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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.

Why Is Twitter Aiding Turkish Censorship?

April 8, 2015
Corporations, like nation states, act out of self-interest. So it pays to be suspicious when a company claims to be on the side of social progress. Markets, with their inherent sociopathy, just don’t value things like justice and equity (well, not that kind of ...

More Bodies for “Never Forget”

April 1, 2015
Watching the NCAA tournament Friday night at a bar in New York’s West Village, I found myself staring at an American flag pinned to the wall. The World Trade Center, lately rebuilt, loomed about one-and-a-half miles away, its well-lit spire tumescently patriotic at 1,776 feet ...

Google: Too Big to Derail

March 25, 2015
It seems handily coincidental that one week after we learned that Google survived an FTC anti-trust investigation without much consequence, the search company announced the hiring of a new CFO, this one plucked from Morgan Stanley. The finance industry, after all, is the ...

Watching the #Watch Watch

March 11, 2015
Any publicly traded company must show continued growth year after year, evidence of its cancerous appetite for new markets. In the hydrocarbons industry, billions are bet on the basis of “proved reserves,” oil and gas deposits that a company can be reasonably sure it can ...

VCs Take the Media

Alex Blumberg wanted to start a business. The veteran radio producer had established himself with such prestige radio programs as This American Life and Planet Money. But in 2014 he decided he was ready to strike out on his own—to build a podcasting network featuring several ...

After Net Neutrality

March 4, 2015
It’s revealing that after passing net neutrality rules last week, one of FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s first stops was at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The MWC is one of the tech industry’s annual gadget bacchanals—a we’re-here-to-make-news confab on the order ...

Hacks, Backdoors, and Cyberwars

February 25, 2015
You could be forgiven for thinking that the Oscar win by Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s documentary about Edward Snowden, represented a symbolic capstone to our country’s surveillance story. Perhaps the well of new revelations had run dry, and we were now in the realm of ...