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Time Is Money Is Work Is Virtue
March 25, 2015
“In addition to showing you the time, Apple Watch actually understands what time means to you,” Apple’s website declares about the company’s latest object of desire, which goes on sale next month. “It helps you be more productive and efficient. So you get more out of ...

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 ...

Feeding the Social Media Slot Machine
March 20, 2015
When Andrew Sullivan, the big bearded granddad of political blogging, announced his retirement in February, the Internet was quick to perform an autopsy—as usual, slightly before its patient had died. Blogging was finished, everyone agreed, or at least it was looking wan and ...

Peer-to-Peer Pressure
March 20, 2015
There’s a telling scene near the end of The Social Network. Punching air as they watch the company pass the millionth user threshold on a large overhead screen, the young Facebook founders suddenly resemble the victors of another kind of bubble economy—NYSE brokers watching ...

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 ...

After Net Neutrality
March 04, 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 ...

Gentrifying the Web
February 20, 2015
An ad recently appeared on the New York City subway—right in one of those above-the-seat ad spots that turns even public transportation infrastructure into a passive #branding vehicle—for “the domain that never sleeps.” This “exclusively for New Yorkers” deal, as the ...

Silicon Valley’s Cult of Nothing
February 17, 2015
If Silicon Valley worships anything, it worships nothing. It excels in the manufacture of the immaterial and the incorporeal. It creates ideas to fill Thought Leader columns, TED talks, and conference circuits. It creates stock market flotations based on shareholder belief, and ...

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 04, 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 ...