A little more than a year ago, I decided to step away from social networks. It's time now to look back at that year, and count all the ways this was a positive or negative change. Spoiler: it was ALL GOOD.

Yesterday I uninstalled the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn apps from all my devices and I closed the tabs I had pinned on my computer. I didn't delete my accounts, but I'm drastically changing how I'll use those services going forward. I'm doing this for a number of reasons that I'll explain in this post. It's not because I'm better than thou, but because I hope I can convince you to do the same.

I’ve been watching this video of Rachel Maddow interviewing Rand Paul about civil rights. Paul’s argument is that private businesses should be left free to discriminate, because Liberty. I think he’s profoundly wrong, here’s why.

It should be pretty clear at this point that our patent system is broken. It’s been designed to foster innovation, but is nowadays stifling it. It’s supposed to protect inventors, but instead threatens innovators. Patent trolls are extorting billions of dollars from our top tech companies, and are threatening to do the same to small businesses and individuals. Meanwhile, big corporations amass enormous patent portfolios that they use as currency, with contents so vague that they can be used to attack their smaller competitors before they even start: if you want to start a small technological business today, don’t do a patent search: you are going to find patents broad enough to cover your innovation, and you may have to give up for fear of litigation that would kill you from the legal fees alone.