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Jacob Silverman

Jacob Silverman is an independent journalist in New York. He is the author of Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection and coauthor of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. His next book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. He is a contributing editor for The Baffler and for The New Republic. He writes for many outlets, including at his website, www.jacobsilverman.com.

#DeleteUber, Delete Everything

February 1, 2017
Like many billion-dollar startups, Uber is notorious for its self-regard. One nugget buried in this week’s news serves as a reminder: until a few days ago, Uber had no automated system to process users’ requests to delete their accounts. That meant that every time a user ...

Tech Meets Trump

December 16, 2016
It’s clarifying to see the oligarchy assemble itself in the open. President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet selection show has offered a murderer’s row of venal billionaires, spousal abusers, wild-eyed ex-generals, Christian fundamentalists, racists, and the ...

The Impunity Game

December 9, 2016
“There is something about the [CIA’s] detention and interrogation program that brings out the worst in people,” says Dr. James Mitchell, a psychologist who helped the CIA design and implement so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), which have been ...

Big Bother Is Watching

One of the lesser-known casualties of Newt Gingrich’s ghoulish Contract with America was the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a small government agency charged with producing impartial reports for Congress and other officials about issues of scientific and technological ...

Crash of the Pop-Culture Party

November 14, 2016
To hear some pundits insist, with perfect seriousness, that it was important for Taylor Swift to speak out on Hillary Clinton's behalf ahead of the election was to realize how celebritized our virtue-signaling politics has become. When disappointed liberals quote The Hunger ...

Spoiling for the Green Party

August 17, 2016
At the Green Party National Convention in Houston this month, the villain that loomed the largest wasn’t Hillary Clinton or global warming or even Donald Trump—it was the doctrine of lesser evilism. Some say that a vote for Jill Stein is a wasted vote, but Martina ...

Hotdogs in Zion

At the Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida, Jesus is crucified most afternoons around 5 p.m. On the day I visited last fall, things were humming along right on time, if remarkably quickly. Six minutes after the redeemer’s bloodied corpse was carried into the tomb, a ...