on the Powers That Be

Welcome! I hope to write about issues affecting society involving power, law, technology, media, and economics.

In the past I have written on my personal website, http://www.aarongreenspan.com, where you can still find a smattering of essays. Writing here is mainly an experiment, and we’ll see if the choice of venue has any impact on people’s apparent interest in the matters discussed herein.

You can expect my first substantive post in the coming week or two: a review of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination (a soon-to-be-released book about Facebook) by New York Times reporters Sheera Frankel and Cecilia Kang. Sheera interviewed me for about an hour for their book (and the interview was subsequently fact-checked by a third party—a rarity!), so I’ll be interested to see how she and her co-author wrote about what I told them, as well as all of the other research they conducted to get an inside view into the company.

I’m also thinking about writing more on the courts. Almost everything written about law is authored by lawyers or mainstream journalists. This is problematic for the obvious reason: selection bias. Very little is written by people who know the system but who do not fit into one of those two important but necessarily limited camps.

So, stay tuned!