Back and Forward
Re-introducing myself, and this newsletter
My first social media venture, a blog called "Pittsblog," launched in late 2003, and for a while I was responsible for four blogs in all. Always as author, sometimes as team-wrangler as well. Then came Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on. I even co-hosted a podcast, “The Future Law Podcast,” for a while. Pittsblog ran for about 10 years, and afterward, with the occasional exception, short essays disappeared into my “drafts” folder, with few places to go.
So I'm a little late to the newsletter world, but I’m not short of things to offer. Twenty years on, I’m somewhat sharper in my focus and somewhat less certain that I’m right.
I’ll try to post here once per week.
The essays will typically have something to do with what I view as the most critical sets of questions facing all of us right now: how do we build and maintain the best versions of the institutions and communities that will get us what we want (individually and collectively) and where we want to go. That’s the stuff “in between” our day-to-day individual experience and massive “let’s explain the world” theorizing - the nature of the state, the nature of society. I’ve always liked how the sociologist Robert Merton drew attention to “theories of the middle range,” trying to bridge careful empirical observation with useful explanation.
I’ve got things to talk about that run a pretty wide gamut, from problems and illustrations that often get described as “governance” (law, legal systems, even my current habitat - law schools and universities) to things that strike a lot of people as entirely different (cities and urbanism; sports, especially team sports). My research area is primarily “knowledge commons,” a field that I’ve been helping to create for coming up on 20 years, but I think about knowledge, information, and data in all sorts of ways. Technology will pop up a lot, because it pops up everywhere, whether or not we want it to. Responsible, accountable, or ethical AI, anyone? I grew up in what’s now called Silicon Valley, and when I was a teenager, I was put on a pathway to a career in journalism. I eventually left the San Francisco Bay Area and long ago left journalism behind. But some of my interests in novelty and some of the breadth of my curiosity are, it seems, almost genetic.
Unlike most law professors, I’m more interested in what social scientists usually call “descriptive” work than “prescriptive” or “normative” work. Inevitably, one bleeds into the other. Who are we, what do we want, and where do we want to go? Perhaps, who “we” are is changing. Perhaps, we don’t want anything, or we want different things, or we change our minds. Perhaps, we want to stay right where we are. Ends and means; ecologies and feedback loops; authority, power, and responsibility - it’s all on the table. Law? History? Economics? Culture? Eclecticism is the order of the day. The questions and conversations will be open-ended and open-textured, as a rule.
We’ll see. Join me?