Alexis Ohanian has a blog

First, could you tell us about the book you’re working on, Without Your Permission? It seems very on topic.

I’m writing Without Your Permission because the Internet levels the playing field for all who can step on it—and not just for minting new millionaires but for anyone with an idea they want to share. It’ll be half informational (“The world isn’t flat, but the World Wide Web is”—probably my favorite quote from the proposal) and half inspirational (the most successful online innovators didn’t ask for permission—this is the kind of thing at the core of most of my public speaking).

I want this book to be a revolutionary manifesto—with doodles! Yes, I’ll doodle in it, just like all my startup mascots (Reddit, Breadpig, Hipmunk).

Yep, that's about right. It only gets worse, friend! :)

via reddit

This week, a popular journalism how-to blog, 10,000 Words, advised writers to start lurking on the site: “Reddit is an Internet firehose . . . there always seems to be a good story waiting there.” Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian tweeted a link to the story and wrote, “It finally happened. Journalism article about how @reddit is great for finding story ideas. Jig is up!”

So, if the jig really is up, then I can’t feel bad advising everyone to head over there. It’s a glorious, messy source of information. Just all I ask: Next time you see me on there, vote me up.

Thanks for writing, Melissa. Bonus points for posting a question on /r/askreddit ahead of time to get feedback.

It would be unfair to lay this all at the feet of American politicians: widening inequality and the decline of middle-class manufacturing jobs is a global phenomenon that vexes governments everywhere. Yet this does not excuse American governance for making matters worse. There are lots of things it could do to improve the ability of and incentives for American companies and workers to innovate and grow, whether it’s taxing fossil fuels, giving more green cards to foreign scientists and engineers or simplifying the tax code. These days, however, that seems a fantasy compared to more prosaic demands such as, don’t shut down the government, starve critical government agencies of funds or default on the national debt. If America is going to hold on to its technological mojo, it needs all the help it can get.

For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.”

Who dat?!

I'm still upset we lost this game....