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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.

Sci-Hub vs. the Scarcity-Mongers

April 1, 2016
In his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” information activist Aaron Swartz urged everyone to do their civic duty and take up piracy. “The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage . . . is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of ...
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Recently, I landed the tech-journalism equivalent of a Thomas Pynchon interview: I got someone from Twitter to answer my call. Notorious for keeping its communications department locked up tight, Twitter is not only the psychic bellwether and newswire for the media industry, but ...

Paterfamilias, Kaput

The August leak of thirty-plus gigabytes of data—customer email addresses and credit card records, company emails, salary and bank information, source code, at least one film treatment—from Ashley Madison, the pro-infidelity dating site, brought the cultural logic of the ...

The Novel in Analog: Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers

July 22, 2015
Reviewers are having a hard time with Book of Numbers, the latest novel from the incorrigibly ambitious and graphomaniacal Joshua Cohen. Responses have ranged from dismissive to enraptured, with most both at once. The book is “a mess,” writes the New York ...

Metrics All the Way Down

July 8, 2015
According to Spotify, the value of one play of a Willie Nelson song in an Ole Miss dorm room at 4 a.m. is around 0.68 cents, but why stop there? When everything is data and data can be called down through the air, “song” and “book” and “movie” ...

The Permanent War on Terror: Only As Old As It Feels

July 1, 2015
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the declaration of the Islamic State. The most infamous cult of ultra-violent millenarian revolutionists since the Khmer Rouge celebrated the event in characteristic style: by murdering some people. On Friday, terrorist attacks in ...

Not the People’s Uber

June 24, 2015
“The idea of a discount luxury is an oxymoron,” Sarah Maslin Nir said recently on the Longform podcast. “And it’s an oxymoron for a reason: because somebody’s bearing the cost of that discount.”  In this case, Maslin Nir was referring to ...

Made to Measure

June 17, 2015
In the latest season of Orange Is the New Black, an eligibility test sends the inmates of Litchfield Penitentiary into a multiple-choice frenzy. High-scorers will supposedly land better paying jobs—no one knows what kind, although the $1-per-hour wage is incentive enough—but ...