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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.

Watching the Watchers

June 10, 2015
The imposing edifice of the security state is propped up by many tools. Mass incarceration, stop-and-frisk, and endless war (those old standbys) get help from Stingray devices, license plate scanners, surveillance blimps, and a thousand different ways to data-mine. Should we pin ...

The Internet Doesn’t Exist

June 3, 2015
The Internet has been very busy. In just the last week, Caitlyn Jenner broke the Internet, but she also united it. The FCC made war on the Internet. The Internet shamed a couple. The Internet had a dark side, Nikki Finke was barred from the Internet, the Supreme Court made the ...

For the Love of Bug Bounty

May 27, 2015
Chris Roberts, suddenly the nation’s most notorious computer security researcher, has had an exciting couple of months, ping-ponging between industry martyr and villain. In April, FBI agents yanked him off a Boeing 737 as soon as it landed in Syracuse; apparently they ...

Tweet If You Love the Sweet Sound of Advertising

May 13, 2015
According to Wall Street, we haven’t been clicking and tweeting nearly enough. Twitter’s 300 million unpaid laborers are underperforming, or so we’ve heard this spring.  Twitter, by some financial measures, is struggling. In early April, the company’s stock price ...

Facebook’s Web of Tiers

May 6, 2015
The oligarchs are here to help. That’s the message that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg relayed in an excruciatingly awkward video released on Monday. The video—a tense apologia featuring many “should”s and “must”s from Zuckerberg and more than one suggestion of a sweat ...

Free Speech Culture Warriors of the World, Unite

April 29, 2015
It can be hard keeping track of all the awards that PEN America gives out. The organization, devoted to promoting freedom of expression, offers some two dozen, for translations, essays, novels, plays, and seemingly, every single other literary form. (There are two awards for ...

Surge Pricing for Your Entire Life

April 22, 2015
Sometimes, the darkest timeline comes quicker than you expect. Last year, Jathan Sadowski noted that insurance companies were fawning over the Internet of Things—smartphones, fitness monitors, wearable computers, and anything else with a sensor and WiFi—with an eye to ...

BuzzFeed Among the Brands

April 15, 2015
On the social web, all roads lead to brands, so let’s start with a story of a #brand. Five years ago, Domino’s acknowledged what most of us already knew: they made shit pizza. So the company launched an advertising campaign in which it offered a mea culpa and promised better ...