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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.

Blaspheming BuzzFeed

February 18, 2015
BuzzFeed isn’t just for listicles anymore, and whoever says otherwise is regurgitating outdated folk wisdom. Or, at least, that’s the prevailing meme ping-ponging around media circles (read: people I follow on Twitter). It’s true, BuzzFeed has changed. The company has ...

Your Snitching Gadgets

February 11, 2015
Your gadgets are spying on you. And not just in the ways you’ve become uncomfortably familiar with, like forking over personal information to the data-mining mill in return for ads for discount florists. A new generation of always-listening devices is now collecting ...

Breaking: Moguls Fear AI Apocalypse

February 4, 2015
A funny thing happened on the way to the Singularity. In the past few months, some of the tech industry’s most prominent figures (Elon Musk, Bill Gates), as well as at least one associated guru (Stephen Hawking), have publicly worried about the consequences of out-of-control ...

Paying Tribute to Yet Another Petro-Tyrant

January 28, 2015
It’s been a rough week in Middle East policy for the Obama administration, though they don’t seem to realize it. Consider recent events: Iranian nuclear negotiations are threatened by Republicans and Democrats who want to force through new sanctions, with Israeli prime ...

Where Are Silicon Valley’s Surveillance Whistleblowers?

January 22, 2015
Last week, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, British Prime Minister David Cameron said—surprise!—that his government needed more power to monitor online communications. He went so far as to imply that encryption itself was a problem, and later said that American tech ...

What To Do About Uber?

November 19, 2014
On Monday, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith published a report from a dinner he and several other media figures attended with Uber executives. During the dinner, Smith wrote, senior vice president Emil Michael proposed spending $1 million to dig up dirt on journalists critical ...

The Crowdsourcing Scam

In 1968 a Norwegian science fiction writer named Tor Åge Bringsværd published a peculiar short story called “Codemus.” The story has achieved the kind of retrospectively prophetic quality that makes sci-fi such a useful imaginative map for navigating our relationship with ...

World Processor

Consider the plight of the office drone: more gadgeted-out than ever, but still facing the same struggle for essential benefits, wages, and dignity that workers have for generations. Utopian reveries spill forth almost daily from the oracles of progress, forecasting a ...