Articles

A mystery industry in the United States is putting a lot of glitter in their products–and they don’t want you to know about it. A little under a year ago, the New York Times published an article all about glitter. In it, journalist Caity Weaver went to Glitterex headquarters, one of the top glitter manufacturers...

The failure of the Feminist Industrial Complex

Timnit Gebru came up through Big Tech. When she switched careers from building AI to examining how it can spread racism and inequality, the giants kept courting her. Then she crossed an invisible line, and Google forced her out. Is Silicon Valley’s system of in-house ethics really going to protect us from the industry’s favorite toys?

He was so damaged, and yet he showed us so much of the world.

There is an alternative to corporate bubbles online — it’s called the IndieWeb. Build your own personal websites, control your online presence, and learn on your own terms.

The artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless.

It took nearly five years into the internet’s life before anyone made a concerted effort to archive it. Much of our earliest online activity has disappeared.

Is there such a thing as Weird Twitter? Earlier I wrote a blog post based on my (non-participant) observations of a Twitter subculture. Recently, there’s been some activity around it in the t…

Countering current claims that digital capitalism is issuing in a ‘neofeudal’ age, as the rentier barons of Silicon Valley and Wall Street extract non-productive fortunes from their users and debtors, Evgeny Morozov returns to classic debates over the transition to capitalism to question the relation of the economic and the political.

"Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman."

Yanis Varoufakis argues that central-bank money and digital platforms, not profits and markets, are driving today's economy.

Here’s my definition: A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over ano…

Social-media algorithms show us what they want us to see, not what we want to see. But there is an alternative.

The biological trick that allows a female mandarin duck to become a male.

ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. To understand AI, we should think harder about bullshit

The search engine has made up so much of our online experience for so long that it can be hard to imagine something better.

Everyone is tired of touch screens.

After a year of observation, experimentation, and testing, we may have found a careful response to the challenges we face with AI.

Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.

The study underlines the 'dominance of the few' rule on social media, and its broader impacts.

The internet — a fragile construction of hardware, software, standards and databases — is run by an ever-expanding range of private and public actors constrained only by voluntary protocols and subject to political pressure. The authors describe four emerging views of how to govern the internet, each playing a geopolitical role and championed at the national level: Silicon Valley’s open internet, Brussels’ bourgeois internet, Beijing’s authoritarian internet and DC’s commercial internet. The competition to establish which internet prevails is likely to be strong, and not always focused on win-wins.

Only nine weeks later, the Wright Brothers achieved manned flight. The pathologically cynical always will find a reason to complain.

Those in the “e-mail job” caste are literally taking money out of a pie which would be more deservedly enjoyed by the families who do the actual work.

Copying and pasting emails. Inventing meaningless tasks for others. Just looking busy. Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?

As a growing resale market has made the brand’s handbags available to more people, some say the image that they convey depends on their condition.

Or how, exactly, platforms die.

How do we recognize the similarities between people of different class positions without papering over the differences?

archived 18 Nov 2022 08:52:44 UTC