Robert Scoble

What does it mean to be an American?

This pisses me off a lot more than anything the NSA is doing.

Our culture and society are broken. In a whole lot of ways.

I've been thinking a LOT about what it means to be an American lately. Are we free? Really free? No. Not when people are getting sent to jail for five years for, um, selling a plant to other people. Think about that for a moment. Selling a plant.

Sigh. Makes me want to buy a Pax Vaporizer. Speaking of which, a TON of entrepreneurs have been talking to me about Pax but few want to be public about what a cool startup Ploom is. At concerts in Silicon Valley you see these all over the place. It's one of those things no one likes talking about because of America's screwed up beliefs and attitudes about drugs.

Hey: privacy folks, this is how you should be framing the problem of letting the NSA have pretty unfettered power to spy on us.

Let's be honest, the NSA got the power to spy based on the good intentions of stopping terrorists, but we all know what they are gonna do with that power along with drones, etc. Come after the "stoners."

And I've seen up close and personal what marijuana does for cancer patients. I'm sure medical marijuana cards are being misused, but it DOES help many people medically.

The next civil rights movement is this.

Do we want to really be free? Let's start right here.

"We're friends on Facebook and we've never met," said Avish Bhama when he introduced himself when my son, Patrick Scoble and I were enjoying a latte at Coupa Cafe - Palo Alto. He then made a nice photo of us with my Glass. What a crazy world we live in where we can be "friends" without even meeting, huh?

Oh, and Coupa accepts Bitcoin.

I wonder, if we could time travel and go back in time 30 years would anyone be able to grok this conversation "in the future you will be able to buy coffee with bitcoin while talking to a friend you never have met, all while Google'ing him on your wearable computer, called Glass."

That's how I know we don't have time travelers amongst us. Imagine how our language will change in just the next 20 years.

We're just as clueless about the future today as we were 20 years ago.